[bobsky]

Local elections matter. You can make real impact.

'A quick backstory: More than a year ago, a previous city council approved a plan for the North Bayshore that allowed up to 3.4 million square feet of net-new office space, but no housing. That stirred passions from housing advocates who said approving such massive job growth without adding nearby housing aggravated the Bay Area's commute patterns and encouraged suburban sprawl... Voters agreed, and a pro-housing council majority was voted into office last November' http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/11/06/mountain-...

[mc32]

It's a start but bay area cities and towns need to realize that as industry and jobs and income grow they will have to grow too (or face increasing housing shortages). This is not the 50s and 60's leafy suburbs anymore. It's an agglomeration and needs to build up --at least along the Camino Real. Allow high density housing and build rapid transit. Allow mixed use development.

[Johnny555]

True, they need to more than just build housing -- if they want people to get out of their cars and on transit and bikes, they need to build first-class Bike and Pedestrian facilities.

Too often think that all they need to do is build housing and collect property taxes and their job is done, and they ignore the fact that most of the residents are continuing to drive everywhere.

[mc32]

It'd be great if they even did the build housing stage but they don't even allow housing development for fear it will bring congestion to the streets... for which they can't build mass transit because there isn't a dense enough pop... because they won't build more housing.

The Camino has the width to allow an underground subway as well as dedicated bike lanes (barriers between car and bike traffic) in both directions. A subway would take enough cars off the road that eliminating two car lanes for bikes would result in no impact to car congestion.

Given its width they could do open trench construction to reduce building costs --the widths also means there are no nearby building they need to support and prop up during construction --only the roaddeck.

[_delirium]

I agree, but I think some densification will help increase demand for that, especially for biking/pedestrian infrastructure. Even in famously bike-friendly cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, biking is mostly a medium-distance thing: the vast majority of bike commuters live in the range of 1-5 miles from work, not 15. So getting a lot of people living within 5 miles of their office is a precondition for having a significant portion of people even interested in the existence of bicycle infrastructure. One way to do that given the current Valley layout is to really densify the axis from Mountain View to Palo Alto. (Unfortunately, I suspect Palo Alto is not going to be at all on board with that.)

[Johnny555]

I thought so too when I moved to a "transit oriented development" area near Caltrain. 2 years later there have been zero bike and pedestrian improvements, and things have gotten even worse when construction has closed one sidewalk and blocked a bike lane and new construction has blocked the safest path to the nearby Caltrain station -- plus, construction workers have placed their "No Parking" signs in the middle of the sidewalk, and calls to the city have not changed that.

[runamok]

Yup. I'm a mountain view resident and the city council election was essentially a proxy vote on housing. It is true that you will not be able to please everyone but allowing only office space to be built is clearly a mistake.

http://mv-voice.com/news/2014/11/04/showalter-rosenberg-and-...

[capkutay]

This.

We need the same level of public support for housing in San Francisco too. You would be surprised by how bad they are zoning transportation rich areas like SoMa and the mission. Heights are for the most part restricted to 40ft around Caltrain and BART stops.