Two Hayward City Council candidate forums are coming up this Saturday.

One at 10 a.m. at the Linekin building, 22248 Main St. The second at 1 p.m. at the Georgian Manor clubhouse, 1419 Buckingham Way.

Here are seven questions from Prospect Hill residents that Frank Goulart, host of the first forum, circulated to candidates in advance of the event:

1. What will you do to alleviate the deluge of traffic which will cut through our neighborhood because of the mini-loop? Specifically, first, what will you do to prevent cut through traffic from Foothill on Hazel and City Center Dr/Maple Court? And second, what will you do to prevent cut through traffic from Mission on Hotel, Simon and Sunset?

2. During morning commutes and especially in the evening, prostitutes are working Mission Blvd. between A Street and Grove. The streets and alleys fronting this area are often littered with used condoms. I am also concerned that this promotes related crimes such as drug use and theft. What amazes me is that Read the rest of this entry »

Not sure what this means for the Cal State East Bay Hill Hopper, but AC Transit is proposing to re-align some of its routes that connect the hills to the Hayward BART.

See a map of the proposed changes and read AC Transit's summary descriptions:

Line 92
In order to improve service to Cal State University East Bay (CSU), AC Transit proposes to re-route the portion of Line 92 between CSU and Hayward BART. Instead of traveling along 2nd St. and Campus Dr., Line 92 buses would operate along Mission Blvd. and Carlos Bee Blvd. to CSU, where it would loop around campus and return to Hayward BART. Service frequency along the entire Line 92 route would be every 15 minutes.

Line 94
With the changes to Line 92, AC Transit proposes to also re-route Line 94 to maintain service along 2nd St. The new routing will provide longer service hours but at reduced frequency. The line would operate all day every 60 minutes along 2nd St., Campus Dr., Hayward Blvd., Skyline Dr., Dobbel Ave. and Spencer Ln. Selected Line 94 trips would operate via East Ave., Windfelt Rd., and 2nd St. to provide service to Hayward High School at the school's front entrance. The schedule, while not finalized as of this printing, will be designed to coordinate with the school's Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you think the planned Route 238 Corridor Improvement Project (aka the "mini-loop") is a great idea or a horrible one, you have to admit the city's new renderings of the project are more colorful than those loop maps we keep running in the paper.

Here's what Foothill Boulevard would look like as six lanes, all going north toward B Street past the future Cinema Place complex:

Here's what the Five Flags intersection would look like, complete with a wandering florist and The Ranch restaurant (you can click on all photos for a closer look):

Here's what D Street would look like heading west at the Foothill intersection:

And here's Jackson looking east (top photo) and Foothill looking west near the end of Main Street (below):

So what do you think?

Update: For more information, you can read the entire final environmental impact report in PDF form. The City Council is scheduled to vote on the report and thereby adopt the project on Nov. 27. We've also published a little map and stories on this.

Today is officially the first day of what will be a long, complicated and expensive project to reconstruct the interchange of Interstate 880 and Route 92.

So from now until February 2011, commuters can expect more hassles than usual at the infamously clogged junction.

In the end, though, the route is supposed to be more efficient.

Today we asked Caltrans spokesman Steve Williams to keep us updated on progress and let us know in advance if there are to be lane changes or other commuting obstacles.

It only mentions Hayward twice, and once incorrectly (no, the Coyote Hills are not here), but a 69-page report released today by the Golden Gate School of Law raises intriguing questions about flatlander access to parks in the East Bay.

Anyone ever try to take a bus to Garin Park?

In a press release and our story today, the report authors say one solution to the alleged inequity is making parks easier to get to via public transit.

We've written about the Route 238/Foothill Freeway/Caltrans controversy many, many, many times in the past several decades, but never in iambic pentameter.

This morning, I received an anonymous e-mail poem poking fun at the debate and particularly Quarry Village, the car-free, ecologically oriented housing development proposed by freeway opponent Sherman Lewis and his Hayward Area Planning Association.

LAMENT TO THE 238 BYPASS

O HAPA guru upon the hill,
Tell again how you would foot the bill
To load a thousand homes onto 29 acres
While relegating autos to other plan makers.

Liquefaction causes wet 'blue rock' to flow deep,
not unlike water, we will watch it sweep,
all before it, onto investments below
betraying the fable of they who crow,

"Save open space!
Take 238 Bypass to another place!"
Yelled they, who could not care less
about augmentation of our present traffic mess.

If this was in an anthology, it would require numerous footnotes. Fortunately, we're just a blog. Got a "local issue" poem you want to submit to The HayWord? Send it to mattobrien@dailyreviewonline.com.

UPDATE: A reader informs me that the above is not, in fact, iambic pentameter:

An iamb is a meter consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (or a short followed by a long). Without the appropriate accent marks here, I'll represent it as ( ~ / ). Iambic pentameter means there are five of these beats to a line.

~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ /
O HA PA gu ru high up on the hill

~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ /
Tell us a gain how you would foot the bill

As you can see, I adjusted the first two lines to fit more perfectly. It functions as a cute rhyming poem just as it is, but it is not purely iambic pentameter.

The death of Ahmad Rahimi, who was hit by an Amtrak train on Wednesday, has devastated the Tennyson High community and brought a familiar question back to the forefront:

Is there a reasonable way to make the tracks through south Hayward less dangerous?

They always tell you not to eat breakfast on the bus, but you can eat breakfast with the AC Transit Board of Directors tomorrow morning at Hayward City Hall.

The seven-member board has a tete-a-tete set for 8 a.m. Friday in Room 2A, located on the second floor of 777 B St.

Will they talk about the so-called "tin can" buses some Hayward commuters complain are now taking them to San Francisco? Not sure, as there is no specific agenda topic and a press release says the board "will conduct no official business at this meeting."

But there will be croissants.

Models of Bud Field Aviation's proposed 11-hangar expansion of the Hayward Executive Airport, complete with toy cars and big rigs, can be seen at the company's Web site.

The Hayward City Council Airport Committee reviews the controversial plan at its meeting at 5:30 p.m. tonight at Centennial Hall.

I recently received a long letter from sometime airport critic and regular blog commenter John Kyle indicating his support for the project. What do others think?

Photo from Aric Crabb:

The late City Councilman Mateo Jimenez would always interject whenever someone uttered the words "San Mateo Bridge" in a sentence. "It's the Hayward-San Mateo Bridge!!," he would exclaim.

We imagined him this morning while reading a front page article (registration may be required) in today's New York Times, which prominently features the bridge and other favorite East Bay roadways.