Biking in Palo Alto is confusing. We don’t realize how good we have it here in the city.
13 Responses to “And then sometimes you end up on the freeway”
Allan Hough (7858)
Brittany Janis & Katie Cruz (104)
Authors
Biking in Palo Alto is confusing. We don’t realize how good we have it here in the city.
Allan Hough (7858)Brittany Janis & Katie Cruz (104)
Isn’t that Oregon Expressway? Not a freeway, exactly, but I sure wouldn’t want to bike there.
I have absolutely done that. At night, like an idiot. I’ve never pedaled so fast in my entire life as I did to get back up where I belonged. Thanks, Caltrain failure that convinced me to try to bike home from Mountain View…
The funny thing is that there’s a bicycle/pedestrian underpass only a few blocks away.
where???? north or south along the tracks?
North. Just head to California Ave, and there’s a tunnel at the end that goes under CalTrain and under Alma. It takes you out by Bowen Park.
Here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&aq=0&sll=27.059126,-155.126953&sspn=62.707966,52.734375&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=N+California+Ave,+Palo+Alto,+California&t=h&ll=37.429248,-122.142274&spn=0.000628,0.000402&z=21
See, I knew there WAS one, but this was the land before I had a smartphone and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I swore I was doing the right thing by turning there… I would quickly find out I was wrong. Absolutely my scariest moment ever on a bicycle.
Palo Alto actually has a lot of bike lanes and even dedicated bike paths. You can go all the way from Stanford to Los Altos almost entirely on dedicated bike routes. But if I hadn’t spent the first ~20 years of my life there, I wouldn’t know where to bike either. There’s very few signs indicated where to go (and where NOT to go.)
Fun fact: the Oregon Expressway overpass was built without any kind of EIR. Not only did it piss off neighbors, but it turns out it’s right in the middle of an underground river. When the power to the pumps goes out, the whole thing floods! Oops.
It’s at the California Ave. train station. It used to be at the end of the street, by the fountain. They recently rebuilt it. Now you access it from the middle of the train station parking lot.
Wha?? No, no, no. The thing that goes under the track there is part of the station, it doesn’t get you to the same place as the tunnel (which was NOT rebuilt.)
Stay in the City. They don’t want you in their clean yet confusing suburbs!
Last time I went through that tunnel, I thought hmmm, why does a tunnel smell like body odor? Coming up on the other side, there was a guy rearranging his shopping cart.
we should retitle the post, “so you went to stanford, and now you live in san francisco, but you have a faint fondness of your past years”
except that i went to cal and by law hate stanfurd