Early stages of El Camino improvements underway in San Mateo County

Currently, the road’s narrow sidewalks, gaps in crosswalks and lack of adequate bike lanes is dangerous for both cyclists and pedestrians, SamTrans Project Manager Cassie Halls said during a July meeting of San Mateo’s Sustainability and Infrastructure Commission.

Planned improvements along the San Mateo stretch of El Camino Real is part of a project known as the Central El Camino Real Multimodal Plan, which would also include San Mateo, Belmont, San Carlos and Redwood City. The improvements range from less-resource-intensive projects — such as turn restrictions and sidewalk repairs at several intersections between the Hillsdale Caltrain station and 25th Avenue — to more capital-intensive initiatives, though the agency is still in the early stages of identifying all the projects that will be included in the plan.

Commissioner Clifford Robbins said he hoped the agency would consider prohibiting left turns in certain hours during peak traffic times.

“The traffic during commute time totally jams up. I’m sure there are tradeoffs like anything in traffic,” Robbins said. “But right now the traffic in our city just totally breaks down during commute hours.”

The multimodal plan is one of the projects under the Grand Boulevard Initiative, a nearly 20-year-old effort that includes ECR improvements throughout the entire county. But the Grand Boulevard project has undergone its own twists and turns. The initiative was once focused on housing and land use along the corridor but, with stricter housing mandates from the state, SamTrans recently pivoted to focus more on transit-related projects, though minimal funding has been secured beyond feasibility studies.

“El Camino has been very well studied but not as well implemented,” Halls said. “So we are really trying to figure out what are the roadblocks that cities such as San Mateo are facing and trying to make improvements on El Camino.”

SamTrans has secured about $730,000 in grant funding for the study, which will identify the key improvements. But financing the project beyond the study still has gaps.

“This whole process will take a long time,” Halls said, estimating about eight to 10 years for the entire project, at minimum. “But we are figuring out a way to address this all collectively so it’s not left to individual cities to do this expensive process for this small portion of the corridor. We really don’t want to just do another plan and have it sit on a shelf.”