|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Mountain View’s efforts to reduce drive-alone commute trips and get more people riding transit appear to have stalled. Data from a recent report shows that workers heading into the North Bayshore district — a high-tech mecca home to companies like Google, Intuit, and Microsoft — are still largely choosing to drive to work, despite ambitious goals to get more people out of cars.
The latest report, published in February, shows that peak commute traffic isn’t clogging up the city’s busiest roads in the post-Covid era. Traffic counts show the city is below the vehicle capacity limit along the three thoroughfares leading into and out of North Bayshore: Shoreline Avenue, Rengstorff Avenue, and San Antonio Road. But the share of commuters traveling to work alone in a car is 64% in the morning and 66% in the evening, well above the 45% target the city set over a decade ago.
The lighter traffic volumes during the busiest commute hours may be a factor, as it makes driving to work more appealing, according to Allison Boyer, Mountain View’s assistant public works director.
“(Single-occupancy vehicle) travel has become relatively more convenient compared to pre-pandemic times and there are less travel delays for motorists, which might disincentivize commuters to consider other modes,” Boyer said in an email.
The memo, authored by the city’s traffic analysis consultant Fehr & Peers, summarizes the results of the city’s Fall 2024 Transportation Monitoring data collection efforts, a process the city has undertaken every spring and fall since 2014.
The report also found that traffic volumes appear to have leveled off in the past two years but remain below pre-pandemic levels. The lower traffic can be attributed to a number of factors, Boyer said, including the adoption of hybrid work schedules and commuters traveling at different times outside of rush hour. Building projects in the North Bayshore area have also been slower than expected.
Though hybrid work schedules make commuters more flexible, they might also make it more difficult to organize transportation demand strategies like carpools, vanpools, and shuttles, Boyer said. This may be the reason why transit use has fallen from a high of 37% in fall 2019 to just 16% in fall 2024. Meanwhile, the share of SOV commuters has increased to 64% in fall 2024, up from a low of 49% in fall 2017. Commuting data was not collected in fall 2020 and spring 2021 due to the pandemic.
Pedestrian and bike traffic have remained a relatively small portion of commuters, with the percentage of pedestrian commuters around 1-2% of commuters. The percentage of bike commuters hovered around 3-6% prior to COVID, but has since settled at roughly 3% since then.
Post-pandemic commuting patterns are still evolving, said Roni Hattrup, executive director of the Mountain View Transportation Management Association, the nonprofit organization charged with reducing traffic and enhancing transit options. Their board of directors includes property owners and large employers in Mountain View like Google and Intuit. According to Hattrup, as more companies have stated they will begin to enforce in-office work days, traffic levels are expected to increase in this area.
“We’re not really at a place where we can establish a new norm,” she said.
Facing these complexities, MTMA has introduced several initiatives to ease traffic congestion from multiple angles, Hattrup said.
Alongside its long-running MVgo free shuttle connecting commuters to the Mountain View Transit Center and key locations during peak commuting hours, the organization also launched a program in 2021 that reimburses midday commuters for taking a ride-sharing service to and from the transit center.
This initiative aims to provide last-mile transportation from public transit centers to certain Mountain View locations, including tech employers, during the hours when the MVgo shuttle does not run — from 10:30 to 3:00 pm — because ridership is too diffuse.
MTMA is also partnering with Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority to offer the SmartCommute tool, a platform that helps commuters find alternative modes of transportation such as carpooling arrangements and awards users with points and gift cards. SmartCommute can be accessed through the MTMA website or by downloading the Commute Tracker App.
“Our role really is in providing these options to people and giving them the ability to make different choices,” Hattrup said. “The Board is really on top of pursuing things in a timely manner and implementing things and not being afraid to try new things as well.”
The City Council may require new developments to implement additional strategies … or withhold further building permits.
Allison Boyer, Mountain View’s assistant public works director
The city is a member of MTMA’s Board, and the two entities work closely together to achieve transportation goals, Hattrup said. To facilitate progress toward the 45% SOV target, Boyer said the city is working with large employers and property owners to ensure continued compliance with the city’s transportation capacity requirements.
“Staff are also working on a citywide (Transportation Demand Management) ordinance that will improve the consistency, transparency and effectiveness of meeting the city’s goals to reduce reliance on automobiles and encourage more sustainable travel patterns,” Boyer said.
Boyer also noted that the City Council has imposed project-specific TDM conditions on large developments in North Bayshore who do not provide monitoring reports or meet the city’s established trip cap requirement. Companies could face possible consequences if vehicle capacity limits are breached, Boyer said.
“The City Council may require new developments to implement additional strategies; increase developer contributions to fund area transportation improvements; implement a congestion pricing program for the area; or withhold further building permits,” she wrote.
There are real consequences if commute traffic exceeds the trip cap along the three major roads heading into North Bayshore, specifically a halt on any new building permits for additional square footage in the district. But there are no direct consequences for major employers failing to meet the 45% target for solo drivers.
Several infrastructure projects could also chip away at the problem and improve traffic flow, transit access, and pedestrian and cyclist safety in the region. The city is working to realign the U.S. Highway 101, La Avenida, and Shoreline interchange, aiming to improve transit access and safety for cyclists and pedestrians, Boyer said.
Close to North Bayshore, the city of Palo Alto recently completed a years-long project to decrease vehicle speeds and upgrade pedestrian and bicycle safety along the Charleston-Arastradero corridor, a significant thoroughfare that leads into and out of the high-tech employment district. Mountain View is also looking to expand its complete streets network, with construction underway on California Street to add protected bike lanes and other upgrades to improve bike and pedestrian travel.
Palo Alto has adopted carrot-and-stick policies to curb traffic and improve transit numbers as well through an agreement with Stanford Hospital, which has been undergoing expansion and renovation for years. As part of a 2011 agreement, Stanford pledged that at least 33% of hospital employees would commute without a car by 2021, increasing to 35.1% by 2025. Failing to meet the target for two consecutive years would trigger a $175,000 annual fine.
From 2013 to 2019, Stanford met the 33% threshold, but rates dropped notably below the target from 2021 to 2023, which the university attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2023, Palo Alto’s City Council opted not to impose fines for those years, citing pandemic-related challenges, but pushed Stanford to strengthen commuting programs moving forward. The share of hospital employees commuting without a car rebounded to 30.5% in 2024, according to Jennifer Armer, Palo Alto’s assistant director for planning and development services.
This will get solved soon. Give it a few years and the city can subsidize a fleet of autonomous Zoox vans to take Googlers from Caltrain to their offices.
At the station, 5-10 vans will be sitting waiting, and the app will assign people going to the same place to the same van. Rinse and repeat.
There is actually nothing to solve. As the article states at the top, commute traffic is already down.
As for Zoox, that is fine but it will never really “solve” anything on its own. It will cost more than planed (these things always do), so the city will find subsidies to be of limited effect. Mechanical and technical difficulties will generally crop up, since the tech is more complex than a guy driving a bus or a train following a track. In the end, commuters will continue to find self driving more convenient, and that will be the way it is. Self driving taxies are the personal “flying car” of the modern era.
Waymo would like a word with you!
You first have to get Google and Microsoft Apple …. to stop providing private bus service, you know the dark buses that stop at the VTA locations but don’t let the common people on.
Shoreline Blvd. is below traffic capacity during rush hour? Really? Is that another way of saying Shoreline can handle MORE traffic? Because it already takes 15 minutes to drive a mile and a half.
Shoreline has enough capacity to handle current traffic with room to spare. What it has not had is effective management of the signal system. The light at the northbound freeway off-ramp belongs to Caltrans. The light at Pear Avenue belongs to the City. They are both supposedly part of an Adaptive Signal System bought from a private provider. Too many cooks? For two years, virtually all congestion on northbound Shoreline during the morning commute was caused by failure to co-ordinate the two signals so that when Shoreline got a green light at the freeway exit, it wouldn’t immediately run into a red light at Pear. This was finally fixed, though not perfectly, early this month. A.M. peak traffic should be moving smoothly now, at least till the next screwup.
In the mean time City council allows developers to keep on building mass developments downtown and provide no parking for the cars that the folks will be driving. They state that sense they’re close to the train station they won’t need a car. Folks will use the train for all of their daily errands and shopping. Laughable to say the least.
Fully tree protected pedestrian and bicycle lanes combined with small bridges would without need to stop on traffic lights with cars for example on evelyn Ave or central way would help and lot. Similar would be needed also for example for Mathilda Avenue to connect the shoreline and Sunnyvale transit center to make it safer to travel with bicycles, walking.
For runners and pedestriand it would nice these roads would be always also offer about one feed wide turf/dirt road as its much moe knee friendly than asphalt. (That’s also missing from parks like the dish in palo alto where road are fully asphalt)
There are three different bike/pedestrian crossings over 101. Does this survey count the traffic on those?
There also used to be regular corporate busses from the train station. Are these still in use?
The report does count bike/ped traffic at all five crossings. You can download from the link in the first paragraph of this article, The counts are on the last two pages (164-165). I recommend ignoring pages 1-163.
There are still private shuttle buses to Googleville, most of which go there directly from the freeway. Caltrain is a cipher.