On Tuesday night, Mountain View City Council is holding a study session Tuesday about the downtown transit center.
The topics include how to improve the transit center to support many more transit users – at least 10,000 on Caltrain alone, how to handle the at-grade crossing of the Caltrain tracks at Castro/Rengstorff, and what to do with land currently used for parking lots.
Place quality is a big issue that is not talked about in the staff report. The transit center overhaul needs to do a great job of the meeting the transportation metrics – efficiently accommodating 10,000 Caltrain passengers, 3,000 VTA passengers, flocks of last mile shuttles, and more, with top-notch support for a smooth and pleasant experience for people walking and bicycling.  At the same time the same time the station overhaul should focus on improving and not detracting from Downtown Mountain View as a pleasant and lively place.
Mountain View has an opportunity to consider major changes to the station area layout to enable a retail/housing extension of downtown, since increased housing is one of the top priorities of the new Council. Since the Caltrain Joint Powers Board owns the big parking lots, Mountain View can explore partnering with Caltrain to use the lots and use money to help support increased Caltrain capacity.
While transit use is going to increase and the parking is currently oversubscribed, the city should seriously study approaches to reduce parking demand and increase the share of non-parking access to the station. The city can consider emerging services such as LyftLine that can give a shared ride to a people coming from the same neighborhood (Palo Alto and Redwood City are starting to look at this approach), and improve bicycle routes to the station and high-quality bicycle parking at the station.
To pay for improvements,  Mountain View has an opportunity consider public benefit from the major developments proposed by Google, LinkedIn and others in North Bayshore as a substantial funding source, since North Bayshore will depend on the transit center. Mountain View can also include and consider the potential of value capture approaches from buildings at the transit center.
The upcoming Santa Clara County ballot measure is a potential important source of funding. Regarding the SCC ballot measure, Mountain View should not try to rush to meet the Santa Clara county ballot measure deadline to submit a project for the at-grade crossing. Instead, Mountain View can lobby for the approach used in San Mateo County to create a pot of funds for such projects and make the funds available with a competitive grant process. That allows cities the time to create great designs that will provide the best transportation benefits and improve places.
The study session will be held at 6:30 or later, after an earlier study session after the bicycle plan. Â Come if you can, or send an email with your thoughts to city.clerk@mountainview.gov
Great news! Their northbound platform is narrow and very crowded especially before arriving express train. In addition,
EMU will have faster acceleration, at grade crossing need to be separated either tunnel or overpass.
For better utilization of parking space, new station should have 4-tracks and two island platform. This will accommodate local-express transfer and mid-point turn around capability.
Any idea if the 2nd VTA track took away space from a 4-track Caltrain south of Mountain VIew?
Mountain View is an ideal candidate for a wide (shared) grade-separated center platform, covered by a single roof — offering much more space and sheltered seating/waiting area than what’s there now. Good to see the staff report suggests this among the options to consider.
For one, the platform needs more shelter. On rainy days it can be pretty miserable. A greater issue, however, is the disaster which is the crossing of Central Expressway for cyclists and pedestrians. For passengers trying to access northbound trains from the southbound side, the near simultaneous arrival of north and southbound trains can generate substantial delays crossing the track, enough to miss a train.
Dan,
Grade crossing is solution for low ridership station. Mountain view have enough ridership to justify building pedestrian tunnel (like Palo Alto) or overpass (Like Milbrae).
Close Castro crossing, modestly elevate tracks & convert Castro between Evelyn and the tracks into a civic bike/ped plaza; dip a gently sloping, wide, well-lit bike/ped tunnel connecting Castro & Moffett under tracks & Central; tunnel features a ramp up to the end of a wider, canopied and elevated Caltrain center platform between north- & south-bound tracks. Motor vehicle access to station and Castro St. shifts to nearby Shoreline (or Whisman) overpass.
I chatted briefly with Caltrain staff before MV meeting – they haven’t given away the ROW
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