One Look Back, Four Years Forward: Transportation
“There’s a simple solution to our traffic problems. We’ll have business build the roads, and government build the cars.”
— Will Rogers
Three Problems
When I took office four years ago, San José faced three major transportation-related challenges.
First, a lack of investment in basic roadway maintenance over the last two decades left hundreds of miles of streets pockmarked with potholes. Second, San José Mineta International Airport lacked the flights needed by our residents and local businesses, and required to generate the airline-generated revenue to reliably finance a $1 billion expansion undertaken in the prior decade. Finally, hundreds of thousands of San Joséans endured — and still endure — daily, time-draining, spirit-sapping traffic, due to anachronistic urban planning and underdeveloped transit that hasn’t kept pace with growth.
While traffic is certainly as dreadful as it has ever been, we’re making progress on several key solutions in each of these areas. I’ll address each of these challenges in this article, as part of my series on our progress — and our future plans — to address critical challenges confronting our City, as I transition from my first mayoral term to my second (you can read January’s installment on affordable housing here). I’ll also discuss how we can best position San José for the future of transportation by leveraging innovations in such areas as micro-mobility, automation, and artificial intelligence, as well as the low-tech, but tried-and-true solutions: walking and cycling.
Our current transportation challenges are the products of several decades of underinvestment and suboptimal planning, and we won’t solve these problems overnight. Road and transit improvements require years to align political forces, secure millions or billions of necessary funding, perform environmental review, design, and construct. However, as you’ll read below, I’ve focused my first term — both as Mayor and in my leadership role with the Valley Transportation Authority — on securing the resources we’ll need to make critical investments in our infrastructure for the future.
1. Back to Basics: Our Streets
Whether we’re long-range commuters, devoted transit riders, or avid cyclists, every trip of ours begins — and depends upon — neighborhood streets. The condition of those streets and our main roads matters for our safety, for our fuel mileage, and for our pocketbooks. According to a recent study, roads in need of repair cost San José motorists more than $900 annually in the form of auto wear-and-tear, tire damage, and additional gas.
The current condition of our roads resulted from nearly two decades of underinvestment. In a typical year, City Hall spent only $20 or $25 million annually — but we would have needed to invest almost $93 million to keep our 2,400 miles of streets in a state of good repair.
Why these shortfalls? Over that period, city budgets weathered two severe recessions, and were withered by rapidly escalating pension and retiree healthcare costs. Longstanding state funding streams for roads evaporated more than a decade ago. By 2015, San Joséans inherited more than a half-billion-dollar backlog of road maintenance and repair, with 400 miles of streets in “poor” condition, and plenty more posing less-than-safe conditions for motorists and pedestrians. Even worse, the costs escalate exponentially with neglect; a $1 investment today in preventative maintenance (“street sealing”) saves more than $6 in in more extensive repairs (“street resurfacing”) a few years in the future.
In other words, there are no short-cuts here. There’s no smart phone “app” to fix a road. It simply costs money to repair streets, and if we ignore the problem, it costs even more money.
Help Is On Its Way
Fortunately, the pieces have finally fallen into place for restoring our roads. This year, we’ll pave more than 200 miles of streets for the first time since the turn of the century — and save our residents millions of dollars in tire and car repairs. We’ve also allocated $93 million for street repair this year, and more importantly, have established a steady stream of dedicated funding for future years of sustained maintenance.
There are several causes for this turnaround. Our Department of Transportation has encouraged paving companies to use more cost-effective methods, such as cold-in-place-recycling of existing pavement, to help reduce costs by as much as 30%. We’ve also gone to local taxpayers to generate the funding that the state and federal government stopped providing.
For example, in the depths of the Great Recession in 2010, I worked with then-VTA official John Ristow — now San José’s Acting Director of Transportation — to gather countywide support for the use of vehicle registration fees for street paving. Those fees now fund more than $6 million of San José’s street repairs. In 2016, I introduced — and the City Council approved — a budget that halted new spending in order to focus our scarce dollars on “fix-it-first” strategies for long-overdue infrastructure upgrades. Voter approval of a sales tax increase last June enabled us to commit more than half of that year’s funding — about $17 million — to street repair and paving (the rest of the dollars went to public safety and to rapid rehousing of the homeless). The passage of SB1, authored by Senator Jim Beall — and the subsequent defeat of Proposition 6 in November of 2018 will add another $19 million annually for local San José streets.
The largest source of street repair money, however, will come from VTA Measure B, which passed in 2016 with 70% of voter support countywide. I worked with Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino to raise the dollars needed for the campaign, and am grateful for his work leading that initiative. Though it passed three years ago, we’ll see the first dollars — some $42.8 million — from that measure only this year, stalled by a frivolous lawsuit that the courts recently dismissed.
In prior years, we lacked sufficient pavement funding to restore anything other than roads with high-frequency traffic, leaving neighborhood streets to continue deteriorating. Starting in 2020, however, funds from our recently-passed Measure T will allow us to reach every neighborhood. Measure T’s approval last November by 71% of our voters will provide $300 million for the restoration of the 400 miles of residential streets in the worst condition. It will also help us restore aging and deteriorating bridges, among other critical infrastructure.
So, pardon the dust — we’ll have a lot of repaving projects on our streets starting this spring.
As we’re paving, we’ll also be upgrading many curb ramps to ensure our sidewalks remain accessible to all of us, whether we travel by wheelchair or baby stroller. We’ll also be improving roadway markings, and installing bike lanes where street widths allow. We’ve got a lot of work to do — for the benefit of every San José neighborhood.
2. The Airport is Taking Off
When I came into office, Mineta San José International faced a budgetary “debt cliff.” After a billion-dollar expansion in 2008 the airport had steeply growing bond payments to make, but insufficient flights and fee-paying airlines to finance that debt. With the help of partners like the Silicon Valley Leadership Group — Guardino rallied local employers to provide data and secure commitments to expand service — and the Silicon Valley Organization, our airport and economic development teams better understood our employers’ travel needs, and doubled-down on a flight-attraction strategy. In four years, we have added 37 new domestic and international routes, making San José the nation’s fastest-growing major airport over the past three year period. a The airport served a record 14.3 million passengers last year, and reinvested its $7 million surplus into reserves and infrastructure. Kudos for much of this growth go to Aviation Director John Aitken, his predecessor, Kim Becker, and the hard work of Mark Kiehl, Vicki Day, and the rest of their understaffed but determined Airport team.
In the years ahead, we’ll focus on addressing the challenges of growth and constrained capacity. We’re among the first two airports in the nation to implement facial recognition software to reduce boarding and security delays on international flights, we’ve installed expedited exiting technology, and we’re constructing several security enhancements with the help of federal grants. We’ve commenced building out a $58 million, six-gate terminal expansion that will provide mid-term relief to our space constraints when it opens this summer. We’ve also begun planning for a more substantial permanent terminal addition in the coming years, and we’re introducing a dozen new, attractive retail and restaurant offerings in our terminals this year.
Finally, we’ll focus on making it easier to get to the Airport. Earlier this month, I announced the exploration of a critically-needed transit link between Diridon Station and the Airport that can dramatically improve traveler convenience and access. Whether utilizing recent innovations in boring technology, autonomous shuttles, or other approaches, we will engage with the private sector to identify an approach that aligns with near-term regional funding opportunities.
3. Traffic
The simplistic solution that Will Rogers humorously suggests for traffic at the top of this article has intuitive appeal, but it is only half-right. Building fewer cars may well reduce traffic, but building more roads won’t. Why? What economists call “induced demand” governs behavior of motorists with an iron fist: by providing more of a public good — i.e., a road — without charging for its use, consumers will happily use more of it. The outcome: more traffic. In 2014 for example, Los Angeles spent more than $1 billion on a five-year project to widen the 405 freeway to add a lane, only to learn that traffic moved one minute slower as a result. Beyond the inefficacy of freeway expansions, the more obvious cost and physical constraints pose sufficiently formidable barriers to road-widening projects — “they’re not making any more land,” according to Mark Twain — to send us looking for alternatives.
Alas, all good intentions of city building and traffic planning bump up against this seeming paradox: we can’t simply build our way out of a traffic congestion problem. That isn’t to say we don’t need to invest in our roads; indeed, we can make our roadways more efficient and effective for all modes of travel, and Measure B will provide some relief in key intersections and freeway interchanges that create chokepoints. We can also certainly improve our roads’ maintenance, reliability, and safety. But more freeway lanes and bigger roads consistently fail to deliver much relief to aggrieved commuters, and worst of all, they fail at a high cost.
The Promise of Transit
We can build smarter, however. Doing so requires an appreciation of the relationship between land development and transportation: a sprawling suburban pattern of one-and two-story development will cause paralyzing traffic on our freeways no matter how much transit we build. In contrast, high-density development that combines housing, jobs, retail, and other services in close proximity to transit — what planners call “smart growth” — will get more people out of their cars, and on the sidewalk.
That requires better planning — an issue that will form an active topic of discussion in this year’s update to our city’s blueprint for development, known as the General Plan. It also requires transit investment, but admittedly, at a price. New transit typically requires voter approval of large, regional measures that will pay for expensive projects. It also takes more time than anyone would like: countywide ballot measures that I first worked on with Guardino 19 years ago (and again, 11 years ago) have finally resulted in the construction of the first BART station in the Bay Area’s largest city, and passengers can begin boarding BART at the Berryessa/North San José Station this November.
The passage of the 2016 Measure B, referenced earlier, will also prove to be a game-changer. It will provide the local funding match to bring BART to Downtown and Santa Clara, to finally create a “ring of rail” around the Bay. The same measure will also invest more than $1 billion to bring a bursting-at-the seams CalTrain — which still relies on the same technology that propelled its first train in 1865, under the presidency of Abraham Lincoln — into the 21st century with electrification and capacity expansion. While CalTrain carries more than 60,000 daily commuters today, its expansion and electrification will provide a better alternative to the 101 “parking lot” that commuters endure every rush hour on their way up the Peninsula. Measure B also invests $1.5 billion in expressway and freeway intersection improvements that will relieve congestion along such corridors as Lawrence Expressway, 101, and 280.
In June of 2018, Guardino and I worked with a broader Bay Area-wide regional coalition to successfully pass Regional Measure 3, enabling transit development in East San José along Capitol Expressway, BART, and the strategically important Diridon Station.
San José’s Grand Central Station
These critical investments lay the foundation for transit construction in the next decade. In the next four years, I’ll focus our efforts on building the region’s “Grand Central Station” at Diridon, where six major transit lines will converge. San José’s Central Station will serve several hundred trains each day, providing the focus point for a massive redevelopment project that can become a national model for sustainability, placemaking, and urban design. Working with transit partners CalTrain and VTA, we have the opportunity to finally create a transit center worthy of a city of our size. By properly guiding Google’s investment, we can enable the creation of a vibrant village that mixes retail, restaurants, office, and housing along with Downtown’s longstanding anchor tenant, the San José Sharks at the SAP Arena.
In the months ahead, we will work to accelerate the delivery and reduce the cost of these projects. For BART’s arrival Downtown, I’ve supported VTA General Manager Nuria Fernandez’s successful efforts to secure the first use of a single-bore tunneling approach in North America, and to seek expedited approvals from the federal government through the use of private-public partnerships and innovative funding opportunities. I’ll be advocating in Sacramento — along with several mayoral colleagues, I’d expect — for expedited environmental review for transit projects. I’ll be working with regional and state leaders to identify more a cost-effective approach for connecting the Central Valley’s affordable housing to Silicon Valley’s jobs with high-speed rail. We’re reaching out to private sector partners like the Boring company to explore faster, more cost-effective tunnel construction methods for an underground airport connector. And, we can also find cheaper, familiar alternatives to expensive rail options, including one familiar solution: the bus.
Buses Are Beautiful
Major rail investments shouldn’t overshadow the importance of buses to the future of mobility in San José. As we’ve seen in cities around the world, when we take buses out of traffic with the use of segregated lanes, enable them priority through intersections to “beat the traffic,” and provide high-frequency service that boost reliability, people will ride them. I’ll push for further development of the Bay Area’s first bus rapid-transit system, which VTA just completed along East Santa Clara Street and Alum Rock, to counter the declining ridership we see elsewhere in the system. This year, VTA will also launch its “Next Network,” a proven approach to making buses more relevant by focusing and improving service in high-use corridors, rather than attempting to serve every corner of the County with mostly empty buses. The electrification of buses presents a unique opportunity for reducing both life-cycle costs and carbon footprint, and both the City and VTA have purchased their first fleets of all-electric models manufactured in California by Proterra. Despite VTA’s chronic fiscal challenges, we’ll continue to expand those electric fleets to reduce operation costs, and to enable expansion of transit service through rapid, high-frequency buses in segregated corridors.
Whether with electric buses, new tunnel boring technology, or other innovations, we’ll need to find ways to expand our transit development to keep pace with the needs of our rapidly-growing city. In February, I publicly urged serious study of additional transit corridors connecting to Downtown San José, including an Airport connector, a Monterey Road line, and a westward transit connection down West San Carlos and Stevens Creek. As we think about the critically important destinations that we’ll want to connect to Diridon Station — such as our Airport, Valley Fair/Santana Row, the Apple headquarters, and De Anza College — we need to begin our planning today so that we can identify the funding to move forward with construction in the years ahead.
The Future of Transportation, Both High-Tech and Low-Tech
Since traffic congestion fits squarely in the category of “hard-to-solve” urban problems, it’s fair to say that the City could do everything right, and traffic congestion will not ease substantially for a decade or more. Solving commute challenges and reducing congestion more quickly, and cost-effectively, requires more than thinking about roads and rail. Thousands of San Joséans commute daily by foot or bike, and investing in our trail network and improving the safety and reach of our bike lanes can boost their numbers. Moreover, promising improvements in micro-mobility — shared networks like electric-assist bike share and scooters — we can boost transit ridership, as more residents find the first-mile, last-mile connections that they need to transit stations. If we want to do something about traffic, we need to expand options beyond the automobile. As we’ve seen in cities from Portland to Paris, these links to trails and transit can bear fruit in the densest, most congested parts of our city.
Autonomous Transport
Of course, any discussion about the future of transportation inevitably wades into the impacts of autonomous vehicles. San José is committed to preparing for the future of mobility-as-a-service, a technological development that will sharply reduce demand for parking, and dramatically transform the development of cities. We’ve engaged with dozens of companies across a host of issues, and this summer, San José will provide an urban testing ground for Mercedes’ launch of an autonomous vehicle pilot between Downtown and West San José, with several other companies’ tests to follow. The proximity of many of these companies — San José’s own Velodyne is the leading manufacturer of the LIDAR technology used for autonomous transportation, for example — provides us with a front-row seat to the testing and deployment of this game-changing technology.
More impactful in the short-run, however, will be the integration of autonomy with public transit. Underutilized, physically segregated light-rail and bus-rapid-transit corridors may provide an ideal means of safely introducing autonomous bus service, and enable a cash-strapped VTA to expand transit service at a much lower cost per mile of operations. We’ll learn more in the months ahead, as we explore the benefits and risks of autonomy along with an understandably wary public.
Pedestrians, Bikes, and Safer Streets
Of course, some of the best innovations are “old tech;” consider the tried-and-true bicycle. We’ve made considerable progress on our goal of building out our 500-mile bike lane and trail system. Relating to the on-street bike lane portion of that network, we’ve installed just more than 300 miles. As I learned too painfully in January, however, most bike lanes are not SUV-proof. In the coming years, you’ll see greater investment in physically separated lanes — often with a painted buffer, or a physical barrier — to improve both safety and, importantly, the perception of safety.
You’ll also see us expand our off-street trail network, now exceeding 60 miles. In addition to efforts underway now to convert the railroad line through Five Wounds and Olinder neighborhoods to connect to the Coyote trail, we have new opportunities ahead. Connecting the Three Creeks Trail, and conversing rail lines south of 280 will enable a safer east-west route for many cyclists and pedestrians. In the upcoming GreenPrint, we should be bolder, and look at active-but-underutilized rail lines, such as the rail line connecting Northside, Japantown, and Hensley with the Guadalupe Creek Trail, for future rail-to-trail conversion.
Under Transportation Director John Ristow’s direction and that of his predecessor, now-Deputy City Manager Jim Ortbal, we’ve seen rapid development of bike-friendly infrastructure that has critically important benefits for pedestrian safety, as well. Using relatively low-cost changes that generally involve little more than re-arranging the paint on the streets, we can create “better bikeways” that slow traffic in high-pedestrian areas, and make it easier for walkers from 8 to 80 to cross busy streets. Implementing “road diets” to eliminate lanes on streets with excessive auto speeds can reduce automobile crashes at least 29 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. We’ve seen the safety benefits of road diets on several San Jose streets, ever since we learned that a similar narrowing of Pruneridge with bike lanes in 2013 cut auto collisions in half, but tripled bike traffic. Where appropriate, supplanting auto lanes with bike lanes, “bulb outs,” and other spatially narrowing devices can dramatically improve pedestrian and cyclist safety.
We’re also leveraging lessons learned as one of America’s leading “Vision Zero” cities, pledging to eliminate pedestrian fatalities through the better use of data to target speed enforcement and safety enhancements. We’ve identified the 17 corridors with the highest rate of injury accidents, and have begun implementing a series of measures to reduce crash rates. Data has also shown that poor lighting plays a significant role in a substantial percentage of our pedestrian fatalities. This year, with Measure T, I’ll push to go out to bid on transforming the remaining 40,000 low-quality, yellow sodium streetlights to high-visibility, bright LED’s, to address one of the key factors driving our experience in injury crashes. Our collective efforts have already reduced San Jose’s injury crash rate — less than three per 1,000 residents — to less than half of the national average. Look for more to come.
Micro-Mobility and the Sharing Economy
Bike-share and its less appreciated cousin, the electric scooter, have overtaken neighborhoods in and around Downtown San José. Many appreciate the convenience of borrowing a bike or scooter for a quick trip at a modest cost. Others reasonably complain of scooters whizzing by on sidewalks at high speeds, with little regard for the frail, elderly, or any other pedestrians occupying that space. Still, others wish for better distribution of these devices throughout the city, to provide access outside the Downtown.
Here’s the good news: first, the reach of bike share will expand. With a major infusion of investment from Lyft, which has recently acquired the company that previously operated bike share throughout the Bay Area, we’ll see hundreds more bikes deployed in San José soon. The company will also expand bike “docks” into neighborhoods citywide. The investment will not just broaden, but deepen as well: already, residents are seeing the emergence of electric “pedal-assist” bikes that will make long-haul trips easier in work clothes, and more e-bikes are on their way. With substantial discounts for low-income residents, we believe that bike share can provide a dramatic improvement in the mobility of many working residents and students throughout our city — especially for a city blessed with 300 days of sunshine each year.
More good news: the reach of electric scooters may shrink — at least on some streets. That is, under a proposal of mine that Council approved in December, we’re demanding that scooter companies deploy geofencing technologies to limit the incursion of fast-moving scooters on sidewalks and busy transit platforms where many pedestrians congregate, such as in Downtown and in busy neighborhood business districts. Several companies have expressed an interest working with San José to implement this innovation, which will ultimately improve the safety of the industry nationwide.
Why should we care? More scooters and bikes mean fewer people will rely on cars — to the benefit of their pocketbooks, of other traffic-burdened commuters, and of our planet. Identifying more of these “first-mile, last-mile” solutions will also boost ridership on bus, light rail, CalTrain, and (soon) BART. So, we should embrace innovations like these as important parts of our transportation ecosystem, so long as we can find safe ways to do so.
While the ultimate impacts of these many technological advances in transportation appear uncertain, we know that they will bring dramatic changes to how we move around our city, and to the very design of cities themselves. In San José, we’re “leaning in” on these transformations, to help shape them with our own vision for a safer, more sustainable, and more equitable future.
