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As Palo Alto prepares to transform the industrial blocks around the San Antonio Road corridor into its newest residential community, city leaders are confronting a colossal challenge: the streets that they hope will be at the center of the building boom have some of the most dangerous traffic conditions in the city.
According to a new report from consultants who are leading the city’s effort to create a new vision for this area, the commercial corridor between Alma Street and U.S. Highway 101 currently contains about 2.7% of Palo Alto’s housing stock but is responsible for about 5% of traffic collisions that involve fatalities or serious injuries. Over the past decade, there were 143 collisions reported in this area, according to a survey by Raimi + Associates, which includes two fatal crashes and three that involved severe injuries.
“People have died because of collisions, so this is definitely a key concern when thinking about future development in the plan area,” said Mitali Ganguly, a senior associate at the firm, which is helping to manage Palo Alto’s new area plan for the San Antonio area.
The goal of the newly launched plan is to ensure that a section of the city that has historically been synonymous with industrial and commercial uses and that conspicuously lacks public transit and biking amenities is capable of supporting close to 2,000 new housing units by 2031, consistent with the city’s Housing Element. But as members of the Planning and Transportation Commission acknowledged during a Sept. 10 discussion of the area plan, the city will have to contend with a long list of obstacles before its ambitious plans come to fruition, from the looming specter of sea level rise to a lack of parks, retail destinations or other community gathering spaces.
Chief among the challenges, however, is traffic. Commissioners agreed that for the plan to succeed, the city would have to implement significant transportation improvements along the 1.8-stretch of San Antonio Road near the Mountain View border that is included in the planning area.
“There are significant gaps, not just in biking network but also in the pedestrian network, such as missing sidewalks, inadequate crossings, unprotected crossing and other such conditions that make it not very safe and definitely not very enjoyable for someone to walk or bike in the plan area right now,” Ganguly said.
Commissioner Kevin Ji, who lives in south Palo Alto, concurred with the assessment. He noted that San Antonio is both a truck route and a designated school route, with a bike lane between Middlefield and East Charleston roads. The mix of identities is “a little bit contradictory,” Ji said.
“I biked to school every day, growing up K-12 here,” Ji said. “I would never have dared to go to San Antonio in its current state.”
A key component of the new plan is collaboration with Mountain View, which has been far more proactive in recent years about redeveloping San Antonio, as evidenced by major projects such as San Antonio Center near El Camino Real. Robert Cain, a Palo Alto senior planner who is managing the San Antonio plan, said that he has regular meetings with his counterparts in Mountain View to discuss the evolving plans for the area.
Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission Vice Chair Bryna Chang was among the commissioners who noted that significant traffic projects on major intersections such as San Antonio and Charleston roads, would require a partnership between the two cities. Commissioner Cari Templeton said that Palo Alto can’t think about “the artificial boundaries of our cities” as it plans for mutually beneficial amenities such as parks, retail and transportation improvements.
“They are our neighbors right there,” Templeton said. “They are using the same space.”
Because the plan is centered on one particular road rather than on an entire neighborhood, it is fundamentally different from Palo Alto’s previous area plans, including ones that the city undertook in the downtown and Ventura neighborhoods, Chang noted. Given San Antonio’s central role in funneling traffic, staff, consultants and area stakeholders will have to consider the street’s interaction with other parts of Palo Alto, she said.
“Because if we only do within, we’re going cause a cascading, massive problem that will affect other cities, the freeway, our whole city,” Chang said.
The area around San Antonio already may be the worst traffic in Palo Alto, Chang said. And if the current ratio of significant traffic accidents to housing units extends into the future, it’s going to be a “disaster,” she said.
Commissioner Cari Templeton urged planning staff and consultants to “think bigger” when it comes to transportation improvements.
“It’s a lovely project but can we do more to make that particular area safer, especially as we look forward to all the types of people who are going to live there and what they’re going to do?” Templeton said. “Everyone who lives in this area … they are literally worried that children are going to die crossing the street.”
Some of the planning for San Antonio Road is already in the works under the city’s ongoing update of its bicycle master plan. The document recommends a shared-use path along San Antonio on the eastern edge of the planning area, between East Charleston Road and Terminal Boulevard, and separated bikeways on San Antonio between Alma Street and East Charleston Road.
The bike plan also proposes creating buffered bikeways on Fabian Way, between East Charleston Road and Meadow Drive.
The new analysis from Raimi + Associates similarly recommends broad traffic improvements, both along San Antonio and in other streets in and around the 275-acre planning area.
“All the key streets in the plan area need to have significant safety improvements to make them viable for the kind of a community that we envision,” Ganguly said.
Transportation isn’t the only major challenge flagged in the new report. Because of its location near the Baylands, a large part of the plan area is in a designated flood zone. The segment east of East Charleston Road is subject to a one percent annual chance of flood, according to the report, while the rest of the area faces a 0.2% chance of flooding.
“New development will need to meet base flood elevation standards and incorporate resilience measures,” the plan states.
Commissioner Forest Peterson suggested that because of the flood-control issues near Baylands, the city should look at the planning area as two separate zones, one that could accommodate denser growth and another that would require significant remediation before any development could occur. He urged staff and consultants to pay attention to wildfire and flood risks in the planning area and cited his personal experience as a former resident of Paradise, a city in northern California that was devastated by fires in 2018.
“We do know that we’re certainly getting our ankles wet, if we’re not getting our hair singed,” Petersen said in reference to the planning area.
The new analysis from the consultants also reflects the dramatic changes that the San Antonio area has already undergone over the past decade, with manufacturing jobs precipitously declining and jobs in the health care and retail fields on a steady rise. According to the report, the number of manufacturing jobs in the plan area dropped from 3,788 in 2012 to 2,043 in 2022, a decline of 46%.
Meanwhile, the number of retail jobs nearly doubled, going from 184 to 360, and the number of jobs in the “health care and social assistance” field went from 184 to 564 over the same period.
While the area has produced little housing over the past three decades, city officials and consultants see great promise in a recent wave of applications for housing projects along and near San Antonio, including recent residential proposals for sites at 3997 Fabian Way, 762 San Antonio Road, 788 San Antonio Road and 800 San Antonio Road. If approved as planned, the various pipeline projects could yield up to 750 housing units, a significant increase over the 802 residential units that currently exist in the plan area, according to the report.
The report also warns that as the San Antonio area continues to evolve, development standards will be needed to “guide compatibility between adjacent uses, and transitions in built form and scale.”
“Because all pipeline projects are located on privately owned land, they remain subject to market volatility and other development uncertainties,” the report states. “Successful implementation may depend on targeted incentives that encourage the provision of community amenities as part of private development.”
Mountain View looks to encourage more multifamily housing with zoning updateJanuary 12, 2026 12:51 pm
I expect Palo Alto residents to come out of the woodwork now and say that because the San Antonio corridor is so problematic, the city should abandon its plans to put homes there.
Perhaps these concerns should have been taken into consideration before the city committed to build thousands of homes in this area rather than in “core” areas such as downtown and Cal Ave.
Consider that all the industrial uses in the past contributed a lot of traffic to the area. The traffic patterns weren’t well laid out but the traffic was there. People forget all the activity that used to be in that area. This will be replaced by use as housing.
This is a major corridor of both MV and PA. It makes sense to develop it into housing and it is better than many other options. It won’t be as bad as this article implies with respect to adding vehicle trips.