Recap: Advocacy Forum: Google's Downtown West Plan
Last week Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition held an Advocacy Forum featuring Google's Downtown West Project near Diridon Station in San José, CA. Project planners and consultants shared the general outline of the project as well as details of the 3.5 miles of bike lanes, .6 acres of trails, and over a mile of new walkways. Participants were interested to hear more about connections between the Guadalupe River Trail and the Los Gatos Creek Trail, bike parking around the development, and ensuring that the project welcomes people of all incomes, gender expressions, cultural and racial backgrounds. If you missed last week’s event, please find the following resources to learn more about the Downtown West Project:
Learn more about the Downtown West Update + Design Standards and Guidelines Overview
Still have questions or thoughts? Visit g.co/sanjose or email downtownwest@google.com
The project team also wanted to follow up on some of the questions they ran out of time to discuss during last week’s event:
Q: If approved by the City, when would the project break ground? And when would it be fully built out?
A: The project will take 10+ years to deliver. The specific timeline will depend on many factors, most importantly, the timeline to deliver Diridon Station’s transit infrastructure projects. San José and Google are working together to ensure Google’s plan is delivered in a way that coordinates with these important transit projects and ensure they are in place by the time new housing and offices are built. If the project is approved, construction could begin in 2023.
Q: Any comments about the potential effect of COVID-19 on Google’s Downtown West project plans?
A: Like everyone else, we’re looking at what the future of our workplace experience will be, while first focusing on the health and safety of our employees. We always feel there’s a place for work and for gathering, that will continue to be important despite COVID. You may have seen our leadership’s response to similar questions:
“We continue to be very much focused on the fact that place and space are important. We believe in collaboration. Serendipity is key to innovation, so we do view space and office as important and are very focused on what does that mean over the long term. We've actually opened quite a number of our offices, in fact, in 40 countries, and do hope to reopen in many more.” Ruth Porat, Q2 Earnings Call
Last month, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, said a hybrid model would best serve employees. Working from home sometimes will mitigate some downsides of always being in an office, such as the two-hour commute between San Francisco and Mountain View common during pre-pandemic rush hours, he said. “We firmly believe that in person, being together, having a sense of community is super important when you have to solve hard problems and create something new, so we don’t see that changing. But we do think we need to create more flexibility and more hybrid models,” Pichai said at a Time magazine event. - Sundar Pichai, TIME, Oct-22
Q: Can I request the proposed Post Street be renamed as to not cause confusion with the existing Post Street in downtown? San José already has so many duplicative names
A: We’ll follow the City’s policy on street naming. Names of new places in Downtown West, including streets and open spaces, are generally working designations, and we look forward to partnering with the city, and the community, to revisit these names in compliance with City process and community priorities.
See you next time!