By Robert Haugh
Earlier this week, the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC) heard a debate about eliminating parking on Benton Street. It’s a crucial issue facing our city.
Santa Clara needs to balance the needs of residents, cyclists, and pedestrians while promoting responsible traffic flow.
Some residents support a bike-centric Benton Street.
Others rely on on-street parking especially those with limited mobility or who have elderly residents in the home.
Some advocates want all parking removed. That’s an extreme position that will likely encourage speeding since there will be no parked cars to impede traffic flow.
The top priority should be speeding.
A neighborhood group study shared with the BPAC reveals that 86 percent of drivers exceed the speed limit on Benton Street.
Implementing effective traffic calming measures should be the top priority. The City should consider crosswalks, speed humps (if feasible for emergency vehicle access), or even narrower lanes.
The Benton Street parking issue is part of a larger city-wide trend. Proposals for prioritizing bike lanes and high-density housing development are gaining traction.
While these initiatives can be good for Santa Clara, we must ensure they are practical and consider the needs of existing residents.
Benton Street residents believe designated parking areas can coexist with safe pedestrian and cycling paths. They want the City Council to take a practical approach to Benton Street and similar projects.
The City should prioritize traffic calming measures, explore designated parking options, and listen to the residents who call these streets home.
Editor’s Note: A City Council public hearing is anticipated for late summer/ early fall.
To contact the neighborhood group: benton.street.feedback@gmail.com
To contact the City and to get more information, visit the project website
Some very good comments, thanks for your time.
It seems obvious to me that most of this bike lane crap is just virtue signaling of the highest order. People want to be able to say they support something green. Bull crap, how about the people that you inconvenience and push out of the way, just so you can brag about being green? Leave us alone! Go be green somewhere else.
They BPAC commissioned a study and there were 3 proposals for different sections of Benton. The narrow section between Lincoln and San Tomas was where they recommended removing parking based on surveys they had done of 4 options: do nothing, share the road, bike lines with parking on one side, bike lanes with no parking on the street. The community responded by flooding the survey with complaints via email so the BPAC agreed to consider all 4 options and voted 3-2 for a share the road solution. 2 members were unmoved by all the testimony of citizens who were against having their parking removed for all those reasons. Now it will go to the City Council with proposals for bike lanes on the first two sections of Benton, and no recommendation on the narrow portion.
In the 2018 Bike plan it was decided to make Homestead and El Camino the preferred bike routes. Now bicyclists don’t want to use Homestead because they say the cars go too fast and the El Camino buildout never happened.
The theory is that if they build it, people will ride their bikes and they want to build a transit mall at the SC Train Station. So more blue sky projects while the area around Levi remains undeveloped, we lost our golf and tennis courts, our swim center is decaying, and development projects continue to be approved without any corresponding increase in recreational options.
So the real issue on Benton is speed mitigation. Being a fire/police corridor it will never be as safe as Homestead which already exists. There is no reason to assume that bike ridership will ever increase to justify these costs or inconveniences. Half of the bikes you see today are now motorized anyway. They need to focus on bicycling for recreational reasons rather than the myth that any significant number of people will ever use bicycles as their primary form of commuting to work – even if they ever do open a BART station our lifetime in Santa Clara Station.
While I hold much esteem and appreciation for the proprietor of this forum, I respectfully disagree with the aim of this editorial.
“Traffic calming” is a euphemism for “impeding another’s livelihood.”
Road diets? Ha!
I routinely drove from Winchester between Pruneridge (two lanes) and Hedding (victim of road diet: one lane + bike lane) and saw more squirrels using the bike lanes than bicyclists. OK, this is anecdotal, I know—especially at the time of day. But these efforts to impede commerce and our liberties to travel to work or just live our lives are suffocating.
I always wondered how much CO2 and other gasses were emitted into the environment by more cars backed up waiting for a traffic light that were INCREASED by road diets.
Vehicles and their owners pay TAXES to ‘purportedly’ pay for road maintenance, whether by DMV or gasoline taxes. Soon, California will require TAXES based on mileage with EVs.
Bicyclists reap the benefits of TAXPAYERs yet go on inconsiderately.
I propose that bicyclists be taxed accordingly. Perhaps by mileage. To compensate for increased green house emissions, too.
***For context, I worked with a person who would bicycle from Santa Clara to Los Gatos—rain or shine. This person would wear a raincoat in the rainiest of the winter days (i.e., even downpours). Yet, this person never demanded others to accommodate this person.***
Silence Dogood,
The funding for maintenance of our roads come from many different sources of which gasoline and diesel taxes are but two. There is a lot of funding that comes from federal sources and other state sources as well as local ones. Many and probably most people who ride bicycles also own and drive cars and also pay fuel taxes and other forms of taxes that go toward our road funds. Electric vehicle owners pay an annual fee.
DMV fees support the DMV and it was just a few years ago that a separate fee as part of vehicle registration was added for road maintenance. But as I said before most people who ride bicycles also own and drive cars. I do not think it is a bad idea to introduce some kind of tax on bicycle use to contribute to road costs however if you think through this proposition it is hard to imagine any tax or fee that would be both reasonable and lucrative enough to pay for the additional bureaucracy that they would require to administer and collect much less make much of a contribution to road maintenance costs. Bicycles also do not impact our roads enough to increase the cost of maintaining them.
Whether we like it or not our valley continues to be a very attractive place for people to move to live and work. Our future will certainly be one with more and more dense housing and a higher and higher population. We are not going to build new local roads or widen them to add more lanes. Because of this if all the new people who move here drive cars along with everyone else who already lives here then traffic and parking will continue to be worse and worse as we have seen them get for fifty years.
There is no stopping the population growth and higher density housing and the only way that we can avoid turning into a place with nothing but traffic jams on all roads is to create good ways to get around. Whether we like it or not we need to create more mass transit and safe ways for smaller and lower polluting vehicles to get around.
Bicycles are a good way for us have less people driving cars and in order for us to get more people to reduce or abandon driving cars we need roads that make bicycling safe. Electric bicycles are especially wonderful and easy for even people who are not young and athletic to get around with ease. I purchased an electric bicycle a few years ago and while I still own and drive a car much more I do like to run errands on my bicycle. I have a rack with bags I can attach that let me do grocery shopping with my bicycle and it is easy. I sometimes ride my bicycle to work and when I do the time it takes for me to commute is only minutes slower than by car and if I had to do the same commute I have had to do in the past during rush hour on traffic jammed streets I think I would be faster.
We messed up when we abandoned our old streetcars and railways and thought we could just keep building homes and offices and adding more and more new drivers forever. We cannot do this and as bad as it is it will only get worse unless we make big changes that include safe roads for bicycling and better mass transit.
Buchser Alum,
I love your passion on your point of view, although I disagree. This makes this forum great for dialogue, unlike Silicon Valley Der Stürmer.
From my lineage, streetcars and trolleys were prevalent. I think we may agree on that. Maybe.
You say: “Bicycles are a good way for us have less people driving cars and in order for us to get more people to reduce or abandon driving cars we need roads that make bicycling safe.”
What?
Apologies, but those who deprive others from their liberties…. I dunno.
But respond with:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are LIFE, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of HAPPINESS. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
I regret that persons wish to deprive others of their rights.
Silence Dogood,
What liberties or rights do you think are being deprived by any of the proposals for Benton or any other proposed or actual changes to our streets? Is there a single public street where you are denied the liberty of traveling that street in general or specifically by driving your car?
Buchser Alum,
I believe I’ve tried to open up discourse, but you seemly neglect the founding principles of this “Great Experiment.”
You convey a different understanding to the term “liberty” than I.
Elvis Presley was a sharecropper’s son and picked cotton. In Tupelo, MS. Others had “liberty” (as you apparently define) to move up and down the rows of cotton, under enslavement. Is that liberty? Mere ability to move is not freedom to move. Not sure I would call that liberty.
What is your definition of ‘liberty?’
Silence Dogood,
I am only trying to understand you. I believe strongly in the founding principles of this country. I am trying to understand how you feel they apply to this matter.
You have written “those who deprive others from their liberties” and “persons wish to deprive others of their rights” but I am unclear on what liberties and rights you are saying have been or would be deprived and who the persons are who are trying to deprive others of those liberties or rights.
What liberties and rights do you feel have been denied or are in danger of being deprived? Who will be deprived of these liberties or rights? And who will be depriving them?
When routinely traveling throughout the city in both my personal life and for work for decades, I have never personally seen a bicyclist using the corridor that was established along Calabazas between Monroe and Pomeroy. And yet that boulevard was heavily modified to accommodate cyclists. The creation of the “green lanes” in hindsight was much more of a mis-engineered traffic calming measure than anything else.
Does the city even make data-based decisions anymore, or are these decisions based on opinion and whim? I would think it would be most important to listen to the homeowners, businesses, and taxpayers along any street that is subject to this kind of potential massive change rather than what amounts to a small special interest group. Does the current daily throughput of cyclists really justify a major change?
You can already see with other similar projects in the city that the adage “If you build it, they will come” does not necessarily encourage people to take up alternative means of transport. And if the real concern is traffic calming, is there a better solution? Roundabouts? Speed humps? More traffic lights and better control at four-ways?
A lot of the houses between San Thomas and Scott have smaller footprints with smaller driveways? How do these folks fee about losing their street parking?
What are the anticipated impacts on important city services such as emergency response and trash collection?
How about we get some adequate staffing in Traffic Engineering rather than the constant turnover of interns working on a backlog of unfinished projects (that are probably more critical) before we tackle items like this?
Please don’t do the typical half-assed current Santa Clara method of making a decision without adequate public input and then making us all deal with the unintended and unanticipated consequences of yet another bad idea poorly implemented.
Love it. 1st: remove street parking, are they nuts. Many households are now multi-generational which will require more parking, not less. 2nd: I haven’t seen that many bikes to justify all these green lanes and posts on the street. It just makes driving confusing. 3rd: The City has MANY more projects that should go before bike lanes. Perhaps bicyclists should have to be licensed so they know the rules of the road.
Linda,
Even though most drivers are licensed I cannot go anywhere in town without seeing many break the rules of the road. Every time I am on Lawrence or San Tomas expressways I see people driving so fast like they are on a freeway and I see people even doing this while they are looking at their phone. I now never go on a green until I look both ways to make sure there is not someone running the red light while speeding.
When I drive on the parts of Benton with two lanes and am driving the speed limit or a smidgen more other drivers will get impatient and pull around and speed past. I rarely fail to see someone driving ten or even twenty miles above the speed limit on that street and many like it.
I remember when I was a child I used to have so much freedom by riding my bicycle everywhere. It is sad that children these days cannot enjoy this freedom because so many adults drive so dangerously and our roads do nothing to prevent one terrible mistake by an irresponsible driver from causing death or terrible injury.
I do not find it confusing to navigate the roads with bike lanes or posts or anything that has been done to make bicycling a little bit less dangerous.
I do understand why many people would suffer a big loss from losing the ability to park their cars in front of their homes. I do not pack my garage full of old stuff and use my garage for one of my cars and there is also room on my driveway for another so I do not use the street to park my cars but when friends visit I would not want for them to have to walk from parking that is around the corner. And I know that some people have more cars than they can fit in their garage and driveway. I think that most people do not even use their garage because they have it packed with old stuff that probably should be thrown away anyways.
I think that we just all need to look at all the different options that are available to find a compromise that can lead to having roads that serve everyone’s needs. It is probably too soon for us to eliminate all street parking or even street parking on one side of residential streets. But I do look forward to the commission coming up with a solution that makes our roads more safe. And not just for people riding bicycles but also people driving cars and also people who are walking. I am sick and tired of having to be paranoid about my safety while taking walks in my neighborhood because drivers do not know the rules of the road or basic decency and speed around at forty miles per hour in a twenty five mile per hour zone. I could not tell you the number of times I have been walking across the street in a crosswalk and a driver did not wait for me to cross before speeding through the crosswalk.
Dear Community,
Be very careful about what you hear and who is presenting the information.
Do your homework.
TRUST NO-ONE EXCEPT YOUR FEELINGS.
VTA is trying to do the same thing on King Road in San Jose.
The Community fought back the removal of on street parking for residents.
The issue is this.
With the Cost of Living expenses in Santa Clara Valley, the number of people and Families that Double and Triple-up into one home has increased.
That means that sometimes Grandmother’s and Grandfather’s have to park on the street.
But if that Parking is removed – how far are these Seniors going to have to walk with their groceries?
How far are they going to have to walk from their vehicles to their homes from a distant parking space?
How far are disabled Family members going to have to walk for another neighborhood street?
How about in Home Businesses that bring in much needed extra funds, like Elder Care and Babysitting – where do those families park at drop-off and Pick-up?
The truth is this –
The City and VTA tried to talk the East Valley King Road Community, into believing that they were doing the right thing for the Community.
It was never about the Community.
It was all about VTAwanting to have quicker time schedules on King Road.
If you do not believe me, ask the City Transportation Team that admitted that they were trying to help VTA, not even thing about our East Valley Families.
THEY EXPRESSED THIS AT THE ALUM ROCK AVENUE AND EAST SANTA CLARA STREET BUSINESS ASSOCIATION MEETING A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO.
I have more but this is long enough.
In Community Spirit,
Danny Garza
Ironworkrdanny@yahoo.com
President
Plata Arroyo Neighborhood Association and Gateway East N.A.C.
All excellent points!
I live in walking distance to Benton, and the section between Pomeroy and Lawrence is the area with the fastest cars. That section is about 1/2 mile long and deserves the most attention, with buy-in from residents. (Don’t merely “listen” to residents along that stretch, pay attention and adjust plans based on what they say.) As Mr. Myers points out, other parts of Benton are in much less need of change. Also, the section between Pomeroy and Kiely passes by Santa Clara High School. That area is already monitored and the High School is a major destination, with nearly 2000 students and staff arriving and departing every weekday. Changes there should be made carefully and with buy-in not only from residents but also from staff and students.
Benton is a fairly long street with many different conditions. Between San Tomas and Scott it is very narrow with parking on both sides. There is not enough room for safe a bike lane, IMHO. There are many small houses with single wide driveways. To forbid them from parking in front of their house to accommodate someone that might want to pedal through their neighborhood would be wrong. There are other routes to take.