2022 Election: Questionnaire for MV City Council Candidates

Alison’s Response

1. Where do you walk and bike in Mountain View? In what areas do you enjoy biking and walking the most? What areas have you found require the most focused improvements to the pedestrian and cyclist experience?

I am a walker. I resisted moving from Berkeley and Oakland to the Peninsula for years because I found it too car-oriented. In fact, my husband and I were married for four years and lived separately because he lived in Mountain View and I didn’t want to move to a car-oriented suburb. I moved here when my son was born 22 years ago and have walked, biked and scooted in different places as the children grew. When the children went to Castro Elementary School, I formed a scootpool (as opposed to a carpool) to scoot neighborhood children the one-mile distance from our houses, up Church and Latham to the school. This started a scoot-to-school trend among Castro School students. I often scooted up to 8 children home for play dates. Later, my children biked to high school and I biked the Stevens Creek Trail recreationally. I also walk the trail and city streets recreationally with friends.

My family lives in Old Mountain View. We walk to do almost all of our regular errands. We frequent Ava’s, Rose Market, the Farmers Market, CVS, Kaiser, the library, our local dentist and more. My children are now both in their 20s. They still do not have drivers licenses because driving is not a priority for them as they grew up walking, scooting, biking and taking mass transit.

I enjoy walking and biking on our smaller, tree-lined neighborhood streets. Several years ago, on Council we voted to replace parking on El Camino with bike lanes. While I appreciate that some people will like the quick and direct route through the city, this is not the kind of bike route I enjoy. My family and I prefer the back streets. Perhaps I would ride my bike on major streets if we had sidewalk level raised bike lanes.

I don’t think I could pick out just a few places that call for the most focused improvements to the pedestrian and cyclist experience. Except for the parts of the city that were designed pre-car, most of the city was designed for cars and not for bikes or pedestrians. Therefor, I think that most of the city requires a gradual shift from auto-oriented to human-oriented design.

2. What changes would you implement to encourage more children to get around Mountain View by biking and walking and to reduce the risk of future injuries and fatalities?

For very young children, I’m a huge scooter advocate. It gets even small children moving along at a good pace. They are safe on the sidewalks. Neighborhood scoot pools are easy to organize. They’re so convenient and fun that, in my experience, scooter use spreads like wildfire among children too young to bike. And it’s a great way to start the habit of turning to non-car transport. I’m wondering if our Safe Routes to School programming should include scooters. Some of our sidewalks are in poor repair and difficult to scoot on, so those sidewalks would need to be repaired.

As for biking, I think we need to beef up our Safe Routes to School programming, both in terms of bike skills training and the routes we recommend students take to school. As one example, my children biked to MVHS but the online map for the high school does not show our neighborhood. We live too far from the high school to even show up on the map. I’m also interested in restricting right turns at red lights, providing more protected bike lanes, providing safer crossing for large streets like El Camino, hiring more crossing guards, and making a second back entrance to Graham School.

3. What goals would you set for increasing active transport commutes in Mountain View in the next few years?

As chair of the Council Sustainability Committee, I have advocated for upgraded Transportation Demand Management (TDM) programming and Transportation Management Association (TMA) responsibilities. Staff has told me that this will be difficult or impossible because we get our TDM programming enforced when we entitle buildings. I believe that with public and Council pressure, though, we can get companies to revisit their TDM programming as a way to meet their corporate carbon neutrality goals rather than just seeing TDM programming as tied to building entitlement. My goal is to get households to feel able to reduce the number of cars they own. Once households own fewer cars, they increasingly use active transportation, mass transit and virtual transit.

4. What infrastructure changes would you propose in Mountain View to make biking, walking and taking public transit safe and comfortable for all street users?

• Increased shuttles to get cars off the street. If we densify and put more cars on the street, no infrastructural changes will make it completely safe for bikers and pedestrians.
• Wider and tree-lined sidewalks in many areas.
• Slow and shared neighborhood streets that anticipate bikers on those streets.
• Alternative and greener forms of neighborhood traffic calming like road diets and green bulb outs.
• Sidewalk-level raised bike lanes.
• Raised crosswalks.
• No right turns on red.
• Safe crossings over, under or through major streets like El Camino and San Antonio.
• Mountain View should have a street design manual like this one to guide infrastructure: City Street Design Manual

5. Castro Street remains the heart of our community, a place for dining, shopping, and events. What do you think must be done to make Castro Street an even more welcoming place for people to gather and enjoy?

• Redesign the street and streetscape of the first three blocks to include some public gathering space. Outdoor dining should remain, but there should also be seating and children’s activity areas available to people who are not purchasing meals.
• The car-free public area should be expanded to include the area that is now Centennial Plaza.
• More and better bike access so that people from all over the city can bike easily and safely downtown.
• A landscaped tree-lined bike path between downtown Mountain View and downtown Sunnyvale so that we can visit each other’s downtowns easily. (This is Mayor Larry Klein’s dream project.)
• Evening shuttles to the downtown from various neighborhoods.
• Over the long-term we should change the road from car-oriented paving to surfacing oriented to pedestrian needs. Resurfacing would allow planting in some area
• Design guidelines to make outdoor dining areas more attractive. Warmer lighting. Authentic placemaking. Façade, signage and window display small grant programming.
• A robust small business attraction program, including unique and compelling anchor businesses to fill current vacancies. A tax on long-term vacant storefronts so that owners have the incentive to fill vacancies. A tax on offices that don’t make their ground floor into a publicly accessible use. (This last idea is former Mayor Mike Kasperzak’s idea.)
• Include side streets in placemaking and planning.
• A downtown public art and mural program. A street music policy. Historic markers and storytelling.
• I am on the Mayor’s Ad Hoc Downtown Committee. We are planning some of these things.

6. Advocating for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure improvements can be controversial because it often requires making difficult decisions about car-centered amenities such as traffic lanes or parking. Tell us about a time when you took a tough stand to advocate for active transportation (or if you haven’t held office, tell us about a stand you plan to take).

I must say that most of my advocacy for bike infrastructure at the expense of parking and car lanes has been fairly easy because the rest of Council was on board with it as well. I’m referring to cutting parking on El Camino, Calderon and California Street to make way for bike lanes.

I have found adequate sidewalk infrastructure much harder to advocate for because I think Council and people in general are much less educated on what is needed to get people out of their cars and walking. As we build denser and taller buildings, we need wider sidewalks. A sidewalk designed for a single-story neighborhood will not be adequate if new buildings there are four, five or more stories. I advocate constantly for wider sidewalks as we develop. I advocate when we review single buildings, but also when we review Precise Plans and development standards in general.

Maybe the toughest time was when we were reviewing the 555 Middlefield project at Middlefield and Moffett. I had to insist multiple times that the sidewalk on Moffett needs to be a decent-sized sidewalk for this major downtown street, not a skinny, treeless, hot and shadeless afterthought. One of the reasons people living in the neighboring apartment complex, Cypress Point, opposed apartment development at 555 Middlefield was because they said people there use the tree-lined paths at Cypress Point to walk downtown instead of the sidewalk on Moffett because it’s so unpleasant. They didn’t want more development and therefor as they said, “crowds of people” cutting through their property to get downtown. This is a valid complaint. We can and should be giving neighborhoods we densify proper pedestrian infrastructure.