Stevens Creek Boulevard is one of Santa Clara County’s most important corridors.
The boulevard hosts major schools, job centers, retail hubs and housing. Some of its biggest destinations include De Anza College, Main Street Cupertino, Santana Row, Westfield Valley Fair and the western edge of downtown San Jose. After years of hard work from employees at multiple local agencies, the corridor is on the verge of getting a major redesign.
The Stevens Creek Boulevard Corridor Steering Committee, made of representatives from Cupertino, Santa Clara, San Jose, the county and VTA, have spent the last two years evaluating the future of Stevens Creek.
Their plan has some great aspects to improve the safety and sustainability of the corridor, including protected bicycle lanes, wider sidewalks, street trees and more. However, even with the aforementioned wins, their plan falls disappointingly short in one key area: there are no major short-term transit improvements.
At the last meeting of the steering committee, I raised serious concerns about a lack of pedestrian refuge islands — protected areas in the median of a road — in addition to the lack of short-term transit improvements. As the safer crossings are easy to implement and already used nationwide, statewide, countywide and even on the Stevens Creek corridor in many places. This would be easy to add into the plan.
New refuge islands, which are proven to reduce pedestrian injuries and fatalities, will make the corridor safer and more comfortable to cross. However, the transit improvements I mentioned faced some opposition.
While only a small percentage of people in our county use transit, the raw numbers are quite large. Stevens Creek sees more than 10,000 bus riders every day across multiple routes, nearly 10% of all the county’s transit ridership. That makes it the second most used bus corridor in the county, behind only El Camino Real.
The cross-valley bus trip that many of those riders make, from De Anza College in Cupertino to Alum Rock Transit Center in East San Jose, takes up to 75 minutes in peak traffic. It’s slow, miserable and makes you feel like a second-class citizen.
The people who use the buses on Stevens Creek — low-income neighbors, students, youth and seniors who can’t drive — they all deserve better. By converting one car lane in each direction to a dedicated bus lane, the cross-valley trip can realistically be cut down to just over 30 minutes at all hours of the day. Not only will it be as fast or potentially faster than driving in peak traffic, it would massively increase the capacity of the corridor, all without majorly affecting car travel times.
Transit stops near businesses encourage higher levels of patronage. By putting high quality transit on Stevens Creek, more people will be able to shop along the corridor, support sustainable dense housing and reduce emissions.
To better support today’s residents and to lay the foundation to support tomorrow’s residents, the corridor needs to be more than what it is currently and more than what the existing plans call for. Stevens Creek needs better transit as soon as possible.
Our local governments are set to decide the future of the Stevens Creek corridor at the final meeting of the steering committee on Dec. 18 from 10 a.m. to noon at Santa Clara City Hall, 1500 Warburton Ave. These improvements are what we need if we want a more sustainable, more prosperous and more equitable Stevens Creek corridor.
Harry Neil is a De Anza College student and transit advocate with SCC4Transit and Transbay Coalition. He is not affiliated with the Stevens Creek Corridor Vision project.
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