Waymo should provide accident data

Earlier this month, the California Department of Motor Vehicles approved testing of self-driving cars by Waymo without safety drivers. Waymo would like to begin providing driverless transportation services in a handful of towns, including Los Altos.

There is only one question that matters with respect to whether self-driving cars are safe enough to be on our roads without safety drivers: How often would there have been an accident if the safety driver had not taken control of the vehicle?

Following is an open letter to the Los Altos School District Board of Trustees and the Bullis Charter School Board of Directors.

We are parents in both the Los Altos School District and at Bullis Charter School who are asking for your help to bring our community together – regardless of school affiliation – and stop the facilities disputes that have torn us apart and pitted neighbor against neighbor for the past 15 years. Enough is enough.

For her wedding last month, my daughter wanted both my husband and me to walk her down the aisle, but the moment was staged so that she actually walked to us first before we escorted her down.

Awaiting her arrival at the bottom of a flight of stairs, I got verklempt. To be honest, that surprised me a little because I didn’t have particular expectations about how it would feel to see my child get married, and in fact never gave it much thought.

“Are you crazy?” a woman I’d just met began, perplexed. “Why bother writing if you can’t make a living at it?”

Back in 2001, when stories I had locked away in my brain found their way to paper, I felt God was giving me another talent to play with. From the time I was young, I was pulled to the arts: drawing, painting, sculpting, even sewing. Later, music entered with my first guitar, and off I was in folk land, singing the songs of John Denver, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. And while I treasured every moment of creation, even occasionally making decent money from each, I was raised to believe the arts were just a nice hobby. They couldn’t be the sole occupation for people who had bills to pay. So I understood her confusion, especially when writing can be a laborious process for little or no pay.

Beth Am event headline soft-pedals terrorism

I’d like to know why the Town Crier chose these words for the Nov. 7 article, “Beth Am shows support in aftermath of tragedy,” as opposed to “Beth Am shows support in aftermath of murder” or even more accurate “Beth Am shows support in aftermath of terrorist attack” or even “white nationalist terror attack”?

Cancer is a tragedy. Car accidents are tragedies. This was murder and this is soft-pedaling terrorism.

So what were voters telling us in the wake of the Nov. 6 local election?

• While sometimes wary of it, residents by and large don’t want to micromanage government. That was one message we picked up from the defeat of Los Altos’ Measure C, an initiative that would have required voter approval for any change in city-owned property, be it sale, lease or rezoning. A similar-type measure also was defeated in Sunnyvale.