The best of Mountain View

1. Outdoor Seating on Castro Street

2. Thursday Night Live on Castro Street

3. Art Ala Carte and the Art and Wine Festival

4. Parades of all types

5. Mostly hospitality business (restaurants, snacks, tea, coffee, books, nightlife and shopping (food, pharmacy, etc). Makes for a vibrant, interesting downtown area, a destination for residents.

6. Shoreline Park (Although it's getting pretty hard to get there)

The worst of Mountain View

1. Roundabout at California and Castro (Not everyone received their license in Europe) It's a danger when many drivers do not know how to use it.

2. Roundabouts in Old Mountain View. They encroach the crosswalks. Cost taxpayers more money to fix when replacing sewers and pipelines and actually reduces visibility with overgrown landscaping and doesn't do the job intended.

3. Speed Humps in Old Mountain View. Seriously, barely two lanes of traffic and Speed Humps. Destroys the esthetics. Reasonably sure someone (city council, city hall) lives in this area when the decision was proposed and approved. Looks like a strip mall parking lot.

4. Proposed intersection abomination at Calderon and Mercy. Why not borrow a page from Los Altos or on Showers drive and install the flashing LED's that can be seen from Outer Space and don't require some go-cart configuration full of cement. Can't wait for a car to leap into the air.

5. Loss of Retail/Hospitality space on Castro Street to commercial (office)space development. We lost the nicest, newest building on the 200 block of Castro and that is just the beginning. The city allows for high density housing all around downtown Mountain View and now will force all residents to get into their cars because soon there will be nothing to do on Castro Street except to go to work.