Contract awarded for bike, pedestrian rail crossing study

This will be a great way for bicyclists and pedestrians to get to Burgess Park and the civic center without having to deal with the car chaos on Ravenswood Ave!

Consider the Stevens Creek Trail. This bicycle and pedestrian amenity is 4.1 miles long, and except for its current termination in Sunnyvale, is entirely in the city of Mountain View. Starting from the baylands, where it connects with the Bay Trail, it crosses UNDER highway 101, OVER Moffett Blvd, UNDER Middlefield, UNDER highway 85, OVER Stevens Creek, OVER Central Expressway, Caltrain tracks, and VTA light rail tracks, OVER highway 237, UNDER El Camino Real, and finally OVER highway 85. There are bicycle-pedestrian undercrossings of the Caltrain tracks in Palo Alto, San Carlos and Belmont. A bicycle-pedestrian undercrossing of the tracks between San Francisquito creek and Ravenswood has been in the General Plan for decades, and the city has already paid for a study for such a tunnel. Now there is to be another study. Build the thing, already!

The Stevens Creek Trail is a fantastic resource for Mountain View residents. It gets very heavy use by commuters heading to and from their jobs on the Google side of Hwy 101. Menlo Park could really benefit from something similar to get commuters to Facebook and the new Amazon campus.

why would they consider going over tracks that are already raised???? They'd need to go up about 30 feet to clearer the berm and trains? or they could just build a tunnel straight thru the Berm, no need for a ton of steps or a huge ramp with a long lead? come on Nikki Nagaya, really, you can get mugged on an overpass 30 feet in the air just as easily as a short tunnel. the upside of the tunnel is that with good lighting and design, such as homer ave in pa, there is no place for someone to hide a jump people. 30 feet in the air, who knows.

The Homer Street bicycle tunnel in Palo Alto is a good example of a short underpass below the Caltrain tracks. Make the tunnel wide and bright and people will have no concerns about safety. Only the dark, steep, narrow tunnels are really scary (like the California Ave tunnel in Palo Alto).

I remember when a bicyclist was mugged on the Ringwood Ave bicycle bridge over Hwy 101 in Menlo Park, so yes, bridges are not guaranteed to be safer than underpasses.

What in world are we paying over a half million dollars for a consulting firm to do this study? What do we get from all those overpaid and over pensioned city employees? Why are they not doing this study?

Agree with Mr Cronin. It is not like some huge changes have happened in the last 5 years at Middle / Alma and El Camino.
This is a total waste of money and I can't see any justification for it.
Especially considering the return value of studies commissioned in the past, coming up with the obvious engineering options and some ooh so nice artist renderings.
Just leaves a bad taste on who is benefiting from either dragging this out or from commissioning another study.