New bikeways, parks proposed for San Antonio Road

Palo Alto doesn’t have to look far to see the potential of San Antonio Road.

The traffic-heavy corridor, which separates Palo Alto from Mountain View, in many ways reflects the different planning philosophies of the two cities.

In Mountain View, city leaders have been bullish about development on San Antonio for well over a decade, as evidenced by the specific area plan that the Mountain View City Council approved for San Antonio in 2014 and by mixed-use projects like The Village at San Antonio Center, a development near El Camino Real that includes retail, restaurants and a movie theater. Mountain View’s area plan talks about walkable blocks, transit hubs and ways to make San Antonio a regional destination.

Palo Alto harbors no such ambitions. Its side of San Antonio is generally viewed as high on potential and low on pizzazz. The Palo Alto council hasn’t approved any major planning efforts for the area, which is dominated by one- and two-story buildings and by industrial and commercial uses. Biking is dangerous and shopping is largely non-existent, unless you cross into the Mountain View side.

Now, momentum is building among Palo Alto leaders to follow the example of its neighbor to the south. The city council received on March 18 a report that members hope will be the first step in creating a new vision for San Antonio. Crafted by urban planning students from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, the plan envisions a cycle track on both sides of San Antonio, a new park in the area closest to the Baylands and a wholesale conversion of sites along the corridor from industrial and commercial to mixed-use and residential.

The graduate students, who are part of the university’s Community Planning Studio, have been surveying the corridor for that past 20 weeks as part of a project that involved numerous site visits, an environmental study, a community workshop and an open house. They focused on the portion of San Antonio east of Alma Street and they came up with two growth scenarios: one that would add 1,185 housing units to this area and another that would add 2,000 housing units.

In both cases, the students are proposing to rezone most of San Antonio between Middlefield Road and the U.S. Highway 101 from commercial to mixed use to absorb most of the additional housing. One area, near the intersection of San Antonio and Charleston Road, is expected to accommodate the bulk of the new growth, with about 600 new dwellings proposed near this crossing in the low-growth scenario and nearly 1,000 in the high-growth scenario.

Southwest of this area, on the stretch of San Antonio between Middlefield and Alma Street, the plan proposes a mix of single-family homes, duplexes and apartment buildings with 30 to 40 units per acre.

Both scenarios include a spacious park on the northeast edge of the planning area, just west of U.S. Highway 101, designed to both meet the recreational needs of the new residents and to ensure that the most flood-prone sites remain generally free of development. Both plans also include a protected bikeway along San Antonio, between Alma and the highway. Parking spaces would be removed to make way for the new cycle track as well as for parklets and community spaces.

“With amenities such as outdoor seating spaces, plantings, and bicycle parking, the parklet will benefit surrounding businesses while also serving as a core community space for the San Antonio Road corridor,” the report states. “The pairing of the parklet and the cycle track creates an attractive and welcoming entrance into the corridor for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers.”

The concept also calls for a linear park along San Antonio, near Fabian Way. The park would include “a vegetated pathway and outdoor seating to encourage movement and relaxation,” according to the plan.

“In addition, bioretention basins and low-impact development will be incorporated into the park design to address flooding and runoff concerns,” the report states. “With more people drawn to the park, the use of the cycle track as an alternative mode of transportation will be more successfully promoted.”

Jake Jansen, a Cal Poly student who presented the concept to the council, said the vision seeks to create “lush verdant neighborhoods, complete with bike lanes and safe crossings that Palo Altans expect.”

For the council, the Cal Poly plan is the first step in what promises to be a long journey to develop a new vision for San Antonio. Unlike their Mountain View counterparts, who have been trying to make San Antonio a more vibrant and pedestrian-friendly corridor for well over a decade, Palo Alto council members are primarily concerned about meeting their housing quota.

To get the state to approve its Housing Element, the city must show its plans to add 6,086 residential units by 2031. The current draft, which the city plans to send to the state Department of Housing and Community Development later this spring, envisions adding about 2,000 new units, or nearly a third of the city’s total Regional Housing Needs Allocation, in industrial and commercial areas along and around San Antonio and Fabian Way.

In receiving the plan on March 18, council members generally acknowledged that simply building housing is not enough and that any improvements must come with amenities such as retail, transit improvements and bike safety projects.

“We don’t want to just warehouse people in his corridor,” Council member Pat Burt said Monday, during a discussion of San Antonio. “We want this to be a thriving, safe, engaging community of new residents.”

A key challenge, he said, is that the city is already seeing new projects on San Antonio that may or may not be consisted with the city’s plans for the corridor. Marriott has recently opened two hotels on the 700 block of San Antonio Road, northeast of Middlefield Road. Just east of that, the city has approved a 102-apartment complex at 788 San Antonio Road. It is also reviewing a proposed condominium project at 800 San Antonio Road with 76 units.

“One of the problems is we’re getting the projects piecemeal right now and we have nothing in place that’s being set aside the land necessary for even one set of bike paths, whether two-sets of bidirectional paths or one,” Burt said.

In approving these projects, Burt said, the city should make sure that it has the needed easements to convert a portion of the road to bike lanes in the future.

He and his colleagues generally lauded the efforts by the Cal Poly group to study San Antonio and come up with new alternatives. Council members Julie Lythcott-Haims and Vicki Veenker both praised the study for identifying both potential housing sites and new amenities that would improve the area. Council members also generally agreed that the city should engage with Mountain View on the forthcoming planning effort, given their shared dominion over San Antonio.

Planning Director Jonathan Lait said planning staff is now putting together a request for proposals to solicit consultants for the broader San Antonio effort, which would kick off later this year.

The area will also be evaluated for bike improvements as part of the city’s ongoing update to its bike master plan, according to Chief Transportation Official Philip Kamhi. He thanked the Cal Poly students for getting the transportation conversation started.

Local resident Natalie Geise, who attended the Cal Poly workshops, also said she was pleased with the report.

“The plans put forth really put a lot of thought into how we take the corridor as it is today into a place that we can still move through, and get to a place we can still go while providing for … the community vision that we have for this place,” Geise said. “This was a wonderful stepping stone to the next phase of planning.”