Palo Alto: Caltrain grade separation alternatives expand, council urges shrinking the list
PALO ALTO — Council members are urging civilians working on proposals for separating Caltrain tracks from busy city streets to narrow down their options as the list of potential projects once again expanded.
City officials plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the next several years to keep Caltrain service from forcing traffic to stop at four city roads: Charleston Road, Meadow Road, Churchill Avenue and Palo Alto Avenue.
On Tuesday council members voted to include two of the three proposed additions to the grade separation list, including an option to build underpasses at Charleston Road and Meadow Road and a bespoke intersection at Churchill Avenue, which hundreds of Palo Altans signed a petition to close instead. That brings the total number of proposals to 10.
The third option to completely rethink and revamp the Embarcadero Road underpass just south of the Stanford Caltrain station was rejected.
For years now cities up and down the Peninsula have had to pay consulting firms millions and set aside hundreds of hours of staff time to figure out how to separate traffic-clogged streets that intersect with Caltrain tracks as the transit authority seeks to expand service in the next decade.
Caltrain’s vision is to have a BART-like “show-up and go” service, taking passengers from San Francisco to Gilroy on trains that run at least every 15 minutes all day long. That means cities like Palo Alto must close the 41 at-grade crossings Caltrain needs for higher speed service and foot a large part of the bill to have car traffic bypass train tracks.
The plan to expand service is the transit authority’s answer to worsening traffic issues that have plagued an already congested corridor of the Bay Area, and would represent a stark transformation from the currently sluggish commuter line to a more urban mass transit system.
The three new options — which Expanded Community Advisory Panel narrowed down from six proposals — are building on what city staff described as “faults on the other alternatives.”
Among the main controversies around the options currently on the table is whether the city will choose to build a viaduct that some residents say will be an eyesore, dig a trench for Caltrain which could be unworkable for high-speed trains or lower roads under the current rail grade which could be prohibitively expensive.
“I know there’s a lot of frustration that we’re adding ideas and not subtracting, but this is about quality,” said Nadia Naik, a member of the panel that brought forward the new proposals to the council Tuesday.
Despite Naik’s calls for keeping the process slow and meticulous, council members Tuesday urged her and XCAP to narrow down ideas over the next several months to two per rail crossing, an effort to speed up a process that started 10 years ago and appears to be nowhere near finished.