2026 Election: Questionnaire for MV City Council Candidates
James Kuszmaul's Response
1. Knowledge and priorities: What do you see as the biggest barriers to making walking and bicycling safe, comfortable, and convenient throughout Mountain View? What specific changes would you prioritize to address them?
The biggest barrier to walking and biking in the city is safety. People have to worry that they will be hit by a car when crossing a street, biking along a street, or when they have to walk or roll in the street due to inadequate sidewalk infrastructure. These concerns are particularly acute at intersections, where pedestrians try to cross the street and bicyclists must contend with cars coming from multiple directions where drivers may not be looking for bikes.
I would work to aggressively prioritize the most needed safety improvements. High traffic speeds can be reduced through lane width reductions, raised crosswalks, and traffic circles. Intersection crossings can be made easier and safer through bulb-outs and “protected intersection” treatments.
Bike lanes can be made safer by adding physical protection between car traffic and bicycles. We can make sure wheelchair users and parents with strollers don’t need to use the roadway by closing sidewalk gaps and removing obstacles.
In choosing what improvements to make, I would prioritize near-term improvements that do not require us to wait on major street repavings to implement modest improvements, such as adding “quick-build” bulbouts at street corners using plastic posts and curbs. Such improvements should be replaced by concrete protection (and ideally concrete with greenery) long-term, but we can get real safety benefits in the short-term.
To choose where to place improvements, I would look to the objective criteria from the Active Transportation Plan, prioritizing safety improvements to high-crash intersections, especially those near schools and in vulnerable communities.
2. Judgement: Mountain View has made a number of changes to its streets in recent years, including
the California Street Complete Streets Pilot. Which changes do you consider successful, and which have fallen short? What lessons should the City take from these projects, and what measures should it use to evaluate the success of future street improvements?
I think the city has made positive progress in many recent projects, but has failed to fully deliver on the promised safety improvements and has taken too long to do them, resulting in decreased safety for residents and eroding public confidence in the city’s ability to deliver projects effectively.
The California Complete Streets Pilot is a real improvement on the prior conditions, where the high speed of the road led to multiple deaths in 2012. However, by taking 14 years to complete and failing to correct inadequate sightlines at driveways, the new street layout is not as safe as it reasonably could be and has reduced public confidence in our ability to deliver new street safety projects. As such, in the future we should:
- Promptly make improvements when issues are encountered in projects.
- Fully commit to safety improvements in projects, rather than making compromises that lead to projects which make no one happy.
- For projects meant to be implemented “quickly,” avoid lengthy, contracted-out, design processes. Many simple traffic calming and crossing projects can be done with much less process and in-house engineering work. Doing so will require updating city design standards and processes.
3. Vision and city role: What is your vision for the future of downtown Mountain View? What would you like Castro Street and the surrounding downtown to be like in 5 to 10 years, and what changes should the City make in economic development, public space, transportation, land use, or other areas to achieve that vision?
I want to see a bustling downtown with more housing, more business, and more people getting to and around downtown with less car traffic. Downtown is already the transit hub of the city, and, so long as the Regional Transit Measure passes in November, we will see even greater transit service to downtown. Paired with increased housing density and past and future projects improving bicycle access to downtown (including the California Complete Streets Pilot), we should have a downtown where far more people are able to access downtown and the streets are comfortable enough to bike on that a parent would be comfortable letting their kid navigate downtown, even at peak evening hours.
4. Leadership and handling opposition: Improving bike and pedestrian infrastructure can require reallocating space or changing how streets are used, which can generate opposition from some residents, businesses, or drivers. As a Councilmember, how would you approach that opposition while advocating for the changes you believe are necessary?
In order to prioritize real street safety improvements we will need to reallocate some street space and this will mean that, because the streets are now more comfortable to walk and bike on, more people will walk and bike instead of driving. When such reallocations encounter opposition, I will take seriously issues raised and make sure to reach out to affected communities to make sure that we are addressing the concerns that are raised. For instance, I appreciated how the California Street Complete Streets Pilot elected to do a road diet instead of simply removing parking, in part because of significant community interest in preserving as much parking as possible, and in part because a road diet would do more to reduce traffic speeds than removing parking. Along El Camino Real, the community was less concerned with parking preservation, which was backed up by a parking survey that found extremely low parking utilization, which meant that it was relatively reasonable to remove the parking along El Camino Real to create a protected bike lane.