by Gregory Saville
This past winter and spring, members of the SafeGrowth network visited San Jose, California in Silicon Valley and taught residents how to apply our safety planning method to roadway safety. Why roadway safety?
San Jose is the largest city in the San Francisco Bay area with over 900,000 residents. It is the nexus of Silicon Valley with shiny architecture and high-tech HQs. Yet San Jose has a dark veil hiding a terrible truth - a deadly plague of traffic fatalities, especially pedestrians and bicyclists struck by cars.
In 2022, 65 people died from traffic fatalities, over half of whom were pedestrians. On one single roadway alone – a ten-mile section of Monterey Road, known by locals as “Blood Alley” – 42 people were either killed or injured in traffic crashes between 2019 to 2022.
We were hosted by the AARP California state office (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), with some exceptional leaders at the helm: State Director, Nancy McPherson, and Ameen Khan, Associate State Director for the San Jose AARP office.
OUR TASK
Our task was to provide resident teams with the organizational, diagnostic, and intervention skills to identify key fatality hotspots along Monterey Road and prepare some strategy reports that offer a template for other portions of San Jose.
Does roadway safety seem like a stretch for SafeGrowth? Not really, when you realize safety is an integral part of livability.
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| The San Jose SafeGrowth reports offer citizen-led suggestions for improved roadway safety. At the final course presentations, one team presented their model of what safer intersections might look like. |
LIVABILITY
SafeGrowth is based on livability. As Mateja has written in this blog, livability can be tenuous if not clearly spelled out. Definitions matter!
In SafeGrowth we include all the major factors that help everyday citizens remain safe, healthy, prosperous, and happy. Livability includes diverse, interesting, comfortable, and exciting neighborhoods for those who live there and for those who visit. In our publications on livability, we propose a neighborhood spectrum from lower/basic levels to upper/advanced levels. San Jose has excellent employment, downtown markets, a historic district, and terrific architecture including the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Center for the Performing Arts.
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| San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, (2023, July 27). Creative Commons license in Wikipedia |
But within all those basic livability ingredients, one of the most crucial is safe walking and transportation. If people are unsafe walking and if walkability carries such risks, livability in San Jose suffers. Latter-day planning theories in North America often talk about walkability. Even in cities where cars dominate and roadways rule, we know the importance of safe roadways, sidewalks, trails, and biking pathways. Thus, walking and walkability are the very core of livability.
SAFEGROWTH IN SAN JOSE
The results of the San Jose SafeGrowth teams were spectacular. In the final workshop, they presented their project work to the community, police, traffic officials, and others. Since then they presented it to the Seven Trees Community Association, a neighborhood along Monterey Road. They also presented copies of their reports to the City Council District’s chief of staff and requested meetings to brief council members.
This work led to the exciting story described in the AARP newsletter article “A San Jose Community Driven Project to Improve Road Safety & Community Livability”.
Two of the SafeGrowth team project reports are available online, including the Monterey Road and Curtner Avenue report and the Monterey Road and Branham Lane report.
The City of San Jose has been awarded a $2 million federal grant to improve roadway safety along Monterey Road. This AARP initiative and the San Jose SafeGrowth team projects are excellent examples of local advocacy – a defining characteristic of SafeGrowth. The collaboration between AARP volunteers and San Jose residents also demonstrates what a livable community can do to empower people to improve the quality of their lives and, in this case, to save precious lives in the future.
2 Replies so far - Add your comment
Excellent project. A nice winnable project that can impact many other things, like increased foot traffic leads to more natural surveillance... etc. The beauty and challenge of crime prevention is that you don't know what you prevented.
Thanks, Larry. Agree, it is an amazing project with some excellent models to redevelop the entire street. Both these focus on high injury, high risk intersections based on their analysis. It is an ideal model that might apply to other high risk intersections in San Jose.
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