Making Escuela Avenue a Great Street

by | Sep 9, 2016

Great Streets Mountain View has long held a vision of Escuela Avenue as a complete street which welcomes pedestrians and bicyclists and an important part of a broader bicyclist-friendly network of streets spanning our city. Escuela Avenue is home to two schools (Castro Elementary and Mistral Dual Immersion) and many families find getting to school along Escuela, with its crowded streetscape and lack of sightlines, a stressful and treacherous experience. Many have expressed that they would bike to school but are afraid to do so because it isn’t safe. It’s imperative to create a safer environment for students and their families who walk to school (245 students each day, 45% of enrollment) and encourage more students to bicycle (only 20 each day, 3% of enrollment). [Source: Vehicle Emissions Reductions Based at Schools (VERBS) Dec 2015 ]

Last night the City conducted a Community Meeting to share the details of the Escuela Avenue project to improve bicycle and pedestrian safety.  About 30 members of the public attended the meeting including neighborhood residents, parents of children who attend the Mistral and Castro schools, bike commuters, and MVWSD Superintendent Dr. Ayindé Rudolf.

The project introduces bulbouts at Latham Ave, Gamel Way, and Mt. Vernon Ct. Bulbouts extend the sidewalk, reducing the crossing distance and give pedestrians who are crossing and vehicle drivers better visibility of each other. In addition, the project includes raised crosswalks to improve visibility and calm vehicle speeds and the installation of 6-foot bicycle lanes on both sides of the street.

To accommodate the bulbouts and the bike lanes, the car lanes need to be narrowed from 12 feet to 10 feet and the parking on the east side of the street adjacent to Castro and Mistral school would need to be removed to shift over the vehicle lanes losing a total of 22 parking spaces.

During the meeting, the City officials encouraged questions and comments about the project. Attendees expressed very diverse points of view. Several neighborhood residents described an acute lack of parking in the neighborhood and described situations where they had to park blocks away from home at night, including the World Market parking lot, because they could not find open spaces. Also several parents of students mentioned that they were very much in favor of the project because the current environment was uncomfortable and dangerous and these changes would enable them to start cycling to school.

The project, which was approved in concept by the City Council as part of the California/Escuela/Shoreline Complete Streets Study is slated to be paid for by the developers of a new apartment building at 394 Ortega Ave as a community benefit to the City. On September 20th, 6pm, the City Council will be voting on whether to select this project as a community benefit. If you would like to see Escuela bike lanes and pedestrian improvements, please show your support by:

Below are conceptional drawings of the project presented at the meeting:

UPDATE 1/8/2017:  At the City Council Meeting on 9/20/2016, the City Staff recommended the construction of the crosswalk enhancements and to forgo the bike lanes and bulbouts as part of the community benefit for the project at 394 Ortega Ave. The City Staff cited the concern of neighborhood residents about losing parking spaces to make room due for the bike lanes. The raised crosswalks on Escuela will be constructed as part of the development project (outside of community benefits). And the City Council unanimously approved moving forward with the development project (with environmental study and development review permit) with no restriction on the public benefit funds so they could be used to fund Escuela Improvements or another community benefit inside or outside of the San Antonio area in the future. In general, the City Council members expressed their strong support for safe routes to school and bike lanes on Escuela. However, they were concerned that the proposed design was still not safe enough for elementary school students and about the constrained parking for neighborhood residents as well as parents during dropoff and pickup. They generally supported reworking and improving the Escuela bike lanes plan and City Staff said that the next window of opportunity was to assign for the CIP for the Fiscal Year.

Records for 9/20/16 City Council Meeting