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Looking to control future traffic woes caused by massive growth in North Bayshore, Mountain View City Council members approved a new plan Tuesday that would make already-tight traffic restrictions on tech employers among the most demanding in the country.
Existing rules already threaten employers like Google and Microsoft with penalties if more than 45% of the workforce commutes in single-occupancy vehicles, an ambitious and unusually tough-to-meet goal for the Bay Area. The updated traffic strategy is now pushing for 40% and potentially even 35%, forcing a large majority of tech employees to take transit, walk or bike to work.
The stringent goals are seen as a necessary measure to keep traffic from grinding to a standstill into and out of North Bayshore during the busiest morning and evening hours. Traffic prior to COVID-19 was already leading to brutal commutes, and city officials are expecting it to come back with a vengeance once the city’s high-density vision for the area is completed.
Once fully built out, the relatively small area north of Highway 101 will have over 40,000 employees and an estimated 18,000 new residents, all of whom have to make it through the same roads that act as chokepoints, according to Jim Lightbody, the city’s traffic consultant.
“It’s going to be a popular area, and while we can significantly reduce single-occupant vehicles with this plan, it’s not going to completely relieve traffic congestion.”
Central to the city’s plans is the so-called trip cap, a measurement of traffic flows on Shoreline Boulevard, Rengstorff Avenue and San Antonio Road during the worst commute hours. When traffic volumes exceed that cap, the city considers office developments in North Bayshore “out of compliance” and can put restrictions on commercial building permits. The bright spot is that a series of traffic improvements will serve to raise the cap, including a new reversible bus lane and an improved onramp onto Shoreline Boulevard.
The new rules on single-occupancy vehicles, combined with expensive traffic upgrades estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, are expected to keep traffic at a manageable level but a far cry from free-flowing traffic. Councilwoman Lisa Matichak said this is hardly what she had envisioned for North Bayshore, which was meant to be car-light and focused so heavily on alternative forms of transportation that it would lead to the free flow of cars.
“I’m hesitant to say I totally support this plan without having looked at how could we make this more car-light,” Matichak said. “I’m concerned that we aren’t optimized for what we want to see in North Bayshore.”
Resident Albert Jeans told council members that the traffic analysis to date is hardly comforting, and that traffic conditions are poised to worsen even with the new single-occupancy vehicle target and added infrastructure. Northbound traffic on Shoreline Boulevard already backs up to Montecito Avenue, he said, and could very well extend to Central Expressway if North Bayshore is fully built out.
One of the strategies the city is banking on is that future residents living in North Bayshore will be in close proximity to where they work, opening the door for what the city is calling “internalized” trips that don’t put a strain on busy roadways. Internalization is going to be a “key” to getting down to as low as 35% of employees using single-occupancy vehicles to get to work, said Public Works Director Dawn Cameron, but it’ll take a while before it makes a difference.
“Initially it’s going to be a big struggle just to get down to 42% or 40%, but as the housing gets built we may say you have to phase down because now you do have the housing here and you can start taking advantage of internalization.”
As for going more car-light than already projected, Cameron said Mountain View is already heading into uncharted territory. The 45% single-occupancy vehicle rate was “incredibly” ambitious and unseen outside of places like New York City.
“Getting anything lower than that is going to be quite an achievement that we can crow about nationally, if we can achieve that 35% to 40%,” she said.
While council members were quick to approve the plan at the Dec. 7 meeting, they were less convinced that congestion pricing — that is, tolls charged for people driving into North Bayshore — was the right path forward. The City Council floated the idea earlier this year as a short-term solution, but numerous challenges left the council reluctant to formally adopt it as part of the North Bayshore traffic strategy.
If it were rolled out, city staff suggested that the fees be charged on drivers entering North Bayshore during peak morning commute hours on weekdays, with a per-trip charge ranging from $5 to $13. The strategy raises a whole host of questions, including whether low-income service workers should be exempt; whether it would have a chilling effect on hiring restaurant and retail workers; and the estimated $30 million capital costs to implement congestion pricing.
What’s more, Mountain View would be a true outlier. Congestion pricing for an area, rather than a bridge or a highway, has not been implemented anywhere in the country, with only a handful of other cities considering it as an option, according to city staff. Council members agreed to ditch the idea for now and reconsider it in a few years.
Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga, an early supporter of congestion pricing, said she was disappointed to see congestion pricing deferred, but that is gaining popularity as a concept and is picking up steam locally.
“When we first talked about it nobody wanted it except for me, and I’m excited that more folks are looking into it,” Abe-Koga said.
Resident Cliff Chambers, speaking on behalf of the Mountain View Coalition for Sustainable Planning, said the group agreed that congestion pricing should be deferred, and encouraged the city to try other ways to get more tech employees out of cars. He pointed to a “dynamic” paid parking program could work to dissuade people from driving into work, and something to fall back on if the city fails to reach its single-occupancy vehicle target.
“Paid parking is one of the most effective traffic demand management (TDM) measures,” Chambers said. “It’s part of the toolbox, but it’s one of the most important parts to really make the system work out there.”
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Such a Bay Area thing: Stop services and make life harder for the people in and around the city in the cause of the environment and then refuse to address any of the root causes of why people might be forced to drive everywhere.
Maybe if it wasn’t going to take 3 decades to build all of the housing that is scheduled in North Bayshore, I would be more understanding.
But as is, this town is turning into a playground of the hyper-rich and the retirees.
All the ‘dissuading’ of car use in the world will do exactly nothing until people actually have alternatives. Realigning a few roads is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Forget laying down more asphalt and put all that money into public transit and bike infrastructure improvements. The best car-free cities on earth are that way because the public transit is so good that people actually want to take it. There is no other way, and to pretend otherwise is just a thinly-veiled attempt to distract from this atrocity of planning, if you can even call it that. I’ve personally sat for hours just trying to get home, moving literally inches in minutes on Shoreline due to Amphitheater traffic. The calamity isn’t coming, it’s already here.
After all of the growth and expansion that has been promoted and supported by Mountain View, now the city is going to turn up the heat on Google and Microsoft reduce traffic congestion? Push them and they’re liable to move to Texas…
Build all the new apartments and these residents need to get to work. They take Shoreline and Rengstorff up to 101… but less than half are headed into Google offices within the city. Why do you think 101 is so busy even with new lanes?
Put a 20%-of-profit penalty on every company with a high average-vehicle miles-per-employee-per-week and a 20 % of-profit-reward on every company with a low average-vehicle-miles-per-employee-per-week. You will be surprised how rapidly companies will become innovative. Besides implementing a four day work week, encouraging car pools and public transportation, and hiring people who can walk or bike to work…… working-from-home ( near by or distant ) will suddenly be very attractive to the employers. They will even be able to spend on implementing working-from-home if it results in a financial reward. If high tech workers can move out of the area and work-from-home with their existing employer, then more local homes will become available for the hands-on workers that need to remain nearby. Other benefits ??? Well, there’s reduced traffic, fewer accidents, lower insurance, fewer roadway maintenance costs, retention of the suburb atmosphere, nicer homes for remote high tech workers, the ability of work-from-home employees to change jobs without upsetting family life, affordable homes for hands-on workers,…. the list goes on. The downside is that current housing prices would fall. (Is that really a downside ? ) For those who argue that a work-from-home atmosphere isn’t doable, if you examine the benefits it is worth putting in the effort to make it work. Yes, it will take adjustment. Oversight and mentoring of remote employees is a skill that will need to be learned. Social life needs to shift from the work location to the home location. You will need to make Zoom a part of your daily life. Eventually remote employees will grow to like living on a big lot where individual homes are not separated from the neighbor’s by redwood fences. It will take adjustment, but in the end it solves a lot of major problems. Technology has given us a way to distribute the population that was previously unavailable. We need to take advantage of it.
well the answer is not to build offices! We can not build our way out of our housing shortage: we need to attack the demand side by not creating any more good jobs here and encouraging companies to leave and take their jobs with them. When are those 5,000 Tesloids going to move to Austin anyway? (According to the WaPo Austin is the least affordable city in the country outside of California). If we remove good jobs, then demand for housing will fall and get closer to balance. No more new jobs until housing prices such that a young couple who don’t work in tech can afford to buy a home!
Seth, I’ve seen you post this before, but you never back it up with any reasoning. Why can’t we build our way out of our housing shortage?
“City officials are expecting [traffic] to come back with a vengeance once the city’s high-density vision for the area is completed”.
Why? High density layouts are far better for traffic than low density. Do you want many people living near jobs and amenities (making car commutes shorter and walking/biking more practical) or many people distributed far away from jobs/amenities (making car trips longer and walking/biking impractical, so all trips become car trips)?
Instead of fining people who are just trying to get to work, or complaining about tech companies creating good local jobs, let’s try actually building enough (dense) housing to meet the demand from all those people and put it near where the jobs are.
Charging people $5 to $13 to drive to Shoreline Lake is not tenable. The MV City Council needs to go back to the drawing board with that one.
It’s already a huge traffic mess out there. They will need to add another exit/entrance from the freeway someday between Rengstorff and Shoreline. And just wait for a concert day when the roads already backed up and creeping along.
I don’t own a car and I find getting around very difficult. Public transportation is severely lacking and Uber-type rides too expensive. Good luck with getting high tech workers out of their cars.
This massive build-up should never have happened.
Instead of treating tech employees like locust and acting like a deer in the headlights – local government officials could do their jobs, embrace the new tax revenues that these companies bring in, and build out new infrastructure.
I am sure tech employees hate being stuck in traffic, but what are the alternatives? The VTA, which goes from Cal train, to nowhere useful, at 10 miles per hour, and has the 2nd to last farebox recovery ratio *IN THE WORLD* (revenues cover 10% of the cost to run the system). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
But no… It is too hard for government officials to do their jobs. Instead, they do nothing, complain, and try to mask their incompetence by blaming others.
We can’t build our way out of the housing imbalance because there is no limit or cap on the amount of new office space being added. Take this Vallco project in Cupertino. It’s going to add 2400 units, half subsidized BMR. Sounds good. But it’s also going to add 10,000 jobs in the same fiasco.
There is some ultimate limit on the number of jobs, but the biggest problem is they are shifting locations. The jobs density in cities like San Francisco and the Downtown part of San Jose is not increasing as much as the jobs density in Sunnyvale and Mountain View. So when old office parks are torn down in San Jose the jobs move here…..
I had, perhaps wrongly, assumed that Seth meant we cannot build our way out of the housing crisis (by building housing.) It seemed unreasonable to assume otherwise.
LongResident, please don’t be roode and try to answer the specific things that people are taking about rather than distracting with misleading statistics, as you usually do.
Good for the Mountain View City Council for taking action to control future traffic woes caused by massive job and housing growth.
Sadly, it’s necessary to force the techies to eat the same dog food that they want to foist on long-term residents, so they understand the downsides of their advocacy. Enacting “solutions” that force people to take transit, walk or bike around the city are nothing but cruel unless adequate, affordable public transit alternatives exist.
“Councilwoman Lisa Matichak said this is hardly what she had envisioned for North Bayshore, which was meant to be car-light and focused so heavily on alternative forms of transportation that it would lead to the free flow of cars.” Keywords: ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF TRANSPORTATION
“[Congestion pricing] raises a whole host of questions, including whether low-income service workers should be exempt; whether it would have a chilling effect on hiring restaurant and retail workers; ” Converting free public parking to paid parking raises the same questions. If we want to punish driving per se, congestion pricing seems more fair. Let’s be honest: those who don’t own cars but rely on Uber and Amazon delivery contribute to the problem too. The traffic congestion problems are CAUSED by the insistence of massive job growth in MV. Seems fair that those on the “jobs” side of the equation to pay for the solution. I’d rather that Google pay instead of it’s workers, though.
“All the ‘dissuading’ of car use in the world will do exactly nothing until people actually have alternatives.” @Rob Huebner nailed it. “The best car-free cities on earth are that way because the public transit is so good that people actually want to take it. There is no other way …” Nailed it again.
“Public transportation is severely lacking and Uber-type rides too expensive. Good luck with getting high tech workers out of their cars.” Agreed. Thx, @That MV guy
Hate cars? Please fight for better transportation alternatives in MV. Many of us would love to live car-free if only we could.
Leslie, I think you need to look inward on your motivations and anger you hold towards your neighbors. It’s present in every one of your posts, a disdain, and sometimes even hatred, for a certain segment of your fellow Mountain View residents.
Certainly, someone in your family that cares about must have reached out to you and asked you to slow down. Please listen to them.
Randy, I don’t believe a MAJORITY of residents approve of the changes that are being FORCED UPON us. I received one vaguely worded postcard back in April to solicit feedback re R3 rezoning. No additional public meetings have been scheduled since that time. https://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activeprojects/r3update.asp
R3 rezoning is a STEALTH PROJECT for which the majority of residents are not even aware!!!
In March, Google announced massive Bay Area expansion plans. “Google’s East Whisman and North Bayshore include a combined total of nearly 9,000 homes in [MV] alone.” https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2021/03/18/despite-pandemic-google-announces-massive-bay-area-expansion-plans
In April, “The city of [MV] is looking to revamp its residential zoning … with an eye toward increased density that could lead to the construction of 9,000 new homes.” https://mv-voice.com/news/2021/04/15/massive-zoning-overhaul-in-mountain-view-would-increase-density-potentially-adding-9000-new-homes
Coincidence? I think not.
“Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga said she wanted to see the development of ownership housing in the form of stacked-flat construction, yet there’s little guarantee that developers won’t just use the density boost to build new rental units instead. She said she is not interested in incentivizing … high-cost luxury apartments. Abe-Koga also underscored that the R3 zoning changes are drastic, and that there hasn’t been enough public outreach.”
I am not opposed to housing, as long as urban planning is performed to ensure the results are positive. Supporters of density seem to grow livid when one raises any concern about the impact on local schools, water supply, traffic congestion, or parking.
The article provides evidence that concerns about traffic congestion are not just a lame NIMBY excuse to prevent more housing. I don’t understand why my call for TRANSPORTATION SOLUTIONS upsets you so.
Leslie, please stop shouting in every one of your posts.
Do you think the people of the city of Mountain View should be allowed to choose which people are allowed to live here?