Mountain View: Danish Gehl Studio to design pedestrian mall at Castro Street

MOUNTAIN VIEW — With Caltrain expanding service, the Mountain View City Council voted unanimously this week to study turning Castro Street into a pedestrian mall.

Council members selected Denmark-based Gehl Studio from a batch of six other proposals and will pay the firm about $290,000 to come up with concepts for the pedestrian mall.

For some the plan might seem like a case of deja vu: hundreds of mid-sized cities across the country turned their busy commercial strips into pedestrian malls in the 1960s and 1970s.

It was clear by the 1980s that the malls didn’t achieve the desired result of increasing pedestrian traffic and many of them were turned back into car-accessible streets.

Mountain View Mayor Lisa Matichak isn’t convinced that a pedestrian mall downtown will fare any better than previous attempts in other cities.

“I’m concerned about a pedestrian mall,” Matichak said in an interview Wednesday. “It could be frustrating for people, and we want to give the best experience for folks when they come downtown.”

With so many moving parts to the grade separation plans — which will include a dedicated bicycle and pedestrian underpass on Castro Street  — Matichak doesn’t feel that taking away parking from certain parts of the street will make downtown more attractive.

She prefers the current city plan for Castro Street, which would make the area more walkable but still allow vehicle traffic. She said Gehl consultants should keep that plan in mind as they present alternatives.

Not knowing what will happen to the area weighed on many council members’ minds Tuesday night, including councilwoman Alison Hicks who said she’s concerned with how the grade separation project will interface with what is currently “the most popular and most walkable” area of the city.

Still, council members were confident in Gehl Studio’s ability to come forward with good plans. Many of them praised both the firm’s previous work in the Bay Area and the proposal that it submitted to the city.

City Public Works Director Dawn Cameron said the firm will take several months to come back to the council with three concepts that will include community input.

The firm has several tasks in its contract with the city: manage the project; study existing conditions in the area; facilitate community outreach; draw up concepts; conduct traffic and economic analyses; evaluate potential alternatives and finally draft and finalize a report for the council.

Concepts will go before the council for recommendations and then back to Gehl Studio for deeper development and analysis, Cameron said, adding that council members are expected to meet with Gehl staff at at least two public meetings before final consideration is given.

All these concepts depend on what Hicks called the “iterative process” involved in grade separation.

Caltrain earlier this year outlined a $9 billion to $11 billion comprehensive program to quadruple ridership between San Francisco and San Jose as soon as the late 2020s — the equivalent of doubling traffic on Highway 101– by fully eliminating 42 at-grade crossings in the Peninsula.

Most of the grade separation projects will return car traffic to affected streets, but about a quarter of the crossings — including Castro Street — will instead be turned into bicycle and pedestrian-friendly underpasses or be eliminated.

Hicks said those plans could go either way for downtown Mountain View.

“I see the grade separation and underpass as having the potential of wrecking the walkability of downtown or potentially making it better,” Hicks said. “I think I’m hoping that by hiring Gehl consulting they will help us figure that out.”