Walk any street in Atherton on a weekday morning and you'll see the same choreography. A jogger drifts onto the gravel shoulder to let a car pass. A dog on a leash cuts wide around a mail truck idling at a gate. There is no white line, no curb cut, no painted crosswalk to organize any of it. The town has never had sidewalks, and for most of the people using these roads that absence barely registers anymore. It is just how you get from one oak-shaded property to the next.
What has changed is that this arrangement is no longer settled policy sitting untouched in a filing cabinet. Atherton is in the middle of rewriting the plan that governs how people walk, bike, and cross its streets, and the rewrite has a budget, a consultant, a set of contested streets, and a clock that started running in early 2025.
The rule that's up for its first real rewrite in a decade
The town's ban on sidewalks and vertical curbs isn't an accident of neglect. It comes from the Municipal Code and General Plan, and it has been defended for decades on the grounds that scenic character matters more than pedestrian infrastructure. The town's 2002 general plan put that goal in writing, describing a desire to preserve Atherton as a scenic, rural, thickly wooded residential area with abundant open space. By 2024, that specific phrasing had quietly disappeared from the current general plan, even though the streets it justified are still exactly as they were.
That gap between the old language and the current one matters, because it lands right as Atherton's actual bike and pedestrian rules are getting their first substantive update since 2014. In January 2025, the City Council approved a contract with the transportation firm Alta Planning + Design to refresh the town's decade-old Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, rebranded as the Active Transportation Plan. The project carries a budget of $225,000, plus another $25,000 the council set aside for contingencies, with $100,000 of it covered by a Transportation Development Act grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. The update was prompted in part by a 2023 San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury recommendation that cities refresh any bike and pedestrian plan older than five years. Atherton's was ten years old.
That is not a nostalgia project. It is a quarter-million-dollar planning process with a state grant attached, and it is deciding, street by street, whether the town's approach to walking changes for the first time since 2014.
Three corridors, three different arguments
The plan's outreach in the fall of 2025 didn't treat Atherton as one town with one opinion. Alta Planning split the community input into distinct neighborhood sessions, each addressing a different corridor with a different set of tradeoffs:
Corridor | What's under review | Where it stood after fall 2025 outreach |
|---|---|---|
Selby Lane / Stockbridge | A proposed bike lane requiring roughly four feet of roadway widening on each side | Deferred by the council on the Transportation, Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Committee's recommendation, citing a lack of community support |
Atherton Avenue | Evaluation of bike lane development on a well-traveled route | Included in the plan's existing conditions review, with a dedicated outreach session on Nov. 12, 2025 |
East of El Camino Real | Pedestrian and bike access in the neighborhood closest to the rail corridor | Separate outreach session on Nov. 20, 2025 |
The Selby Lane deferral is the clearest example of how contested a single stretch of pavement can be here. The road is a regular route for children biking to and from Adelante Selby Spanish Immersion School, and a widened bike lane was originally part of the plan. The council opted to hold off until the broader master plan update is finished, after a town staff report found the project as proposed didn't have enough neighborhood support to move forward. A safety route to school lost out, at least for now, to resistance over widening the road itself.
Where the plan stands as of this summer
The town's own schedule put the full update on an 18-month clock starting with that January 2025 contract, which points to a wrap sometime around the middle of 2026. The Transportation, Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Committee reviewed an existing conditions report on Sept. 30, 2025, and the project team said at the time it would spend the winter preparing draft recommendations for the committee's next session in March 2026. That milestone has already passed. By the town's own timeline, Atherton is now at or past the point where the update was supposed to move toward final council adoption.
The person who has chaired that committee through the process is Jerry Leugers, an Atherton planning commissioner. In August 2026, Leugers was one of four candidates who qualified for four open City Council seats, an outcome the town treated as uncontested. Rather than pay San Mateo County roughly $15,000 to run an election nobody was contesting, the council canceled the November vote on Aug. 18 and seated all four candidates by appointment instead. Leugers is set to begin his council term in January 2027, by which point he will have spent close to two years steering which Atherton streets get bike lanes and which don't, and will soon be voting himself on whether to adopt the plan he helped write.
The other walking fight nobody closed
Streets aren't the only unresolved piece of how people move through Atherton on foot. Holbrook-Palmer Park, the 22-acre former private estate that Olive Holbrook Palmer willed to the town when she died in 1958, with the town formally taking ownership in 1964, is where most of that walking already happens. Its historic water tower and carriage house are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and its trails draw a steady stream of dog walkers and joggers precisely because the park is one of the only shared outdoor spaces in a town with no commercial district at all.
In 2019, the town's Parks and Recreation Committee removed a planned off-leash dog area from the park's master plan. The decision was significant enough that committee member Christine David resigned in protest. David went on to run for City Council in 2020, came in last in a four-way race for two seats, and qualified again for one of the four seats up in 2026. She was one of the two newcomers the council appointed alongside incumbents Rick DeGolia and Bill Widmer when the November election was canceled, and she is currently chair of the board of the nonprofit Friends of Atherton Library.
So starting in January 2027, the council seated by appointment includes both the committee chair who has spent close to two years deciding which streets get bike infrastructure and a former Parks and Recreation Committee member whose resignation traces back to a fight over off-leash dog access at the town's only public park. Two of the longest-running disagreements about how people move through Atherton on foot are about to sit at the same table.
What this means if you walk here every day
None of this changes the basic fact that Atherton still has no sidewalks and isn't likely to add them wholesale anytime soon. But the routes you actually use, whether that's the shoulder along Atherton Avenue, the loop through Holbrook-Palmer Park, or the stretch past Adelante Selby, have been actively renegotiated over the past year and a half by a specific set of people who are about to hold the votes that finish the job. The draft recommendations the project team promised to bring back to the Transportation, Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Committee this spring are what will shape which of those streets get formal bike lanes, which stay as they are, and which see the kind of neighborhood pushback that already stalled Selby Lane once.
If you've lived here long enough to know every shortcut and every blind curve, this is worth watching the way you'd watch anything else that touches your own front yard. The town kept an online input map open throughout the outreach process for residents to flag concerns block by block, and the council's eventual vote on adoption is where a decade of deferred decisions finally gets resolved one corridor at a time.
For those of us who spend our days tracking how Peninsula towns like Atherton actually function, this kind of granular civic detail is part of understanding the place, not just its home prices. Straser Silicon Valley keeps an eye on the town hall alongside the comps, because both shape what it's like to live on a particular street here. If you're weighing a move in Atherton, Menlo Park, or the surrounding Peninsula and want a clearer read on what's actually happening block by block, reach out to request a white-glove consultation.
