Glad it's done but timing was horrible. Still don't understand why it couldn't be done in January/February so not to affect holiday business.

SRB: because it's too rainy in Jan and Feb. The city won't schedule asphalt work during those months.

I really think this could have been done in a way more considerate to the businesses trying to survive. This seriously impacted the crucial holiday season. It should have been finished well before November or postponed to later. Really bad planning and implementation.

Do we really need to raise the "street level" to be the same as the sidewalk? That seems like gross overkill and it sounds VERY expensive and disruptive. I quite like the sidewalks for walking and the central area for hanging out and relaxing.

Castro is a ghost town, we checked it out both Saturday night and a weekday lunch period. So many closed stores and businesses now. Fire everyone involved with making MV downtown worse. The city and council have done a terrible job starting with permanently closing traffic from the northern third of the city. The original city survey *never* had a survey option allowing traffic in from central expressway, it was a rigged survey!! Nobody wants to visit having to cut through Landels residential roads, or making 4 turns from Shoreline.

Castro downtown continues to hurt businesses and it starts with pie in the sky impractical council members and city planners. The only way a pedestrian mall will work is to dramatically increase housing density around Castro which these m-rons won’t realize until years from now. The easier solution is to open up the roads like Palo Alto and Los Altos did over a year ago.

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@CommonSense, downtown Castro is one of the busiest and vibrant dining venues in the bay area. There is a wait during weekend lunch for outdoor dining every time. I have been there for lunch and dinner quite often. If you want to see a dead and deserted downtown try San Mateo. There are tons of empty outdoor dining tables even on the weekends.

Downtown Castro is dead compared to what it used to be, removing traffic/parking doesn't improve anything.

Making the street level the same as the sidewalk also makes little sense, other than people no longer need to look for curbs and can keep their eyes focused on their cell phone while jaywalking through Villa. Forcing cars to wait through multiple green lights, further jamming up traffic and making more people regret coming to the area. They should have left it as a stop sign on Villa/Castro.

Sadly I see these consistent non-engineering/non-common sense decisions through out MV, only making traffic worse. Somehow the city feels if they slow all traffic down unreasonably (massive speed humps, extremely shorten left arrow turns triggered by pedestrians Villa/Shoreline street) that people will react reasonably. The result is people just start running the red lights and stops signs along villa because they know the traffic is going so slow and so backed up from the changes.

Leveling the pedestrian mall is a "want" unless it's a legal requirement for handicapped access. It's not worth "tens of millions".

If the goal is to make this more human friendly, why replace asphalt? Why not use materials for pedestrians, like grass, rocks, concrete. Literally anything other than asphalt, which is for cars. Completely unclear what the value was of this project, and downside was staggering.