If you have walked California Avenue any time since 2020, you already know the drill: duck around a wood-framed dining shed that has been "temporary" since the first Newsom lockdown, watch a cyclist thread the needle between a patio table and a planter, and wonder, again, when the city was finally going to make up its mind about this street. This summer, it did.
California Avenue has been car-free since June 2020, when the city council turned a pandemic emergency measure into a semi-permanent fixture. It became officially, unconditionally car-free in November 2023, when the council voted 5-2 (Mayor Lydia Kou and council member Vicky Veenker dissenting) to keep the block between El Camino Real and Birch Street closed to traffic for good. But the furniture on that street, the parklets that restaurants built out of plywood and folding tables during the emergency, kept operating on rules that got extended one quarter at a time for another two and a half years. The street was permanent. What sat on it was not. That gap closed on June 1, 2026, when the council signed off on real design standards for the structures themselves, and it is the reason this particular summer on Cal Ave feels different from the four that came before it, even though nothing about the sidewalk has visibly changed.
Two Arguments the City Finally Settled
The June 1 vote resolved two fights that had kept the street in planning limbo since a scrapped 2025 proposal tried to strip the parklets down to bare tables and umbrellas. Restaurant owners pushed back hard on that version, pointing out, correctly, that nobody eats outside in the rain without a roof. The compromise the council approved instead offers three models: a cabana with a sloped roof and overhangs, a pergola with a flat roof, and a third roofless option for anyone who wants it. For a strip that has weathered five winters of "temporary" tents, that is the first time the physical shape of outdoor dining on Cal Ave has had an actual design standard behind it rather than an emergency extension.
The second fight was about bikes, and the resolution there tells you something about how the city now thinks about the street. Earlier plans floated a two-way bike lane running down the center of the promenade. Urban architect Bruce Fukuji, who has been leading the Cal Ave redesign for the city manager's office, pitched a different fix: thermoplastic bands laid across the pavement to create a bumpy, self-regulating deterrent, the kind of "behavioral cue" meant to slow cyclists without banning them outright. Council member Ed Lauing argued the street had become a pedestrian zone in practice and shouldn't pretend otherwise by running a bike lane between rows of diners. The council agreed. Cyclists can still ride through, but nothing on Cal Ave is designed to make that comfortable anymore.
What makes this worth noticing is the timing. Two weeks after the council decided to discourage cycling on its own signature pedestrian street, it unanimously approved the city's 2026 Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, a three-year planning effort aimed at making streets like San Antonio Road and Middlefield Road safer for riders and enhancing established routes on Maybell Avenue and Bryant Street. Palo Alto is not anti-bike. It just decided, deliberately, that Cal Ave is not where that effort belongs. If you live near the corridor and have wondered why the city seems to send mixed signals about cycling, that is the answer: it isn't mixed, it's zoned.
What the Restaurants Are Actually Saying
The businesses that depend on the sidewalk have been mostly enthusiastic. Sahlik Khan, head of operations at Zareen's, told the council that foot traffic has "increased tremendously since the closure," and described a district where people are lingering rather than passing through. Owners at iTalico and Terun offered similar support at the same June 1 hearing where the council settled the parklet and bike questions. That support already had a stage by then: the city's new Thursday-evening concert series had launched a few days earlier, on May 28, with Vice Mayor Greer Stone cutting the ribbon outside Joanie's Café while Terun co-owner Maico Campilongo played and a luxury car show, coordinated with Auto Vino, served as the evening's centerpiece. It is a small irony that a car show anchored the kickoff of a series named for a street the council would spend the following Monday deciding how hard to discourage cyclists from riding through.
The First Real Season on the Books
That concert series, called Thursday Live on Cal Ave, runs one Thursday evening a month from May through September, plus a special daytime event planned for Halloween. It replaced the older 3rd Thursday series, which had run on California Avenue from 2023 through 2025. A Wine Walk filled the July 30 date, and the season's last scheduled evening, a wellness and end-of-summer program, lands on August 27, both free and both designed to close out the market season before fall. The city has encouraged attendees to eat and shop before and after, which is a fair description of how the whole corridor now functions: the Sunday farmers market at one end, dinner at a roofed parklet somewhere in the middle, and a live show most months to give the evening a reason to stretch past dessert.
What's Coming After the Festival
None of this is happening in a vacuum. At the far end of the block, a multi-tower residential proposal for the Mollie Stone's Market site at 156 California Avenue is moving through the city's review process. Council discussion around the parklet vote itself pointed to that project, not the parklets or the bike bands, as the bigger disruption still ahead, one that will bring years of daytime construction to a stretch of the avenue whose restaurants now depend on lively lunchtime foot traffic. It is a fair thing to keep in view even while the street enjoys its first fully resolved summer in years. The parklet vote settled what the street looks like today. The Mollie Stone's site is a reminder that Cal Ave is still, in some ways, mid-sentence.
The Weekend That Closes the Loop
If you want to see what a settled California Avenue actually looks like in practice, the clearest marker on the calendar is not on Cal Ave at all. It is the Palo Alto Festival of the Arts, running August 22 and 23 on University Avenue between High and Webster, in its 43rd year. Roughly 250 artists and crafters set up along the tree-lined block, and Tasso Street hosts the festival's Italian Street Painting Expo, where chalk artists work in scale for two days with proceeds benefiting Palo Alto Youth Community Service and Ada's Cafe. It is the kind of weekend that has anchored downtown Palo Alto for four decades, and this year it lands just after the city finally finished deciding what its other downtown, the one on California Avenue, is supposed to be.
Six years is a long time for a street to operate on a temporary permit. The parklets are permanent now. The bike question has an answer, even if it is not the answer every cyclist wanted. The concert series has a real season instead of a pandemic-era workaround. What's left is the slower-moving piece, the towers at the Mollie Stone's site, and that will take longer to settle than a single council vote. For now, the street finally matches the permanence the city granted it back in 2023. That took a while.
If you have been watching Cal Ave's evolution from a window nearby and find yourself thinking about what it means for the block you live on, or the one you have been eyeing, Stephanie von Thaden has spent years reading these Mid-Peninsula shifts block by block. A conversation costs nothing and starts with a Confidential Home Valuation whenever you're ready for one.
