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corridors
east 14th/international
el camino real
• challenges san pablo avenue
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Challenges - El Camino Real
Land
Use Challenges Wide, busy boulevards and expressways separate many station areas into commercial, industrial, and residential districts. El Camino Real, other major streets, and the Caltrain railroad tracks often divide eastern and western neighborhoods from each other. While grade separations have improved safety around Caltrain tracks, they have also created visual barriers between single-story neighborhoods. Other station areas, including San Bruno BART and San Antonio Caltrain, have highway on-ramps that interrupt surrounding neighborhoods.
Many cities along El Camino have suburban, auto-oriented centers situated between the corridor and the local Caltrain station. For some cities, an auto-oriented regional shopping center has supplanted the presence of a traditional downtown, preserving retail opportunities but losing public gathering spaces, "greenscaping," and walkability. San Bruno, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale are examples of cities where major regional shopping centers disrupt an urban grid pattern.
In
many segments of the corridor, underused strip malls and surface parking
lots are prevalent. Several cities have shopping centers that compete
with downtown businesses. Big-box retail and large grocery stores encourage
auto-dependency, both in
For those cities that do have public parks or plazas, not all of them are well-used or integrated into the neighborhoods. Often, an issue is that the park or plaza is too close to El Camino Real or another busy street to be a pleasant place for pedestrians to linger. Examples of successful park designs that work next to highway infrastructure do exist in San Bruno, Colma, and elsewhere. New development in neighborhood nodes along the corridor, rather than in strip malls, could also help create popular, usable park and pedestrian-oriented spaces.
Housing Challenges At the regional level, a measure of neighborhood strength is the ratio of housing to work opportunities and the provision of both for a range of income groups. While there is some range of housing choices from city to city along El Camino Real, there are generally more jobs than homes, and fewer housing opportunities for workers in median or lower-paying jobs. This is a predicament not only for communities along El Camino Real, but for the Bay Area as a region.
Despite the increased presence of multi-family housing along El Camino Real, high costs limit housing choices along the corridor. The average sales price for homes near El Camino was $867,000 in 2006, compared to $675,000 regionally. Average home prices for the same time period were $673,000 in San Mateo County, and $722,000 in Santa Clara County.
High housing costs make housing for teachers, firefighters, and other essential personnel a concern for many cities. In addition, new retail and service jobs created along the corridor do not pay enough for workers to be able to purchase or sometimes even rent a home close to their jobs. Some industrial areas to the east of El Camino Real, however, do create higher-wage jobs. Potential land use conflicts arise because these areas are also attracting housing developers. There is a need to balance protecting living wage jobs with resolving the area's housing crisis.
While providing quality housing for very low-income populations is often a challenge, a shortfall of housing for median-income earners is also a problem in neighborhoods along El Camino Real. Costs of the existing housing stock are generally above what most Bay Area residents can afford, and more moderately-priced units are needed. Complicating matters, cities and counties with programs to take care of their most vulnerable populations are still experiencing a loss of middle-class residents and an income divide.
Transportation Challenges About 35,000 people drive along El Camino Real each day. Automobile use of the corridor is concentrated on the inner cities and tapers off by nearly 50 percent at the external edges of Mission Boulevard in Daly City and El Camino Real in Santa Clara. Averaged along the length of El Camino within their cities, San Bruno, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale have the highest number of annual driving trips. Traffic is heaviest at freeway junctions, such as the Route 85 junction in Mountain View or Route 92 in San Mateo. The legal speed limit is 35 MPH for the majority of El Camino Real. The street is congested during peak times. Most intersections are rated "Level-of-Service D," meaning cars are delayed between 35 and 55 seconds. Between 2002 and 2005, there were 4,402 accidents on the corridor, including 18 fatal accidents. There are 25 intersections in San Mateo County and 15 intersections in Santa Clara County exceeding the state average accident rate.
With the exception of the SFO BART station, the San Mateo County BART stations have the lowest ridership numbers of any in the system. Low densities near the station may be a contributing factor to low ridership. Most residential and employment centers are located outside of the half-mile station area. Transit commuters to these stations rely heavily on shuttles that connect the stations with many employment centers.
El Camino Real is generally not suited for walking. Many intersections are timed for cars and do not leave sufficient time for pedestrians or even bicyclists to cross the street safely. Buildings in the commercial strip malls along the street are oriented in a variety of ways, creating a haphazard landscape divided by parking lots. The general retail design maximizes convenience for the motorists rather than the pedestrians.
El Camino Real is not designed to accommodate cyclists and cycling accidents are common. Cyclists that use El Camino put themselves in danger by riding next to fast moving traffic. Many traffic lights do not detect bicycles, so a cyclist must push the pedestrian crossing signal or wait for a car to trigger the light.
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design
and because large volume purchases require a car to transport goods
home. Furthermore, the parking lots needed to serve these large retail
centers along the corridor are a major consumer of land. Despite their
omnipresence, a lack of local parking is still a frequent resident complaint
and a primary obstacle to passing new development through the planning
process. 
Prosperity
in recent years has led to an extremely high cost of living that also
significantly impacts low and middle-income families. In San Mateo County
in 2004, the yearly income necessary for a family of three to maintain
self-sufficiency was estimated at $62,568. In contrast, the federal
poverty level for a family of three was $15,670. To rent a two-bedroom
apartment in San Mateo County, a resident would need an hourly wage
of $29. This puts San Mateo County in the top three ranking of "America's
Least Affordable Jurisdictions," along with its northern neighbors,
San Francisco and Marin County.