TO: TRANSPORTATION AND
ENVIRONMENT COMMITTEE
FROM: John Ristow
SUBJECT: Move San José Plan Annual
Report
DATE: May 18, 2026
Approved Date:
5/27/2026
RECOMMENDATION
Accept the Move San José Plan annual report.
BACKGROUND
Building on the 2011 General Plan and Climate Smart San José (2018), the Move San José plan (Plan)1, adopted in August 2022, advances safe, equitable, low-emission transportation by prioritizing walking, biking, and transit. The Plan includes nine goal areas, 26 implementation strategies, and 36 key performance indicators designed to measure and guide progress across infrastructure, mobility, and access (see Attachments A and B). For example, the key performance indicators that measure the Access for All goal include measurements of bike network connectivity and cost of transportation as a percentage of income. These indicators promote the Access for All goal through their targeted measurement of access and equity. The full list of key performance indicators is provided in Attachment B.
ANALYSIS
Decision Support System
San José's transportation system continues to evolve. Travel behavior remains largely car-dependent, but targeted investments in transit, safety, and active transportation are beginning to show measurable results. This year’s update draws from the newly enhanced Decision Support System (DSS) to document where progress is occurring, where gaps persist, and how the City is directing resources to address both. Overall, DSS analysis indicates that while San José is making measurable progress in areas such as transit performance, electrification, and multimodal investment, broader 1 Link to the Move San José plan: https://gis.sanjoseca.gov/maps/movesj T&E AGENDA: 6/8/26
ITEM: (d)3
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Subject: Move San José Plan Annual Report
transportation system conditions and travel behavior continue to reflect longstanding structural reliance on driving.
Using citywide transportation data, the DSS has helped establish a continuously updated baseline of conditions related to transportation safety, environmental performance, multimodal access, equity, and travel behavior. The subsequent sections summarize key insights identified through DSS analysis, including trends in crash severity, vehicle electrification, transit accessibility, mode choice, and broader travel behavior patterns.
In addition to system performance monitoring, the DSS evaluates over 500 planned transportation projects identified through adopted planning efforts (i.e., Downtown Transportation Plan, West San José Multimodal Transportation Improvement Plan, En Movimiento, and Better Bike Plan 2025). The DSS assesses projects based on their expected network benefits and tradeoffs across key performance indicators, helping staff identify investments that score strongly across multiple City goals and demonstrate measurable public benefit. While the DSS does not make decisions or originate projects, it strengthens transparent, data-informed decision-making and investment prioritization.
Since the Transportation and Environment Committee’s last update, the Department of Transportation has continued to refine the DSS, expanding functionality and improving usability. An initial version of the DSS was developed alongside the Move San José Plan in Fiscal Year 2021-2022. In January 2025, the City entered a contract for big transportation data, allowing the DSS to reflect current conditions citywide—including travel behavior, traffic trends, and geographic disparities—while also improving the City’s ability to forecast project outcomes and monitor performance over time.
Recent DSS analysis of San José’s transportation system performance and travel behavior reinforce the need for a balanced investment approach that both maintains existing infrastructure and accelerates travel mode shift. Consistent with the City’s adopted priorities for regional transportation funding, this includes:
Maintaining transit-supportive corridors to preserve transit reliability; Making capital investments that expand access to major destinations and regional hubs; and
Improving transit service, speed, and rider experience to increase competitiveness with driving.
Collectively, these strategies respond directly to current transportation conditions and support continued progress toward the City’s equity, safety, sustainability, and mobility goals. They also reflect a recognition that travel choices are shaped not only by individual preferences, but also by the built environment and transportation networks people navigate daily. In areas historically built around driving, land use and development patterns create durable conditions that are slow to change. Buildings and
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Subject: Move San José Plan Annual Report
infrastructure last for decades, meaning destinations, trip patterns, and travel distances shift gradually over time. Achieving broader mode shift therefore requires sustained, coordinated investment in both transportation and land use.
Performance Metrics Overview
This section presents the status of Move San José’s progress, drawing from the DSS key performance indicators and recent travel behavior data.
Transportation Safety
Vision Zero is the City’s commitment to eliminating traffic fatalities and severe injuries in San José by 2040. In 2025, traffic fatalities decreased, but severe injuries and fatalities involving pedestrians and bicyclists persisted at similar levels. In the first half of 2025, there were 2,168 recorded crashes, with 120 severe injuries and fatalities. Of these, 61 involved vulnerable road users, or people biking, walking, or rolling. During the same period in 2024, there were 2,873 crashes, resulting in 121 severe injuries and fatalities, with 48 involving vulnerable road users.
DSS analysis of San José’s citywide bike and pedestrian stress scores, which model estimated stress levels for people traveling outside of a vehicle, also reflects broader concerns about transportation safety and comfort. A citywide bike score of 47.1 and pedestrian score of 51.1, both out of 100 (where 100 indicates very high stress and 0 indicates low stress), suggest that many users continue to experience challenging conditions when walking, biking, or rolling throughout the city.
San José continues to implement design-based safety improvements throughout its transportation network. In 2025, the City installed or upgraded 14.1 miles of on-street bikeways as part of various safety, restriping, and complete streets projects.
Additionally, the City upgraded approximately 40 intersections with enhanced safety treatments last year, with six additional locations currently under construction. These upgrades incorporate elements of protected intersections, a design approach that increases separation and visibility between people biking, walking, and driving at intersections to slow turning vehicles, reduce conflicts, and make crossings more predictable for all users. These bikeway and intersection investments continue to support broader efforts to improve safety and comfort for vulnerable users.
Environmental Progress
Environmental performance metrics track progress toward reducing transportationrelated greenhouse gas emissions, particularly through increased zero-emission vehicle adoption and reductions in vehicle miles traveled.
San José continues to make measurable progress toward its climate goals, particularly through increased electric vehicle adoption and an expanding charging infrastructure.
The share of zero-emission vehicles registered in the city has grown to 7.2% in 2025 (or 83,400 vehicles), up from 6.1% at the end of 2024, reflecting an 18% increase in registered zero emissions vehicles. This continues a trend averaging 33% growth year over year since 2018.
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Subject: Move San José Plan Annual Report
This growth is supported by an expanding charging network. Since 2022, the city’s public charging network has expanded by an average of 9% annually, including a 9.2% growth rate in 2025, up from 7.9% in 2024. In 2025, just over 50 new public charging stations and 224 charging ports came online in San José. According to the U.S.
Department of Energy, the city now has more than 650 chargers and nearly 2,300 charging ports, equivalent to approximately one charging port per 445 residents.
Vehicle electrification addresses emissions intensity but reducing vehicle travel itself remains equally essential to meeting the City's climate goals.
San José’s General Plan sets a target of reducing vehicle miles traveled to 11 per capita per day by 2040. In 2025, daily vehicle miles traveled per capita decreased to
16.7, down approximately 3% from the previous year, though it remains about 10% above 2019 levels (see Figure 1). Closing the gap to the 2040 target will depend on continued investment in transit, biking, and walking infrastructure that makes driving less necessary.
Figure 1 San José Daily VMT per Capita Trends Relative to General Plan Reduction Targets Multimodal Access and Equity
Access metrics assess how well the transportation system supports travel by walking, biking, and transit, and whether residents can reliably reach key destinations using
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Subject: Move San José Plan Annual Report
these modes. These metrics also reflect transportation equity—whether residents across different communities and mobility needs can safely and reliably access destinations using non-driving travel options.
The transportation network continues to favor driving, disproportionately limiting access for residents who cannot or do not drive due to disability, age, or income. According to DSS analysis, citywide bike connectivity remains relatively low with a score of 39 out of 100, where higher scores indicate a more connected low-stress bike network. This suggests that many residents face challenges reaching jobs, schools, transit, and other essential destinations reliably by bike. At the same time, San José’s Complete Streets Index stands at 66%, meaning only about two-thirds of street segments support expected travel modes based on roadway type, including sidewalks, bikeways, and transit services where appropriate. These gaps also have affordability implications:
while San José residents spend about 10% of household income on transportation— below the national average of 13%—gaps in the multimodal network limit access to lower-cost travel options, particularly for residents who rely on non-driving modes.
Recent transit investments are beginning to narrow these gaps. As of October 2025, all Valley Transportation Authority transit routes within San José utilize centralized transit signal priority across more than 650 signalized intersections. Despite increases in regional congestion, travel times across Valley Transportation Authority’s Frequent Network increased by just 1% in San José from 2022 to 2025, compared to 4% in other jurisdictions. On select routes, even greater improvements have been observed, with travel time savings of up to approximately three minutes, or about 7%. Similar improvements are reflected in employment access: 40% of jobs reachable within a 30- minute drive are now also reachable by transit in the same timeframe, up from 37%.
While barriers to reliable non-driving travel remain, this trend represents meaningful progress.
Travel Behavior Trends
Travel behavior metrics track how people travel across the city, including travel mode choice, trip frequency, and trip purpose. These indicators help assess progress toward reducing reliance on single-occupancy vehicles and increasing the use of walking, biking, and transit.
Most trips in San José are made by single-occupancy vehicles. Walking, biking, and transit accounted for about 14.5% of all trips in 2025, remaining relatively stagnant since 2019. However, commute mode share reflects incremental progress toward a more multimodal system since the pandemic. While driving alone continues to dominate, its share has declined, suggesting a gradual shift away from single-occupancy vehicles, with much of that shift absorbed by increases in carpooling and non-driving modes.
Carpooling now accounts for 15% of commute trips, up from 12% in 2021, while public transit, walking, and biking now accounts for 6.5% of commute trips, up from about 5% in 2021.
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Subject: Move San José Plan Annual Report
At the same time, total commute trips have increased each year since 2021, largely driven by a return to in-person work and a decline in remote work from about 30% to about 13%. Taken together, declining drive-alone commute share, increasing transit and carpool use, and rising in-person work attendance suggest commute travel is becoming modestly more multimodal, while overall travel behavior remains largely unchanged. This suggests that structural barriers related to factors such as trip purpose, network connectivity, travel time competitiveness, and land use patterns continue to limit broader mode shift beyond the work trip. As a result, most travel demand continues to be met by driving.
However, commute trips account for only about 40% of daily travel. According to Replica2 data, discretionary trips, including shopping, dining, social, and recreational activities, comprise a similar share of total trips. In addition, one-third of all trips are two miles or less, and trips of this length have increased by approximately 6.5% year-overyear. These patterns suggest that more daily travel is occurring over shorter distances, signifying that a significant share of daily travel is short and flexible in nature, creating opportunities for mode shift to walking, biking, and transit.
Shared micromobility options, including bikeshare and scooters, provide first/last-mile connections that support short non-driving trips. Currently, usage remains low, with 56,219 shared micromobility trips taken in 2025, or about 55 trips per 1,000 residents.
Until March 2026, only bikeshare was available; shared scooters have since been reintroduced citywide. Docked bikeshare stations are primarily located in central San José, with less than 20% of total households living within a quarter mile of a station, limiting citywide access.
In response, San José will expand its bikeshare system by 32 stations beginning in summer 2026 as part of the broader initiative designed to build bike culture and improve mobility access, particularly in East San José. This expansion is supported and funded by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and The Clean Mobility Options Voucher Program, which was awarded by California Air Resources Board in 2024.
Collectively, the growth in shorter trips, gradual increases among non-driving commute modes, and expansion of micromobility options suggest that improvements are beginning to influence travel behavior in specific contexts; however, these changes have not yet translated into substantial systemwide mode shift. Despite growing opportunities for mode shift, most travel demand continues to be met by driving.
Data-Driven Project Prioritization
DSS evaluation of planned transportation projects highlights investments that perform strongly across multiple transportation goals, particularly projects that improve safety, multimodal connectivity, transit access, and travel reliability. 2 Replica is a third-party data platform that integrates public and private datasets to model the built environment and how people interact with it. Using aggregated and anonymized data, Replica provides estimates of travel behavior, trip patterns, and activity across mobility, land use, and economic systems.
TRANSPORTATION AND ENVIRONMENT COMMITTEE
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Subject: Move San José Plan Annual Report
High-Performing Planned Projects
Two complete streets projects, the Senter Road Complete Streets project and Stevens Creek-San Carlos Transit-Priority Improvements project, illustrate how planned investments can address distinct but complementary system needs. DSS evaluation identified both projects as among the strongest-performing planned transportation investments because they projected measurable benefits across multiple key performance indicators. On Senter Road, DSS analysis highlighted opportunities to improve safety conditions along a Priority Safety Corridor with high rates of severe crashes and elevated bike and pedestrian stress. In contrast, DSS evaluation of the Stevens Creek-San Carlos Transit-Priority Improvements project highlighted strong potential to improve multimodal connectivity, transit access, and mode shift along a major regional corridor serving destinations such as Santana Row and Westfield Valley Fair. Collectively, these projects illustrate how the DSS can help identify highperforming investments and guide limited transportation resources toward projects that address multiple system needs simultaneously.
Additional high-performing projects identified through DSS evaluation similarly demonstrate broad benefits related to corridor safety, protected bikeways, and transit access:
Monterey Road Protected Bikeway: Upgrades existing bike lanes to protected bike lanes from Alma Avenue to Bernal Road, improving safety and accessibility for users of all ages and abilities.
King Road Transit-Priority Improvements: Introduces a combination of protected bike lanes and intersections, enhanced transit stops, trees and street lighting, and upgraded crosswalks to improve transit reliability, safety, and multimodal access.
First Street Protected Bikeway: Adds and upgrades bike lanes to protected bike lanes from Alma Avenue to US-237, creating a continuous low-stress corridor for cyclists.
Collectively, these high-performing projects identified through DSS evaluation demonstrate how the DSS can support data-informed prioritization across hundreds of planned transportation projects by identifying projects that address multiple City goals simultaneously and deliver broad, measurable public benefit.
Overall, the findings presented in this update reinforce that achieving broader transportation goals requires sustained, coordinated investment that addresses both the infrastructure gaps and the structural conditions that continue to shape travel behavior and reliance on driving. The DSS provides the City with a framework to better understand these conditions and prioritize investments that deliver measurable benefits across multiple transportation goals.
TRANSPORTATION AND ENVIRONMENT COMMITTEE
May 18, 2026
Subject: Move San José Plan Annual Report
COORDINATION
This memorandum has been coordinated with the City Attorney's Office and the City Manager's Budget Office.
/s/
JOHN RISTOW
Director of Transportation
For questions, please contact Ramses Madou, Division Manager, Planning, Policy, and Sustainability, at [email protected] or (408) 975-3283.
ATTACHMENTS
ATTACHMENT A – Strategies and Goals
ATTACHMENT B – Goals & Key Performance Indicators
ATTACHMENT C – Decision Support System Goals Areas of Move San José KPI Report
ATTACHMENT D – Decision Support System Top 5 High-Performing Projects Report ATTACHMENT E – Local Transportation Activities