Candidates for the Palo Alto City Council have differing opinions when it comes to housing growth and the future of the rail corridor, but there’s one thing just about everyone agreed on at a Monday forum: It’s time to go big on bike projects that improve safety.
That was one of the takeaways from the candidate forum that the Rotary Club hosted at the Baylands Cafe on Monday afternoon. The event, which was moderated by this reporter, featured eight of the nine candidates who are competing for four council seats: incumbent Council members Pat Burt and Mayor Greer Stone, Planning and Transportation Commission members George Lu, Keith Reckdahl, Doria Summa and Cari Templeton, Parks and Recreation Commission member Anne Cribbs and Human Relations Commission member Katie Causey.
Henry Etzkowitz, a researcher who focuses on innovation, is also running but did not attend the Aug. 26 event.
The eight candidates all agreed that the city needs to encourage more housing development, but they offered different ideas for doing so. Palo Alto’s recently approved Housing Element, its official blueprint for housing production, envisions about 2,000 new dwellings in the largely commercial and industrial area around San Antonio Road. When asked what other strategies and locations they would want to focus on for housing, Burt and Summa both supported looking at Stanford Research Park, with Summa also suggesting Stanford Shopping Center as a possible area for future residential growth.
Stone pointed to El Camino Real, where the city recently created a “housing focus area” between Page Mill Road and Matadero Avenue that allows building heights of up to 85 feet — well exceeding the current 50-foot height limit — for residential developments with affordable-housing components. This zone, he suggested, can be further expanded to facilitate more such developments.
“What that is going to allow is to get us additional affordability out of some of the market-rate developments while offering some incentives for developers to be able to build there,” Stone said.
Lu suggested that a key part of the problem when it comes to building housing is the city’s lengthy approval process. He supported enhancing the city’s affordable housing incentive program, which creates a streamlined approval process for below-market-rate residential developments. As a model, he pointed to Los Angeles, where Mayor Karen Bass issued Executive Directive 1, an edict that, among other things, requires the city to take no longer than 60 days to approve a completed application for 100% affordable housing.
“I think that’s a success that we can replicate here in Palo Alto,” Lu said.
Cribbs similarly said that she would like to take a look at ways to make the process move faster. She and Summa both emphasized the need to create what Summa called “complete neighborhoods” in areas where the new housing will be targeted.
“Besides housing, we’re going to need walkable services for people like parks, and we’re really going to need space in the streets for safe bike lanes,” Summa said.
More bike lanes was something that just about everyone supported, both around San Antonio and elsewhere. When the candidates were asked what their top infrastructure priority would be, bike improvements were by far the most popular answer.
The city already has two planning efforts under way to determine exactly what types of improvements to pursue. One is the update of the city’s bicycle master plan. The other is a “safe streets for all” plan that looks at all modes of transportation with the intention to minimize serious accidents.
“Our programs for ‘Safe Streets for All’ is really our highest priority going forward,” Burt said. “That’s for pedestrians, bicycles and vehicle drivers. We can and really need to achieve this. It ties into our climate plans, it ties into public safety and it ties to our ease of moving about in our community.”
Others shared this view. Lu, a bicycle advocate, said he would want to see the city meet the “Vision Zero” goal of eliminating all traffic fatalities and significant injuries. Causey, who works as a community organizer at the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, called street safety her highest priority and said she would like to use data to identify areas in Palo Alto with the highest collision rates, much like she currently does in her professional capacity in other cities. Templeton suggested the city can start with areas where recent collisions had occurred.
“I know we had a few collisions this year in which no improvements have been made on safety infrastructure on the street. … I think it’s really important to add that level of forward thinking to our safety infrastructure,” Templeton said.
Another topic that had broad consensus is the need to redevelop Cubberley Community Center, a bustling south Palo Alto campus that has fallen into disrepair and that the city hopes to redevelop. To do that, the city is now negotiating a purchase of Cubberley land from the Palo Alto Unified School District, which owns 27 of the 35 acres and leases them to the city.
Burt, Cribbs and Reckdahl all said that redeveloping Cubberley would be a high priority. Reckdahl, who lives in south Palo Alto, said that the city needs to “take the bull by the horns” and start planning for future uses at Cubberley as it wraps up negotiations to acquire more land. Cribbs, who has participated in several past efforts to come up with a new vision for the community center, concurred. She cited her work on the Cubberley plan in 1991.
“Here we are in 2024 and I’d like to see it in my lifetime, and see what we leave to our kids in the future,” Cribbs said.
There was somewhat less agreement on grade separation, the redesign of the rail corridor so that tracks and roads would no longer intersect. The city is planning grade separation at Churchill Avenue, Meadow Drive and Charleston Road and has narrowed down its menu of options from more than 30 a decade ago to three: a car underpass at Churchill and either a car underpass or a “hybrid” design with raised tracks and lower roads on Meadow and Charleston.
Two candidates, Causey and Templeton, voiced their support for the viaduct, an option that is favored by local bike advocates but that has been eliminated from consideration largely because of the visual impacts of having elevated trains passing close to people’s yards. Templeton, who served on a citizens committee that studied grade separation options, supported revisiting the viaduct option in south Palo Alto, while Causey said that while she had favored the viaduct in the past, at this point she would support whatever option could be implemented efficiently.
“For me, the priority is getting it done,” Causey said. “We explored a lot of great options and I want it to be done and done safely to help our residents.”
Reckdahl, who also served on the citizens group that focused on grade separation, and Burt both favored the car underpass, though each noted that the project remains in an early conceptual phase and that they would need more information before making a final decision. Reckdahl acknowledged that the project is causing anxiety for many residents near the tracks, particularly if their properties may need to be acquired to accommodate the project.
“We’re building this grade separation in the middle of an urban area that’s also built out,” Reckdahl said. “In the middle of corn fields it would be a much more straight-forward problem.”
When asked what factors, if any, may cause them to reconsider grade separation altogether, both said declining Caltrain ridership. While the council has been steadfast in its desire to bring grade separation to south Palo Alto, Burt suggested that the idea of also pursuing grade separation at Churchill may need to be reconsidered, particularly if Caltrain’s forthcoming business plan projects lower ridership in the coming years.
“I’m not at all convinced that we’ll have an increase in trains and we’re not having an increase in traffic,” said Burt, who serves on the board of directors of the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board, which oversees Caltrain. “And we can address a lot of the needs through quiet zones, quad gates and other protection measures.”
