I really hope the City can make something happen here. The disconnect between Downtown/Caltrain and North Bayshore makes taking the train to work a tough sell for many. If a good link had been available from the beginning, I wonder if Google and others would still be running their full fleet of buses from SF to Mountain View.

While I am happy to see the study, I personally don't think light rail will be the right choice here. The travel time will be too long-- probably 15-20 minutes, at least. The North Bayshore gateway is almost exactly 1.5 miles due North from the Castro transit center, with existing roads already built and half that distance virtually unused (along Stierlin Rd). If we can create a transit option that runs that distance at 30 miles an hour, we'd have a travel time of about three minutes each way.

Perhaps that would be enough to get some cars off of our most congested streets, and perhaps THAT would be enough to get Google, LinkedIn, CalTrain, and friends to help foot the bill.

What disconnect between Downtown/Caltrain and North Bayshore ?

A lot of companies are already running their own shuttle bus links from caltrain stations. Google and Microsoft have been running them for years. Nowadays they get stuck in traffic, but they used to work great.

People take the large busses because of disconnects getting to train stations on the other side.

Palo Alto and Mountain View have to understand that people need to cross the San Antonio Berlin Wall for all sorts of reasons every day and shuttles, etc. need to serve both places. Neither are islands. Whether it is for work, school, recreation or shopping, residents of both places would benefit from transportation that acknowledges this.

Glad to see something like this getting kicked off again. Taking away existing lanes to put in some new transit in hopes that it will be adopted is asking for two leaps of faith - pay the cost in dollars and lost transit capacity. I favor looking for something overhead since that can coexist with existing infrastructure and ADD capacity, while not requiring people to adopt it immediately - only after the benefit becomes clear. Though, it too, requires a leap of faith to pay for it. I'd be willing to take that leap.

The best solutions are: 1)Google et al move out, (really - go to Texas or anywhere else), and 2)stop building cheek to jowl housing or better yet - stop building housing.

Those in charge have decided to suck every bit of charm out of Mountain View and to replace it with income generators to prop up their over bloated compensations.

The build-affordable-housing concept is really just a way to knock down affordable housing and replace it with expensive housing and token affordable housing. The most obvious example is the complex next to the post office. There were at least six affordable complexes in downtown Mountain View that have now been rebuilt into luxury, (cheaply built but with luxurious pricing), housing.

In Old Town young, wealthy, techies are buying houses with history and style and scraping them off of the Earth to build tacky McMansions. Kids - you have more money than sense and you don't understand the value of classic architecture.

Housing and traffic go hand-in-hand.

As soon as I can leave MV I will; I will be replaced with someone soulless and I won't be missed; I'll miss old Mountain View, but not the cesspool it has become.

Let the whining begin...

The light rail extension, while not optimum, would be the quickest solution, and would be a viable Phase I.
Phase II could be driverless cars, monorail, magnetic pod cars or even a gondola.

Why not run BART down 101, as it's done on 580 out to Dublin? Then put a station at Rengsdorf, and one at Shoreline. A $1b a mile, google could pull that money out of their Caymen's fund (of $85b) no problem. They didn't pay tax on it anyway, since it went there via the Dutch Sandwich (look it up).

Why didn't the Council ask them to do that in exchange for building in N. Bayshore in the spring. The deal they made, dividing up NB, will just result in Google getting it all in 5y anyway.. so it was a waste of a trade.

That way we would have transit around the bay, and Palo Alto, Menlo Park, etc could build their own stations if they wanted in.

Years ago, Mountain View spent 20 million dollars to bring Light Rail to Castro Street.

Laying new tracks from Ellis Street / Hwy 101 to the Shoreline area will not only provide a direct route to Caltrain, but will also provide a direct route to the new BART station in Milpitas.

In order to get cars off the road, why not resort to tunnels at strategic places? For example under San Antonio Road connecting HWY 280 to HWY 101 with exits to company campuses? Another example would be under Grant Road from HWY 280 to Shoreline east of HWY 101: essentially connecting HWY 280 to the company campuses east of HWY 101. These tunnels could also be used to implement underground public transport in parallel. East coast cities and many cities in the Netherlands and Germany have implemented this solution for their cities with lots of underground parking under the city centers. Google and wealthy donors could contribute and have the tunnel sections bearing their names.

Investing in this would benefit the communities a lot more than the $ 71 billion high speed rail road.

First, adopt the solution that raises traffic off the already overburdened streets. I missed the Podcar presentation, tho your description shows progress in a viable view that seems to hold the best solution. (BTW, are there printed/internet descriptions of the proceedings available?) I'm sure many local citizens would endorse such a course of action that would preclude MV from becoming a proto-LA.
Try to estimate how Google/LinkedIn/et al are going to attract and maintain 30K(!) new employees with current conditions in living and traffic. These are bright people- there must have been intense discussions among them about how to solve a looming problem, and it seems that city planners lack a full grasp of the issues and urgency.
There has been more change in MV in the last five years than have occurred in the last fifteen or so years past. I have been a resident here since 1977, so I can speak from experience. Incidentally there is a huge housing development nearing completion nearby; the many workers start at 7am and knock off at 3pm to avoid traffic as they commute from Sacramento or Chico- they can't afford to live locally.

It's really simple. While new transit solutions can reduce congestion, it would be better for the city to find ways to encourage companies to reconsider their requirements for employees to commute at all.

If the company isn't a retail business or customer-facing service business, it is quite possible that employees can be productive working remotely -- especially with the virtual office platforms available nowadays. I remember being blown away by a product called Sococco some years ago, and I can only imagine how much better it may be now.

How about the city levying a tax of $5 per day for every non-retail office worker required to commute to work from a distance greater than 10 miles. That would cause companies to stop and think.

Ellis to North Bayshore? Seriously? Hey! let's take a 30 minute ride from North Bayshore to Caltrain!

Tunnel under Central and send that damn trolley straight down Stierlin/Shoreline....

@Greg David. The Ellis/North Bayshore connection could act as a last mile solution for any traffic captured at Moffet Field (already many commuter buses park there during the day or at night). It would allow commuters (light Rail....) coming from the South reach North Bayshore without crossing Mountain View. It would also make it easier for Google and Microsoft to connect their Mountain View and Sunnyvale campuses (current solution is to use shuttles crisscrossing 101 and Mountain View)

It seems like the traffic on San Antonio could move faster and better if signals were timed so traffic does not have to stop at every other signal. the worst seems to be at Fayettte where cars trigger a stop of SanAntonio every time I travel there. It is caused by the new shopping area and new apartments. San Antonio is a main route to 101 and should be the main through street. If the set speed is posted for set lights like 25 mph everyone would move better. It would save fuel and time and maybe noise.

@Jay Ess, completely agree that traffic light synchronization should be a top priority. The light by the Starbucks / Grocery Outlet on Central drives me crazy, I always hit it just after Charleston, just so one car can leave that lot.

My biggest hope of any upcoming Caltrain improvements is to get rid of as many at-grade crossings as possible, so the timing of the lights isn't affected by every passing train.

We should look at Musk's HyperLoop. I used to enjoy watching these at department stores where they were used to send payment to a central location and change came back in a couple of minutes.

Wouldn't it be great to go down to the corner and Schlooop, Flurrrp, be deposited in your own in basket??

Or maybe not.

This is great, but everything west of Shoreline is utterly neglected. Whatever transit solution needs to also serve Monta Loma and Castro City.

And can we get a damn grocery store over here? New construction needs to provide basic shopping needs to keep people from piling into their cars.

we should have built BART on this side of the bay when it was on the ballot years ago. Grade separation is economically the best way to go. Waiting for trains at crossings goes away along with the pollution idling creates, accidents involving trains and cars go away, suicides would possibly be less and the money and time saved would be well worth it. We just need to do the right thing and get the funding to build a system that will work well many years into the future. What we plan and build today should give future generations a better system even if we don't reap the rewards any time soon. Each generation should leave the world better off than when they came into it. Let's be smart and plan way ahead and leave a legacy of intelligent, well thought out infrastructure for future generations.

Would you envision a connector from Ellis St. to the NBS area to be an extension of existing trains? Or have a VTA trolley run back-and-forth between the two points (maybe with an extra stop along the way)

Not sure it makes necessarily sense to extend the existing light rail train but light rail could be a feeder for that Moffet/Ellis <--> North Bayshore connector (trolley, train, bike...)?

Note that Google has engaged with VTA to study these types of connections:

Web Link