If you design for cars...you get cars.

New textured pedestrian crosswalk
being placed at the corner
of Campbell and Winchester.

During many San Jose General Plan and Diridon Station meetings, I remember Michele Beasley of Greenbelt Alliance invoking a well known phrase, "If you design for cars, you'll get cars. If you design for people you'll get people". Just this week I took photos of two locations in the valley that bring this point home.

One picture is of the ongoing construction work in downtown Campbell and at the intersection of Winchester Ave. and Campbell Ave. The Winchester Ave project will make for a more walkable Campbell west of the downtown area. Two years ago the city built their complete streets project to the east of downtown near the entrance of the Los Gatos Creek Trail.

These infrastructure improvements, along with the construction of a multi-story garage, and additional private investment has helped to make Downtown Campbell into a bustling retail area with shops, an extremely popular farmer's market, and a number of well known restaurants.

Almaden Blvd.; wide, with no
pedestrian activity.
The old SJDOT felt it was
better to design for cars.
The 'new' SJDOT gets it.

The other photo is of one part of the city of San Jose's downtown Bicycle Improvement project along Third and Fourth Streets, Ninth and Eleventh Streets, Almaden Blvd. (shown in the picture). The city is doing great work incorporating more bike routes in the downtown area. One of the areas is along Almaden Blvd., a suburban office park arterial dropped into a traditional downtown area. With the wide boulevard, the large medians, the mid-level office towers with large setbacks to allow for front lawns you get the feeling if you where in Tustin or Irvine, not a downtown with 250 years of San Jose history.

What would you rather have textured crosswalks or textured left turn lanes?

Which area do you perceive as being safer?

If you notice the photo, old school San Jose designed as if for cars only. The boulevard is wide, wide enough to have one of those old Soviet era May day celebrations with the parade of ICBM's (curious if the generation who grew up without newspapers knows what an ICBM is. click here for answer)

Related Posts:
New building going up in the heart of downtown Campbell
Tread Bike Shop - Just one more reason to enjoy downtown Campbell