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Palo Alto’s elected leaders have been talking about redesigning the rail corridor for well over a decade but it wasn’t until about two months ago that the debate arrived at the doorsteps of Jackie Schneider and her Seale Avenue neighbors.
“It felt like it came out of left field for some people,” Schneider said.
The “it” in question is the city’s new proposal to build a bike tunnel on her block. Under the city’s current plans, westbound pedestrians and cyclists who want to cross the train tracks would dip into the tunnel between Emerson and Alma streets, go under the train tracks, and reemerge at Peers Park. The City Council’s Rail Committee endorsed the Seale tunnel in April and the full council is to consider the option on June 10.
Supporters of the Seale tunnel view it as the best answer to the question: How will the cyclists and pedestrians who currently use Churchill Avenue to traverse the tracks get to the other side once grade separation is implemented. The council’s preferred alternative for Churchill Avenue is a “partial underpass” that would dip Churchill under the tracks and create a T-intersection on Alma for westbound cars, forcing them to turn either north or south.
Westbound cyclists, including the hundreds of Palo Alto High students who bike to school every day, would now be routed to Seale, which is four blocks south of Churchill. Once they reemerge at Peers Park, they would be able to take existing bike lanes paths to the Paly campus.
For Schneider and her neighbors, the plan is problematic. While the city is still finalizing its design, the current concept calls for building the tunnel entrance in the middle of the road, pushing cars to the side and eliminating parking spaces. Far from an elegant solution, they see it as expensive, disruptive and inconvenient for both Seale residents and the tunnel’s users.
“Nobody believes a bike tunnel in the residential neighborhood is the right answer — a tunnel that is supposed to bring kids to school but instead drops them off into a dog park.” Schneider said.
To date, Seale Avenue has a relatively minor role in the city’s complex, protracted and politically thorny discussion of grade separation, an effort to separate rail tracks from roadways at three crossings: Churchill Avenue, Meadow Drive and Charleston Road. The council’s highest priorities are the Meadow and Charleston crossings in south Palo Alto, which are being evaluated in tandem.
Last month, the Rail Committee voted 2-1, with Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims dissenting, to advance two options for the south Palo Alto crossings: an underpass for cars and a “hybrid” design that combines lowered roads and raised tracks. The council will have a chance on June 10 to review this recommendation and potentially advance both options for further analysis.
Work on the Churchill crossing isn’t expected to start for years but even the city’s tentative plans are causing angst for residents near the corridor, some of whom may see portions of their properties acquired by the city to create the underpass.
A similar conversation is occurring at Charleston and Meadow. As this publication has previously reported, current plans for the south Palo Alto underpass show that the project would require 23 partial property acquisitions and two full property acquisitions, both on Charleston Road.
Lythcott-Haims acknowledged the growing chorus of concerns about property impacts at a May 23 meeting, where she recalled talking to a resident who had recently learned from a newspaper article that his property may be seized as part of the construction project.
“He and his wife bought the house recently to get their children into our schools,” Lythcott-Haims said. “Now it looks like they may have no home here at all. He’s feeling dismayed, disrespected.”
Even though Seale residents don’t live next to a rail crossing, many are similarly dismayed by the city’s plan to create a bike tunnel on their street to complement the Churchill underpass. Some believe the city should simply close Churchill Avenue to cars at the tracks but create a passageway for bicyclists to cross the corridor. Others believe the city should find another location, closer to Paly, for the new bike corridor.
“It’s a lot of money for a half measure where there’s an existing pedestrian and bike tunnel three block south,” Cathy Muma, a Seale Avenue resident, said in an interview.
She and her husband Brian moved to Palo Alto eight years ago and have two children who had graduated from Paly. They believe that the new plan would, more than anything else, make the conditions less safe for the young cyclists heading to school, particularly during months when it gets dark early.
“We believe we should prioritize the 2,000-plus Paly students having the most direct way to safely get to and from school, because most of these kids are pedestrians and cyclists,” Cathy Muma said.
Brian Muma said he and his neighbors are also concerned about what they see as the lack of transparency by the city, which has yet to release any detailed plans about what the Seale tunnel would look like.
“We’re dealing with asymmetric information — just kind of filling in the blanks,” Brian Muma said.
For the council, the Seale bike tunnel is a relatively recent detour in a long journey to find the most suitable grade separation alternative for Churchill. A specially appointed citizen committee that was charged with reviewing various options recommended the closure of Churchill near the tracks. That option, however, proved unpopular in the Southgate neighborhood, where many residents decried the potential loss of direct access from their neighborhood to Alma Street and El Camino Real.
The council then pivoted to a partial underpass, an option that was designed by a Southgate resident. In November 2021, council members voted to select the partial underpass as their preferred alternative and the closure of Churchill as a backup plan.
While a bike tunnel was always part of the plan, the council had initially planned to build it on Kellogg Avenue, which is closer to Paly and which would provide a more direct access across the tracks for cycling students. This benefit is also, however, the plan’s biggest liability. Under the Kellogg alternative, the westbound terminal of the tunnel would be at the Paly football field bleachers.
A new report from the city’s Office of Transportation notes that a Kellogg tunnel would also require additional turns on the west side of the tracks to connect to the Embarcadero bike path on Caltrain property. The report suggests that a bicycle and pedestrian crossing on Seale Avenue would “fill a longer gap between alternative locations and would increase connectivity.”
Council member Pat Burt, who chairs the Rail Committee, suggested that a Seale tunnel would make bicycling conditions for Paly students safer than they are under current conditions. Today, students have to wait for a signal to cross and then they “gang up and they all go at once.”
“Whereas with an underpass, they go smoothly in a steady flow,” Burt said. “That’s the concept for why we’re investing in that — to give real improved bike and pedestrian flow across Alma and the tracks.”
On June 10, the full council will have its first chance to weigh in on the Seale vs. Kellogg debate. It will also have an opportunity to eliminate from considerations the trench alternative for the south Palo Alto crossings, an option that the Rail Committee agreed was infeasible because of high costs and engineering constraits.
Once the council picks its preferred alternatives, members will have to confront the big question of how to fund them. The city’s most recent cost estimates peg the cost of a Churchill underpass and bike tunnel at $160 million and $200 million. The Meadow and Charleston underpass option, which also includes a roundabout for cars, has an estimated price tag of $360 million and $420 million; while the south Palo Alto hybrid option would cost between $190 million and $230 million.
At recent meetings, council members and staff had suggested that the actual costs may actually be far higher given the escalation in labor and material costs over the past few years. During the April 16 discussion, Burt suggested that given the complexity of the various projects — and well as uncertainties about future Caltrain ridership — the Churchill grade separation won’t be happening any time in the near future.
“It’s not going happen soon. It may never happen. And I think that’s kind of where we are with Churchill, but we’re not at a point where we can make that decision based on the information we have,” Burt said at the April 16 meeting.
Correction: The story had initially misspelled the last name of Brian and Cathy Muma.
