Commission Recommends Alternative 1
— by Jeffrey Wisniewski — 6 October 2009 — 1 comment below »
At last night’s Planning Commission meeting, the Planning Commission slowly but surely recommended Alternative 1 after receiving a presentation on the final two alternatives from the design team.
Commissioners deVera, Maltez and Mitchell all voiced their favor for Alternative 1, and Chair McCoy deferred to the design team (which also recommended Alternative 1). Commissioner Bibal abstained from the “vote.” (There was actually no vote, only delivery of comments. However, the stated purpose of the meeting was to forward a recommendation to the City Council for their final vote on the alternatives next week. I spoke out during the meeting as to the need for a singular recommendation from the Commission.)
For those in attendance or who watched on television, a foot-candle is the “amount of illumination the inside surface of a 1-foot radius sphere would be receiving if there were a uniform point source of one candela in the exact center of the sphere.” (Exactly what I thought it was.) The lights along the tracks will be illuminated at a maximum of 5 foot-candles when trains are working the platform. At all other times, the illumination will be significantly reduced, to 1 foot-candle or less.
UPDATE — It should be noted that the Planning Commission did not make an official recommendation, but only voiced their preference. The presentation was for information only — for the Commission and the community — and no action was taken.
Jeff, just a note about footcandles… It is important to understand that footcandles are a measure of light incidence (illuminance) not transmittance. That is, they represent the amount of light analagized by the wiki entry you cited at a specific location that may or may not be one foot from the source. To truly understand the ‘amount’ of light being emitted by a source, one must know where the measurement is being taken and what other sources might be contributing.
A fun bit of trivia is that the light of one candle can be perceived by human eyes at five miles if there are no competing light sources.