Tuesday: Mountain View Council considers transit center overhaul

On Tuesday evening starting at 5pm, Mountain View City Council will be holding its next study session on the transit center, focusing on the overall layout of the transit center, including plaza space, station platforms, bus/shuttle facilities, bicycle and pedestrian access, bicycle storage.  The staff report is linked here.
One of the key questions is whether the current plaza area and replica station building should be preserved in something like their current forms or changed, and whether car parking should be put underground to create more room for buildings.
The plaza and the historic-style station waiting area and building are dramatically under-utilized (the building was built in the early 2000s, after the original was demolished in 1959). The original station building included functions such as postal mail handing and telegraph operations, which are no longer needed.
downtown-mountain-view-station-building-at-centennial-plaza
Mountain View has a successful downtown, and that success could be extended.  So options that re-think the plaza/building and put parking underground to extend downtown, and create a livelier plaza seem promising to me.
What do you think?   The staff report has sketches of the various options.
Other key questions have to do with bicycle and pedestrian access.   The report has a powerful chart with current data about access modes and a forecast of future access.
mv-modeshare-forecast
Currently auto park and ride represents only 16% of station access, while bicycling and walking represent 37%.   In the future, park and ride is forecast to decline to 9%.   (The future walking/cycling is projected to decline to 33.4%, is substantial, but seems odd given planned and reasonably expected development in walking and bicycling distance from the station).
More people walk and bike than drive or are driven.  The next largest share after walk,bike is expected to be shuttle and bus. This mode share should guide investments.
If mode share guides investments, than cycling and walking should be a first-class experience. One suggestion from a community member is to raise the tracks, allowing the pedestrian and bicycle connection to be made without ramps, and to allow people with bikes to ride through, rather than to walk the long distance under Central.  Caltrain’s data suggest that the tracks could be raised only 5.5 feet without interfering with the Shoreline overpass – how much would that help cycling/walking access?
Given the current and projected future mode share, the expense of a direct onramp from Central expressway into a parking structure, as described in option 3, seems high for the return, plus tight turns out of traffic seem like a potential safety problem.
In order to guide these decisions, it would be useful to analyze, not only what modes people use, but what directions people are coming from and going to. For cycling, it would be helpful to use the approach Google took with its bike plan, creating a 3 mile radius and planning for safe routes within the most common cycling distance.
What do you think?

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