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Mountain View’s redesign of California Street is garnering mixed reviews, with residents split over the move to reduce driving lanes and parking to make way for new protected bike lanes.
Work on the roughly $6 million pilot project began in March 2025. The city removed one driving lane in each direction on California Street from Showers Drive to South Shoreline Boulevard and installed parking-protected bike lanes on either side of the road. Mountain View also added crosswalks in the middle of some blocks and removed 63 of the road’s previous 275 parking spots to create clearer sight lines at driveways and near intersections.
California Street is identified as a high injury corridor in Mountain View’s 2024 Vision Zero Action Plan. According to Terry Barton, who sits on the city’s Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee, a string of three fatalities between 2010 and 2012 intensified calls to make the street safer.
“The reaction was, ‘Hey, we had three people in a short amount of time killed, something needed to be done,’” Barton said. “And it’s clear, the traffic volumes and the street design didn’t agree in terms of having four wide lanes that induced high levels of speed.”
However, not everyone views the pilot project as an improvement. Multiple California Street residents told the Voice that the reduction in parking spaces has made it harder to find a spot on an already busy street. Some residents report that the traffic has worsened, with fewer and narrower lanes forcing drivers to slow down, and particular problems arising when a lane is blocked by slow moving vehicles or car accidents.
For Lisa Hirsch, who lives in an apartment on California Street and has a disabled parking placard, the parking-protected bike lanes have posed a particular problem. The new setup, in which cars park between the bike lane and vehicle lane, has worsened visibility for cars entering and exiting driveways, Hirsh said.
“My life and my family are at risk every time we need to leave our apartment,” Hirsch said via text message. “The streets need to go back the way it was.”
Evaluating California Street changes
Now that construction on the pilot project is complete, Barton wants quantitative feedback, including speed data, collision data and bicycle and pedestrian counts. Barton told the Voice that he’s heard stories about the benefits and drawbacks of the changes, but that data will help identify pain points and usage rates.
According to city spokesperson Lenka Wright, Mountain View is monitoring the pilot project and adjusting some of the street’s features, including moving some rubber posts that are near intersections. The city also plans to “improve sight visibility,” Wright wrote in an email.
As a pilot project, Mountain View used installation methods that can be rearranged or reversed.
The city has already been collecting data on how people are using California Street, and plans to gather community input later this summer, Wright said. City staff intend to present their findings to the Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee by early 2027.
When the safety features were first proposed, California Street resident Ariel Ranker said she was enthusiastic about the potential for better bike infrastructure. Although she doesn’t bike herself, Ranker regularly uses the new high visibility crosswalks.
However, she echoed safety concerns around pulling in and out of driveways, emphasizing that the design makes it hard to see cyclists in the bike lane.
“I always feel like I’m potentially a couple seconds away from being in a car accident in the high traffic times of day,” Ranker said.
Bruce England, who co-leads the Silicon Valley Bike Coalition’s Mountain View team, sees the pilot project as being beneficial overall, especially for pedestrians and less experienced cyclists. The narrower driving lanes and other new safety features are succeeding in slowing cars down, England said, though he added that some tweaks could be made, as people still sometimes park in the bike lanes.
While there may be more cars than bikers on the road, England pointed out that increasing housing density means parking will be a continually worsening problem, regardless of the street’s designs. England also sees the project as a “spot fix,” given California Street feeds into other roads that don’t have as many safety protections for cyclists and pedestrians.
“It’s tied and linked to all of these other projects and how we move around Mountain View as a whole,” England said. “We can look at just California Street, it is its own project, but the way it ties in with the other parts of town is just as important.”
There’s only one real fix A dedicated, sidewalk level two way bike lane. But because the apartments are overstuffed (2 families in a 2BR apt, sometimes 3), there just isn’t enough parking as an apartment will generate 4-6 cars. This is the future of Mountain View as we build more housing without parking…..that’s nowhere near public transport.