November 15, 2022
San José City Council
City of San José
200 E. Santa Clara Street
San José CA 95113
Comments for Item 5.1 File 22-1660 – Downtown Transportation Plan.
Dear Mayor Liccardo, Vice Mayor Jones and Councilmembers:
SPUR commends the Department of Transportation’s development of the Downtown Transportation Plan. We want to thank the City and staff in pursuing bold strategies and big ideas for San José’s Downtown that will move the city closer to meeting its goals for sustainable and equitable mobility within and beyond the city center. SPUR has been a supporter of the city’s efforts to align its many transportation policies and strategies to better serve the people of San José.
San José is at the center of an expanding transit network with ongoing local and regional investments, and employers in Silicon Valley are continuously interested in great places for people to live, work, and play. The Plan anticipates that Downtown will grow and bring in over 60,000 new residents, 100,000 new workers, 15,000 new students, and many more visitors by the year 2040. However, many of the assumptions in the plan rely on housing, work and mobility patterns from 2019 – before the COVID-19 pandemic upended how people live their lives. One of the most transformative changes has been in the number of working-from-home options offered by employers and the lower number of commercial o
ffice space leasing in downtowns in
comparison to pre-pandemic levels. The success of the Plan’s initiatives will rely on how the City adapts to these new realities in its implementation of transit and mobility priority projects.
In order to meet the needs of an evolving and more highly dense city center, the Plan’s prioritization of short-term and long-term projects offer strong targets and goals to meet within speci
fied time frames. It has been critical for the City to set a structure to prioritize transit and multi-modal access within San José, and the Downtown Transportation Plan has clearly aligned many of these big ideas and projects alongside Move San José and Transit First Policy to bring