Palo Alto’s City Council and City Manager Ed Shikada are trying to figure out how to bring back foot traffic to downtown.
Council is moving ahead with an idea, proposed by a consultant, to spend more than $40 million widening sidewalks in a nine-block stretch of University Avenue.
Let me propose a less expensive solution that will save the city money.
One of the largest employers downtown is the city government itself. Yet many employees still work remotely, as if the pandemic were continuing.
Office workers are critical to the health of downtown areas. They eat lunch, get coffee, drop off dry cleaning, stretch out in yoga gyms and run other errands that pump money into the local economy.
If those workers were back downtown, that would create momentum. People attract people.
Smart restaurant owners know that when their place is nearly empty, the place to seat newly arriving diners is by the windows. They want to create the impression there are customers inside so that people walking along the sidewalk think it’s a popular place and want to go inside. (Think of Club 54 in Manhattan in the 1970s, which put up a velvet ropeline outside its door to keep people out. Of course, that caused people to want to come in.)
The city should cancel remote work. Give the employees a date a month or so from now and tell them that they need to be at work at 8 a.m. that day, or they’ve forfeited their jobs.
Firing people who don’t want to work will save the city money.
The unions will scream bloody murder, but the city is just going back to the work rules it had in 2019 before the pandemic.
Some council members will clutch at their pearls if they’re asked to go against the unions. The few council members who think they have a political future will want to stay on the good side of the unions, so they’ll come up with reasons why canceling remote work is too drastic a step.
But this isn’t a drastic step. Oakland is requiring its workers — union and management — to work in the office four days a week, according to the news website Oaklandside.
(About 24 hours after this column was printed, San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie announced that all city workers will be required to work from the office at least four days per week starting on April 28.)
In the private sector, Meta, Amazon, Disney, UPS, Salesforce, Tesla, KPMG, JPMorgan Chase and Dell have all taken steps to order employees back to the office.
Let’s give this a try before we spend millions on widening our sidewalks — a solution nobody asked for — and see if it helps downtown.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
Hear, hear!!
Maybe our “leaders” on the CC Retail Committee who prefer a huge expenditure on sidewalks!! and their gravy train of retail consultants could implement the common sense policy of banning company cafeterias if they want to increase retail traffic.
I’ll never forget booking a late lunch at St Michael’s Alley “to avoid the business lunch hour rush” only to find one other table occupied. Why? The Palantir cafeteria right next door, the waitress explained.
They’ve never reopened for lunch.
You’re welcome. Please wire my $1,000,000 consulting fee to my Swiss bank account.
The pandemic is still ongoing. Therefore, this entire op-ed is nullified. People are still getting sick and dying from COVID in high rates, and none of the mitigations to prevent it’s spread have been permanently installed: better air purification and ventilation, making sure people stay home when they’re sick, masking, universal testing (for COVID and flu), etc.
People like this want to continue the “let er rip” strategy of infecting everybody and letting those who are immunocompromised or don’t have access to health resources suffer the consequences. It’s gross and sick.
Also, widening sidewalks actually prevents traffic deaths too, and that’s needed far more than generating capitalistic “economic activity” in downtown Palo Alro.
Stop advocating for policies that ensure more people will get sick and die.
“Palo Altan says “People are still getting sick and dying from COVID in high rates.”
Not true. Go to the Santa Clara County Department of Health’s Respiratory Virus Dashboard. You’ll see that Covid deaths reached their peak the week of January 3, 2021 at 150.
For the most recent week shown on the database, February 2, 2025, there were 2 deaths.
150 vs 2. No, people aren’t dying from Covid at high rates.
And if you compare diseases, you’ll find the mortality rates for flu and RSV currently are much higher than Covid.
You’re not helping anybody by lying about this.
He or she is one of those people who drives around in a car with the windows up wearing a covid mask, just to be careful.
Fact Checker is correct.COVID deaths were much lower in 2024 vs. 2023, which in turn were mich lower than the number of deaths in 2022. So far in 2025, deaths even lower. Look up the Santa Clara county respiratory virus data dashboard, to see the facts, not conjecture.
Wacko want some fruit cake?
YES!!! And open City Hall. The sidewalk plan should be tossed, along with the consultants who suggested it. Asking merchants to pony up for that adds insult to injury. And any contribution to that from City coffers should instead be spent on bringing PAFD up to the staffing and equipment levels needed. As of now, PAFD is struggling. That’s ridiculous and dangerous.
Just four days a week? I’ll bet they don’t work 10 hours on the days they work to equal a 40 hour week. In the private sector, everybody works over 40 hours!
Where is your office and are you there 9 hours a day, 5 days a week? And if you work from home like so many writers, please do tell us.
Spoken like an entrenched city employee. “Hypocrisy” should spend a day at a restaurant, financial company, HVAC crew, or anything without a city paycheck. You’ll find out very fast that the typical work day is longer than anybody at the city.
Oh, one more thing, we don’t get vacations or holidays like city employees. For many of us who are self-employed, we work through the holidays and we haven’t taken a vacation in years.
Katherine, I’m with you on that. The job I have is literally 24/7; I’m pinged any day of the week, any hour of the day. I never have peace and quiet, and the most “vacation” I’ve taken in one year is 4 days – for the entire year – and I was STILL emailing and texting and handling business, so not a vacation at all. Being able to WFH at least means I won’t also spend 2 hours a day commuting to and from work (and I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to pull over and handle a task immediately). It’s exhausting.
Dave is a dying breed.
Someone with common sense running a newspaper.
Why make a not perfect public sector job any worse than it already is? Hard pass on forcing folks to perform salad-at-their-desk sadness.
How hard can a public sector job be when staff pushes most of their work onto consultants with no local knowledge of PA? And how absurd that one the the assistant city attorneys LIVES in a different state.
How absurd that people can’t get a timely reply to questions about their 4-figure utility bills because NO ONE from CPAU is there to respond and/or can’t be bothered to respond.
Remember when Planning Director Jonathan Lait blamed “work-at-home email confusion” for his staff’s failure to process solar permits for years until their failure was FINALLY exposed?
Working for the city is an easy and well-paying job with lifetime no copay/no deductible lifetime health insurance available to anyone with 5 years or more of service, including council members. (It’s why Julie Whatever-her-name-is will run for re-election next year. She wants that fifth year under her belt.)
I am sure CC will hire 3 consultants to spend a year collecting data to recommend whether city employees should return to the office full time, or not.
By the way, how do I get one of those city jobs so I can stay at home?