How about getting the developers to fund grade separation on Caltrain as a benifit? No too practical.

Still true now:
"I'm concerned some of things you've listed are either in the developer's interest or are essential mitigations," Council Member Larry Klein told Jim Baer, who is representing the Pollock Financial Group as it looks to build a four-story, 33,500-square-foot office building on a former VTA parking lot at 2755 El Camino Real.
Web Link

Jim Baer and Ken Hayes, what a team.

PC zoning is the not problem, so much as it getting used to vastly exceed zoning restrictions in a way it was never intended. PC zoning was supposed to provide flexibility, not an excuse to throw zoning principles out the window. Had the Maybell rezoning been a proposal much closer to zoning, even all affordable housing, especially all affordable housing, it never would have been opposed, even as a PC.

The other problem is in the City Council deciding what constitutes a "public benefit" -- if they had to ask the public, and if there were automatic (rather than having-to-be-litigated-for) and major compensatory damages to the public if those benefits didn't materialize, then PCs wouldn't be as controversial either.

But once the cat is out of the bag, people are rightly disinterested in having to keep putting it back in.

I hope new Councilmember Eric Filseth will be successful in giving our City tools to analyze every development as part of a system. It may not be everyone else's fault that this Council allowed all those exceptions, but neither is it the public's fault, and we need to understand the cumulative impacts of all these existing ways the zoning was exceeded. This understanding has never been quantified, though we have all witnessed it in the huge increases in traffic, noise, and other degradations in quality of life (and ignoring of the Comp Plan vision and principles).

Once more companies allow their employees to work remotely, what will happen to all the empty office buildings in Palo Alto?

Pretty soon we're going to need personal helicopters to get across El Camino without going to nearby communities.

Embarcadero's already impassable, University's clogged and now we're going to jam up Oregon even more. Brilliant.

If you think it is difficult to cross El Camino now, just try it in a few years when another half-million people move to the Bay Area and the center lanes on El Camino are confiscated for buses only. You will not want to attempt to cross El Camino during commute (6 hours/day).

Practically speaking, I can't imagine how cars are going to exit from what is sure to be a steep up ramp from the 3 stories of underground parking into a corner of the page mill/el camino intersection that has an almost constant flow of traffic. If exiting onto El Camino, they will be almost blind to the cars making a right turn from Page Mill Westbound onto El Camino. Already, it takes several light changes to cross Page Mill from the other side of El Camino and make a left turn from Page Mill Eastbound onto El Camino in the middle of the day, not to mention commute hours. Wondering if this will be taken into consideration in light of the other 2-3 developments that are scheduled/proposed within a few blocks of that intesection.

Obviously such practicalities aren't of interest to our traffic/planning officials who recently changed the Cal Ave. diagonal parking near El Camino to parallel parking.

Or they like creating backed up intersections.

Gotta be one or the other.

@What a Team makes a good point. When the College Terrace Centre at 2180 El Camino (fka JJ&F) wanted to push the deal through to the end zone, they paired up with Jim Baer. The results are there for all to see. Baer knows the city inside out and has credibility with key decision makers. If I were a developer with a controversial project I'd probably seek a partnership with him, too. Something to think about: if a project needs Baer to reach the end zone it may well be that there's either something fundamentally lacking (such as parking) or something overdone (such as density) that needs to be remedied before the project is approved. Do we really want other corners to look like 2180 El Camino?