The first question any local asks when they hear about a shoreline construction project is always the same, no matter which corner of the Bay Area they hail from: “How long will the trail be closed?”
Almost everyone who enjoys the outdoors is familiar with a specific stretch of the 350-mile-long Bay Trail, whether to jog, walk the dog, or commute to work at the tech campuses of Google, Microsoft, and Intuit on the Mountain View shoreline, for example. Which is why the closure of a portion of the Bay Trail for seven months to raise its elevation and buffer the surrounding properties from sea level rise was one of the biggest challenges for a $20 million project completed this February (detours were provided through Shoreline Park).
“If you walk on that levee trail today, you’d never know there’s a flood protection project out there,” says Raymond Wong, a City of Mountain View engineer who collaborated on the project. “Instead of a typical sea wall, the entire thing is buried and converted back to nature on the surface.”
The second most frequent question from the public is “How long do I have to put up with the traffic?”…