EDITORIAL: Designs could guide city's future EDITORIAL: Designs could guide city's future (June 08, 2005)

What would happen if you pulled together a team of the best architects you could find and challenged them to visualize a better design for downtown Menlo Park, particularly around the train station?

City officials, led by business development manager David Johnson, did just that in early April during a design charrette. The event engaged four teams of architects to brainstorm ways to improve the El Camino Real/Santa Cruz Avenue intersection, the Caltrain station and points between. The results, seen in the drawings on this page, will be presented at a City Council study session this Tuesday, June 7, in the council chambers.

The architects did a masterful job in bringing a fresh look to this area's immovable objects: El Camino Real, a six-lane boulevard thick with traffic; and the railroad tracks, which will later this summer will see more than 90 trains a day stopping east-west traffic downtown.

Because of the increasing train traffic, officials have been discussing reconfiguring the city's rail crossings. So each charrette team was assigned a different plan for the tracks: keeping them in place, lowering them below the road, elevating them high above the road grade, or slightly raising them while lowering the road.

Readers should note that the ideas on this page are simply a starting point - they represent free-form thinking at its best, without the fetters of real-world issues such as money, feasibility or whether the property in question is even available. But in our view, this is the best way to launch what we hope will become an ongoing conversation that could turn the city's downtown into an area that beckons residents and visitors, rather than just serving as a stopping point for travelers.

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