What happened to Millbrae?

Brace yourself. I'm going to be brutally honest with all my random thoughts about this city. Millbrae is quickly becoming a pathetic little town. This place is nowhere close to what it used to be. I grew up here and I call it home.

I remember the first day the palm trees went up on Broadway... the people that put that plan together were forward thinkers. Millbrae was clean and beautiful then. 

Fast forward to today. Our city is DIRTY. I often see a worker scrubbing the sidewalks in the Broadway area very early in the morning. He does an amazing job. I'm talking about El Camino. The center dividers all along El Camino and Millbrae Ave have the appearance of an overgrown, polluted jungle. The only time I've ever seen it being maintained is the week before our art and wine festival. People around here are getting too comfortable with throwing trash out the window. How about the areas by the 101 freeway ramps? Seriously.... wow. Can we put the littering fine signs up and punish some offenders?

I'm spotting graffiti way too much around town. And when it goes up... it is slow to come down. Is there not room to improve this? And the parking situation on Broadway is laughable. Double-parking, parking where there is no parking... no regular enforcing of the hourly parking limit...

I've read the posts about the SFO noise. Yes, there is a problem. Yes, there is a much more powerful vibration. I set my hand down on a table last week as a plane passed overhead. My body and the table shook. If it weren't for the noise of the passing plane-- I'd think it was a small earthquake. I believe it's messing with my gas pipes and who knows what else. The loud booming and banging sounds are so frequent that I have just written them all off to the "sounds of SFO". Yes, I live in one of the houses that got the sound-proof windows. Let me tell you... those were installed at least 20 years ago. Almost every window of our house gets stuck. I remember they would not install a soundproof door on our backdoor because it "was not part of the original house" even though we bought the house with it already there in the mid-1970's. One morning as I walked into the living room a few weeks ago... I could see sunlight coming through a slim crack in the door jambs. I think it's safe to say... our living room and house is no longer sound proof. 

I want to thank Caltrans for putting the train whistles back where they belonged... under the trains. They do not wake me up at all hours of the night now. Thank you. 

I used to brag to everyone that Millbrae had the best tap water on the planet and that it was better than any steeply priced bottled water anywhere. This is no longer true. The water quality is horrible compared to what it used to be. It now has a weird taste. 

Our little downtown area needs a face lift. We have too many Asian restaurants. We need more variety. Even San Bruno's San Mateo Ave is looking better than us now. The mix of shops opening up around Millbrae look odd and frankly... some of them make us appear generic. Yeah, I know how snobby that sounded but I mean it. Drive down our strip of El Camino... for the most part… it's unattractive. 

After we’re done with all the fixes mentioned here… can we put up some more trees/gardens/benches around town? I don’t see as many senior citizens out and about like I used to and I miss them. It’s a bit of the quirkiness of this city that I adored. We always had a good mix of the old and young.