Town Square

Council favors a passive approach to meadow

Original post made on Sep 10, 2009

Ever since it became clear that the Stevens Creek Trail was going to extend south of El Camino Real last year, Mountain View residents have been dreaming up uses for the large, previously closed-off meadow along Highway 85 just south of El Camino Real. It now appears that none of those ideas is likely to come to fruition.

Read the full story here Web Link posted Thursday, September 10, 2009, 10:46 AM

Comments (6)

Posted by Nick
a resident of another community
on Sep 10, 2009 at 12:15 pm

The BMX Park should be out near Crittenden Slope (the hill behind the Shoreline Amphitheater Parking Lot on Crittenden Lane).

Web Link

That location has a lot of benefits:

-It's still accessible via the Stevens Creek Trail so kids who used to ride to the demolished creekside BMX trails can still do so safely.

-It's located next to a major recreation area with easy parking and access for *all* BMX riders from throughout the city.

-Unlike a location directly on the banks of the creek, it wouldn't lead to construction that could damage sensitive riparian habitat or lead to erosion into the creek.

-It already has a lot of unique topography (as a sculpted former land fill) that could be manipulated to create a fun course.

-It's currently a highly underutilized space and there's plenty of land out there to keep as open grassland and still have a BMX course.

The council, I think, made the right decision with the meadow and just plussing it with native landscaping. Pursueing anything else here here would have cost a lot due to the access issues (as stated in the article) and it would have messed up what already is a nice natural buffer for the creek - one of the few places where you can see what Stevens Creek looked like before it was completely pinched by development on both sides. With the addition of more native plants and trees that block the freeway, this could be an even nicer piece of passive creekside open space (which we don't have much of in Mountain View)

There's no reason to make this a creekside open space versus BMX course debate. Everyone shold band together and work towards a BMX park out near Crittenden Slope.