Airport Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay, it's 1.30, so we're going to call today's meeting of the Transportation Environment Committee to order. Let's start with roll call, please.

Council Member Tordillos? Here. Campos? Absent. Ortiz? Foley? Vice Mayor Foley? Here. And Cohen?

Here. Thank you. Thank you so much. Let's jump right into it. We are moving straight on to our reports to the committee, and the first report today is our Community Forest Management Plan and Urban Forestry Annual Report, and I see everybody's ready. So, John, take it away.

Thank you, Chair Cohen and committee, John Ristow, Director of Transportation, and we are here to present an update on the Community Forest Management Plan and our Forestry Annual Report. So, with me today is Jennifer Sagan. She's our Deputy Director for Infrastructure Maintenance Division, and Sarah Davis, our City Forester. So I'm going to get right into the presentation and take it away, Jennifer.

Thank you, John. Jennifer Sagan, Deputy Director, Infrastructure Maintenance and DOT. We're going to start by just a quick reminder. The Community Forestry Management Plan was adopted in 2022, and it's got five major themes. The Strategic Work Plan, has a number of different things under each theme and we're going to focus today on what we accomplished during this current fiscal year and clicker that's me hi council my name is sarah davis i am your city forester i was going okay do you want to go ahead sure okay um so of the the five themes of the plan were again reminding you streamlining governance ensuring the sustainability of the urban forest support for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, efficient and effective tree management, and then standardization of our planning and development practices. We're gonna focus on the middle three today because those are the areas where we made the most progress this year. So now I'm gonna turn it over to Sarah Davis.

Hello again. I'm Sarah Davis, your city forester. Let me advance our slide. There we go. So a part of ensuring sustainability of our urban forest is to make sure that we keep it going. A tree's not something that just happens once. You have to keep the community growing and thriving. So a part of that in the CFMP, the plan, we were asked to look at the different pallets of trees that we have available to plant. So this last year we went through and updated our approved street tree list. with the mind on looking at, is this a tree we can plant today that will survive today? And will it also survive in a future climate, say 30 years from now? So keeping that in mind. We've also taken that list and grouped the trees into size classes so that we can make sure to match the tree species to the infrastructure that's in place. So if a tree gets really large, we're going to plant that in a large planting space and vice versa. So we'll have fewer disruptions to the hard infrastructure like curbs and sidewalks. And our plan has been vetted. It's covered up here. But the Urban Forestry Institute, Environmental Institute at San Luis Obispo, Cal State, has reviewed our list and it's been completely vetted. So we're good to go with the species we have chosen. So as you can see in the diagrams, there's different ways of looking at different types of infrastructure. And you'll notice power lines are highlighted there. So our partners at PG&E has also vetted our species list. So we've met our goal this year of planting over 2,000 trees each year in combination with Parks and Rec. We try to reach that goal. That number is what the Community Forest Action Plan pointed out is the number we would need to plant to get our goal in place by 2020, 2030. So that's what we shoot for. Every year when we can exceed that, we try our hardest. This year we also pruned over 4,000 street trees. So that was another part of sustaining the forest that we focused on. So moving on to our theme area of sustainability, of the urban forest, diversity, equity, inclusion, we put a lot of effort in focusing on where can urban trees be the most useful. So there on the right you can see something we call the Tree Equity Score. That's something that's used nationally and is put out by American Forest. So you can see that arrow is pointing to a census track in the city. So we can use that equity score to set a goal. So in that census track, we should be trying to add 668 new trees. So we're trying to really focus on those neighborhoods that need the most help. And as part of that, we are offering free trees. to all streets in San Jose. The property owners need to request those trees, and we will plant them for them. So property owners are able to capitalize on this project partly from our mitigation fees and partly from a forest service grant, which is our community forest investment project. And that area is also refined down to our disadvantaged neighborhoods. I'll show you in a moment. There on the bottom of the page is the address where people can go to click to request their street tree to be planted. That is live. And this week we will be sending you easy to use and repost messages for your newsletters and social posts. So keep an eye on your inbox for that.

And let me add that anybody who's in the grant project area will also be eligible for ongoing sustainable watering and pruning. So in addition to the tree, they get the additional services if they're in the grant project area.

Yeah. And on the map, the areas in blue, those are where we're offering that free watering service. So again, that's the Inflation Reduction Act Community Forest Investment Project. And that goal, we have two years to finish up this grant. So in those blue neighborhoods, we are shooting for 2,800 new trees, as well as doing a one-time maintenance task of pruning 5,000 existing street trees. It takes a little bit of that burden of having a street tree off of everyone's plate. Also part of our equity work, we work with, I keep saying work, workforce development groups. We partner with our city forest as well as the San Jose Conservation Corps, showing young people that there are urban careers in forestry that are available to them. So highlighting one of our partners, our city forest was able to engage with 2,500 volunteers this year as they hosted 57 events. And that's where that workforce development comes in because those events are led and hosted by those young people. We also did a little work this year to update some of our print materials, so the door hangers we leave behind for people when we're doing tree work, flyers about invasive pests, those sorts of things. We updated those to the five most popular languages we've been asked to do. So another part of keeping our sustainable urban forest is really looking, how can we be most effective? How can we keep our trees in good health and safe to be around? So part of that, we had a 30-year pruning cycle originally before the plan was adopted. So that meant we touched a public tree. So that's a tree in a median or a tree behind a sound wall once every 30 years. That's a long time. So our goal was to get that down to 12 years. And this year, we've been able to surpass that, and we're down to 11 years. So we're going to keep after that and see if we can't get that down to once every seven years. So we'll be visiting every public tree once every seven years. And by doing that, we have less storm damage. So if we keep those trees in good structure, they're less of a problem in the future. I may have already talked to you about this. There's nothing more exciting for decision makers than to listen to a scientist talk about insects. It's awesome. I can see the thrill on your faces. So we have an invasive pest called the shot hole, invasive shot hole borer, and it carries a fungal disorder with it, so it's a complex disease. It is from Asia. We're the first location outside of Southern California to identify the pest. That means one in every five street tree and private property tree are at risk of succumbing to the fungus that the borer carries. So we've done some proactive work. All of the literature shows us that pesticides can be effective. So we've been surveying all of the trees that are infested. So all the little yellow dots on that map have a low level of infestation. And if you zoom in, this is all on our website if you'd like to dive in deeper, all of the trees that show up as red, those are heavily infested trees that we've removed. So we're trying to limit the spread of the pest. And of that, we've treated another 90 trees. So it basically acts as a sentinel. So if one of those insects decides to chew on that tree, It dies so that it can't go on to reproduce hundreds of thousands more beetles, speeding up the whole process. So I'm hopefully pleased with the work that we've been able to do in three of our five themes this year. And we are happy to take any questions.

Okay, well thank you very much Jennifer and Sarah for the report. We'll start with public comment.

Yes, Tara and Jordan please make your way down to the podium. You will have two minutes to speak.

Thank you. Thank you to chair Cohen and committee members. I'm speaking on behalf of our city forest and their president and CEO Rhonda Berry. And first I want to thank the city and counseling committee for your continued partnership in advancing San Jose's urban forestry goals. and especially Chair Cohen recently championing us in the city budget and I know all of the council members here have been out to community plantings and have hosted community plantings with OCF and so you know that OCF has been supporting the city's urban forest for over 30 years And WANASHARE OCF has reached its annual planting goal of 1,765 trees planted this fiscal year, and it was mentioned in the report engaged over 2,500 volunteers and contributing over 7,500 service hours. At the same time, WANA provides some Context, so in the memo out of the 2013 trees reference, about 300 of those trees are from our city forest as supported through city funding. But the rest of our work comes through a mix of federal funding, state funding, philanthropic funding, private funding. And so as many council members know, some of that federal funding is now uncertain due to federal cuts, cuts to AmeriCorps funding. OCF is the nation's first urban forestry AmeriCorps program. So that's created real challenges for us, and so definitely that matters within this context. And as folks know, tree planting is only one piece of OCF's work. There's also watering, stewardship, volunteer coordination, the Our City Forest Nursery, and workforce development through AmeriCorps Climate Action Corps. And so we're respectfully asking the committee to use this discussion as an opportunity to help continue to strengthen that implementation moving forward as we navigate a lot of challenges.

Hi, Jordan Moldau, District 3 resident. Thank you for the presentation and thanks for managing the shot borer infestation so well. I think some of those yellow dots are probably in my neighborhood, and I don't think any trees have had to be cut down yet. And I'm glad how many yellow dots there are compared to how many red dots there are. So thank you so much. I was really worried a few years ago about how many trees might have to be cut down because of this. There's a slide talking about equity. And we all know how good trees are for equity in terms of better health outcomes and higher property values and stuff like that. But they're also really good for active transportation as well. And we know that transportation is a big household expense. And if we can get people to want to walk or bike places, they can reduce that household expense and also have better health outcomes. I listened to an interesting presentation a few weeks ago that was talking about how trees are a very important aspect of biking, especially for underrepresented communities. You know, we often think, oh, people will bike if we put in a Class 4 protected bikeway. That's only part of the story. For some people, you know, if it is really sunny and hot and there's no shade along their route, they're not going to want to bike. In order to make sure that we are making good on our active transportation investments, we need to plant trees next to those bikeways so that people have shade. And I also learned in that same presentation that trees have an air conditioning effect around them. So it's not just the shade that they cast, but they also additionally cool the air around them because of the biological processes they go through. So definitely want to see more trees planted along bike corridors. And I think in the muni code it says that we need to prune trees up to at least 14 feet next to roads. Which seems excessive if there's not a travel lane underneath it, it would be nice to consider maybe a shorter amount.

Back to the committee. All right, thank you, and we start with Councilmember Ortiz.

thank you uh chairman cohen i want to thank uh department of transportation our staff for the um the presentation that they've um provided to us trees are definitely an important topic uh they're especially for my district i know district 5 is one of many districts in the city that lack its fair share of tree canopy and our discussions around it have been quite contentious. Unfortunately, we had to cut some trees near Hillview Park this year and it turned into a big fight. But luckily, we were able to get, I think it was 60 trees to replace those sick trees. My community, I think our city forest was involved in some of that planting as well, and maybe the conservation core. And so I want to definitely thank the staff for that work. I wanted to touch a little bit on, I'm sure, the elephant in the room, which was the May 19th civil grand jury report that raised concerns about our urban forestry approach and if we'll meet our long-term canopy goals. We have a goal of 20 percent canopy coverage by 2051, I believe. Then we have annual, I guess, benchmarks of planting 20,000 trees, 2,000 trees per year, not 20,000, which would be nice, but 2,000 trees per year. And I understand all this costs money. We need labor and a lot of volunteers. And so I know that there are cost constraints that eliminate us as well. But I guess at the crux of the report, it said that Our annual goals of 2,000 trees just won't meet the overall ongoing requirement to reach that overall 20% coverage. They're saying we would need to plant anywhere between 4,500 trees per year to 22,000 trees per year. And so can we just touch on that? Like, are we setting our goals to too low or is this just more realistic and then if that's the case then should we set expectations that we won't be at 20 percent or how can we invest in this at a way that shows that we're we're taking this serious thank you council member John Russell director of transportation yes the grand jury's done a review of the uh our community forest management plan

we will be responding to that formally in august so you're going to get a chance to see actually a former response and we do think that there was some things that they kind of missed and left out so we'll leave that response to the formal one that we will bring back through council but in terms of the goal our plan does talk about the 2000 per year and we're meeting that goal and those are annual numbers and so we're meeting that so we think we're on track and on pace for that we would love to be able to plant 20 000 trees but that's not realistic with the current funding. As we talked about in the reporting, we receive funding through that forestry grant that we got, and we do get some funding from development projects that actually pay into an in lieu fee for removal. So those combinations are what go into that 2,000 tree factor. What else happens out there is there is planting going on in the private sector, and that's a good thing in their own private lands, whether they be residential or commercial as well. So that does happen, not to the degree that we want it to, but we're on track for that goal of trying to meet the 2,000 per year.

Great. So I guess my next question would be 2000. How did we get that number? What is the bigger picture with that? Are you confident that if we at least hit this 2000 annual goal that we will reach the 20% coverage?

Yeah, that was the... goal that came out of the actual plan that we went through a couple of years ago that council approved so that that goal came from that estimate of what it would take to get to that goal of the whole canopy okay it came out of the report all right well i'll look forward to um you know the the conversation in regards to what your the department's response um will be i appreciate you may need some time to

to prepare that i know that tree tree planting throughout the city is one thing but i know you also touched on equity and that some of these districts i know that district five district four and some other ones have aren't necessarily starting at the same starting line that some of our other districts are are focused on so do we have individual district goals or like region goals at the city how do we make sure that like you know 2000 throughout the city if we're still planting them in the same areas how are we really moving the needle

Yeah, Sarah Davis, City Forester. Going back a couple of slides, we had that map of that equity score. That can give us a target per census track. So we can roll that number up into council districts if you would like to see that.

I just think so because I think that's part of the picture. If we're only putting the tree canopy in one side of the city, then the other side of the community is not going to get that benefit. So I think we need to have a little bit more intentional goal levels outside of just citywide. I'm not saying I want to dictate what that is, but I would just like to see something like that.

Yeah, and I'll add one thing, Jennifer Sagan, Deputy Director. The grant that we got is focused on some of those areas that are lower in canopy that are more challenging, and what we're trying to do with the grant is to make it easy for somebody to accept the tree because they don't have to necessarily do all the establishment period work for the first three years. We're going to give them the tree and care for the tree for them until it kind of gets established on its own without a lot of... care needed after that establishment period. So we're hoping that that's going to take off and help us do more in those areas.

Are we seeing, you know, because I'll be honest, I mean, in my district, we got the VTA tree grant. We got the, I believe, some of those funds, I think, are dedicated to District 5 or areas similar to District 5. But it's still a tough conversation to get people to accept the trees. And so are we keeping a metric of even with all these, you know, incentives to take these trees, is it moving the needle? Are we looking at that?

Yes, so I would put that into a conversion rate. So we'll be looking at offering people the trees and the service, how many requests we're getting and how many of those requests convert over into a tree planted. In a previous location to get 3,000 trees planted, we would take in 6,000 requests. So there are things that happen in the real world that can kind of negate the desire for the tree, like the placement of utilities and things like that. So we'll be looking at that conversion rate and where those conversion rates are low, we'll have to be asking ourselves, what's the barrier? Why aren't people asking for trees? And why aren't they getting conversions into planting from requests?

When do you think we could see some of that analysis?

Yeah, we'll do that as we go along each month, just because we need to be nimble and figure out what the barrier is. In some places, it could be that someone doesn't have a garden hose. So getting that garden hose means a trip to somewhere to buy the hose, as well as thinking about, OK, well, this hose is going to cost me $30. Is that $30 I'm not spending on new school supplies? So by taking away some of those hindrances, yeah.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, affordability is a major concern.

Yeah.

um okay great another question is i want to just make sure that we are working with um available resources to the best of our ability and not duplicating you know some of this work and so i wanted to ask how many trees do we have on record how many trees did our city forest plant this fiscal year and then if we could look at the next number what would be how many of those were funded by the city

Great question. I believe Tara mentioned that earlier.

Yeah, the total number, let's see, I have the number. The total number in San Jose is 1,300. And I believe the total number was 1,765. So a good portion of them were planted in San Jose that they planted this year.

Oh, I see. And how many of those did we fund?

So our city forest did plant around 300 trees that the city directly funded. The rest of the balance of the trees that were planted were using city contractors.

So I just want to understand. City contractors are city forest who could probably do it for a lot cheaper. And so what's the thought process? I guess one thing I would like to see is are we fully utilizing our partnership with our city forest to the best of our ability? Do we have like a formal partnership with them? Is there like a private, uh, city private partnership that we can review how it's saving costs. Um, and if it's, if it would assist with the, our goals for the canopy, the tree canopy, does that exist?

Or could you make, yeah, we do have a specific partner with the partnership with our city forest. And, um, we partner in on several levels. Uh, there are primary partner for, uh, community engagement and outreach so they do a lot of events where they're bringing volunteers in to plant trees and they also are doing the workforce development that we mentioned working with groups and teaching folks about forestry and then in addition to that they have a fee-for-service partnership with the city where if they do a certain thing if they provide watering services or plant a tree or do both or something else we also can pay for service Over time, I would say that's the area where we probably could grow because we're willing to fund as much as they're able to plant. And so the more that they do to reach that maximum would be great.

If I could just one thing. One thing I'd like to see is if we could just have in a future report what that formal partnership looks like and an analysis from staff on ways in which we can improve it. Because as a time where we're stretching our pennies, you know, I just want to make sure we're being innovative and not, you know,

what is it cutting our foot off the spider I don't know what that term is but I want to make sure we're doing our best to stretch the dollar all right thank you unless you have a foot on your face I guess it's a thank you good questions councilmember and I'll turn to vice mayor Foley in a second after I ask a couple just a follow-up on that there were some questions that came to my mind from his questions and some are related to some of that funding sources because you said city funds our city for us to plant and I'm curious of what city funded means because like when we have grants when our office is has raised money and had our city for us to plant things is that included in the city funding or is that separate funding I'm not sure I fully understand how that's accounted for we would count that separately because it's a unique project so when we say city funded it's

the value add that our city forest provides so they could be our contractor they could put trees in the ground and water them and step away or finding the advantages of working with the non-profit is they're having those one-on-one conversations with individuals and they are doing those workforce development tasks So they're a little bit different from our regular contractors because they are so in tuned and have so many touch points with the community.

And just to be clear, the number you said about 2,100 trees, whatever it was that was planted, that's city-funded trees. That doesn't include all the other partnerships that our city forest might be involved in or... private trees or a lot of other things. So I'm just wondering if there's a way for us to roll up all of that so that we do, when we get this report, know how many really were planted and that also helps inform the civil grand jury response because those 2,000 are not the extent of trees being planted in San Jose. Anyway, okay, thank you. I'll move on to Vice Mayor Foley now.

Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Ortiz, for lifting up your community and the needs of your community. I think some areas in this city it's easy to plant trees, and some areas it's not so easy, and you represent a district that is more dense and may have more difficulties, but I think it's really important that we focus on the equity of where those trees are located and get them out there as much as we possibly can. So I have a question for you, and I'm not sure I caught this or not. You said that if someone asks, we'll give them a free tree and that you'll water it for three years. Can you tell me a little? Is that what I heard?

It kind of depends. That goes into that equity question. So within that grant area, we can come and plant the tree. and then we'll water the tree for three years. And the rest of the city will come and plant the tree, but the property owner is responsible for the watering and establishment.

Makes perfect sense. And that is what I heard, that it wasn't citywide that you were going to be watering, that it was in specific areas. And I think that's really important. If you could send us the link to obtaining those trees, that would really be helpful, because then we could push it out to our community. And I do want to thank you. I'm not sure we've had this meeting since you were out in my district, where we were having trees under threat to be removed because we were repaving but we were able to you were able to meet with the community and figure out how to save the trees in that neighborhood i know they were grateful and and i was grateful too so i wanted to thank you for that so uh with that i will move approval of the item okay thank you and i just have a few more questions i want to ask um

I know that there was that in lieu reserve. So when we started this plan, when we updated the plan in 2022, one of the issues was that we had been collecting in lieu fees, but there had been a long period of time where we weren't using the in lieu fees. Have we now spent that? Is there still a reserve? Are we still spending it down? Where does that stand?

Yes, we are actively spending it. Since those funds came over to DOT, we've been able to spend 73% of those funds, including new ones that have come in since then. So, and I have a breakdown if you're interested of where the revenue was created and where it was spent because we're being very mindful that some districts have more development than others. So we're taking half of the monies generated through fees in one council district, spending it in that generating district and then taking the other half and putting it into a kitty, if you will, so that we can work in those neighborhoods that don't have heavy development fees coming in.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, it's working the way we envisioned it when we worked on this plan four years ago. It's important to have that split. Obviously, yes, we want this to be spread citywide, but the reason these fees are coming into certain districts is because trees are getting removed. So we also want to make sure we have that fund to replace trees within the areas where they were removed. So I appreciate that. It would be great at some point to understand that. Now that we're spending this down, and we spent 73% of it, this is a 20, 30 year project. I presume at some point in the near future the fund will run out. Is that going to cause us trouble in being able to continue this project, this whole process moving forward?

Possibly. It depends on what the development community is going to do. So we'll review plans and we work out the mitigation ratios if the property can't accommodate the required number of new trees and then they pay that fee. So when we see that plan, we might see $200,000, $300,000, $500,000 worth of mitigation money that would be coming in, but we can't always guarantee that that project is going to get built. So anticipating how much money is going to go into that fund is a little bit of a moving target.

And ideally we don't want to encourage developers to take out trees. Correct. Although they do, we get funding for planting other trees, but that's not the ideal way to preserve a tree canopy. All right, thank you. When we were talking about your census tract review, I assume that that's informing us on where we should focus on planting trees. It would be interesting to see at some point a plot of the canopy cover versus the poverty index or whatever measures you're using so we can sort of understand how are we doing and maybe track that over time so we can see is the work we're doing changing those ratios a little bit, so just for the future. Back to the question of where some people, there's less uptake on household trees. Are we seeing a difference between renters versus homeowners? I mean, I would imagine a homeowner is more likely to request a tree and want to take care of it than renters. Do we have a process by which we can involve renters in this?

Yeah, so that's one of the questions that we ask. Are you the owner of the property? And if you're a renter of the property, if you're the renter, we ask that they have permission from their landlord. We haven't gotten up to full speed yet. We're just kind of trickling into some neighborhoods now, but that will be something that we're looking at as we go along.

Okay, great. Thank you. You know, I know we're planting the 2,100 trees, but a certain percentage don't survive. And I know I drive around and I see, you know, 30 trees have been planted and six of them are not alive the following year. So are we including that in our metrics about how... or every tree that eventually that doesn't make it gets replaced, is that part of the process and that doesn't get counted twice?

Correct, it doesn't get counted twice. So they're living things, so we do experience mortality for a myriad of different reasons. But if that tree doesn't succeed, our contractors have to replace it until it does succeed. So we don't double count, it's still just a one for one. Okay, great.

You mentioned bringing the goal of bringing our pruning down from 11 years to seven years. Is there a, do we have a funding roadmap for that? And what is it that we would take for us to achieve that?

Yeah, so that's in our general operating fund. So we use those dollars as efficiently as we can to move across the city to prune. In previous times when the pruning cycle was 30 years, it was more of a scatter shot of let's remove all of these and if we have money left,

we can prune this street but instead now we're finding efficiency and cost savings and doing it systematically and like working one street at a time just like the pavement resurfacing would work so it's just better operations being able to allow us to improve okay great and then on the tree invasive tree borer issue we've we there's a lot of trees who are susceptible to it are we planning to treat almost all of them so that we can prevent this expansion i mean what's our Because we don't want to have untreated trees that still are susceptible, right?

Yeah, so the trees in the public right-of-way, so street trees as well as people's private property trees, are their responsibility. We're treating some street trees to slow the infestation down, but we can't as a city control the entire population of trees because they don't all fall within our jurisdiction. So those are trying to tell people about the issue and move people into action. It's really expensive to treat all of the trees. So right now, of our population of street trees, that's about 50,000 trees. And if we include all of the trees in the entire city, 310,000 trees, so that would be private property as well.

Not just, that's not total trees, but trees that are susceptible to this? Correct.

That's trees that are susceptible. Everybody wants to be really zealous and kind of get excited about treating trees and cutting down trees and we can make this stop. We have the luxury of this pest. It doesn't move super fast. What we've been seeing in Southern California isn't as devastating as some of the pests in the Midwest have been. So it moves a little bit slower. So as trees are declining because of the pest complex, it won't be as noticeable as it could be because of the speed.

So we would find out where they are and then treat within a vicinity around there to prevent spread? Yes. Is that the approach? Okay. Thank you. I see some little clusters around in my district but all across the city. So we would go and treat in the vicinity around those clusters?

Mm-hmm.

Okay. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you so much. And I, you know... We've been working hard, obviously District Four had our own goal to plant 1,000 trees. If you go to Pennington Creek Park, you'll see the little plaque next to our tree that represents our 1,000th tree, so we're proud of that, but I want to thank you for the work that you're doing across the city, and it's really important. I think that's it for comments, so let's vote to accept the report. All right. Motion passes. Motion carries 5-0. Thank you so much. All right, John, you're staying for the next item. The next item is our Vision Zero Traffic Safety Status Report.

I'm here all week. Yeah, as the team makes their way down, let me just introduce them. Again, John Risto, Director of Transportation. Jim Bittner is our Division Manager for Safety Division for the Department of Transportation. Hopefully, Lieutenant Hanson Bueller will be able to make it. He leads the Traffic Enforcement Unit of San Jose PD. Hopefully, he can be here because he's a key partner. And Jordan Moldau, our Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee member representing the city's bicycle and pedestrian communities. And so let me turn it over to Jim. You get ready to get started.

All right, thanks, John. Good afternoon, Transportation Environment Committee members. I'm Jim Bittner, and I'm the Acting Division Manager of the Vision Zero and Traffic Safety Division that's overseeing the Vision Zero, school safety, quick build, walk and roll, and the neighborhood traffic management systems. I'll be presenting today the latest and greatest Vision Zero program status report as part of our biannual updates. Might help if I put my eyes on. All right. As we discuss crash data, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that these are not just simple data points. They represent human beings, our neighbors, our loved ones. And that's really what drives this vital work forward. And with that, I'll turn it over to Vice Mayor Foley.

Sorry, I didn't know I was doing my part yet. But okay, thank you. So we always start the Vision Zero discussion by centering on what this is about and why this is important. And this is about saving lives of people on our streets from crashes. And every Vision Zero meeting we always start by talking about who those individuals are their names and these individuals they're not data points they're mothers fathers children neighbors there are loved ones so with that I will read the names of the individuals who were killed in a traffic crash uh since the last our last meeting Jerome Michael Castro, a passenger. Unidentified pedestrian. Unidentified pedestrian. Ellen Orcutt. Christian Herbert Heigeland. Unidentified motorist. Unidentified pedestrian. Unidentified pedestrian. Unidentified driver. Lauren Badio. Unidentified pedestrian. Unidentified bicyclist. Unidentified pedestrian. Daniel Martinez, driver. Unidentified pedestrian. Unidentified driver. Unidentified pedestrian. an identified bicyclist, an identified pedestrian, Kong Bui, bicyclist, Benigno Blas, passenger, an identified motorcyclist, an identified driver, an identified driver, an identified pedestrian, Thuyet Nguyen, passenger. Unidentified pedestrian. Unidentified driver. Olivier Carmelo Scarlata, pedestrian. Unidentified pedestrian. Kimberly Sarah Rose, driver. Mackenzie Carnes, driver. Some of these were killed by speeding crashes, others were killed by drunk drivers. I'll have more later, thank you.

Thank you, Vice Mayor Foley. Today, to go into some of the details, I want to give a brief overview of the trends in the traffic fatalities and severe injuries in the past 10 years, followed by program updates over this last fiscal year. As a reminder, the 2025 Vision Zero Action Plan has very ambitious goals of 30 by 30, meaning a 30% reduction in KSI by 2030, and zero by 40, an elimination of all KSI by 2040. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, traffic deaths in America went down about 7% between 2024 and 25. Here in San Jose, we're seeing a similar but steeper decline. Traffic fatalities peaked at 65 in 2022, but steadily declined to 41 in 2025, which results in a 37% decrease. In fact, 2025 had the lowest number of traffic fatalities in San Jose since 2012. But we are now seeing an upward trend with impaired driving fatalities, looking at the pie chart at the top. In 2025 and through April of 2026, over 20% of traffic fatalities have involved DUI-related crashes, the highest percentage in the past decade. Switching to killed and severe injury crashes, or KSI, these stayed about the same in 2024 and 2025, with those numbers being the lowest since 2018. Even with San Jose's recent drop in fatalities, dangerous driving behaviors remain a major concern in the city. Speeding and red light running continue to play a role in about a third of all KSI crashes, as seen in the pie charts on this page. So while we're still making progress in reducing traffic deaths, the KSI numbers have remained relatively flat because risky behaviors by drivers are still persistent on our streets. Now I'll focus on some of the highlighted accomplishments for this past fiscal year. Aligning with the Vision Zero Action Plan's short-term strategies, our team recently launched an updated Vision Zero website at visionzerosj.org, designed to serve as a one-stop shop for all traffic safety information in San Jose. The site brings together information on the city's traffic crash landscape, high injury networks, crash data dashboards, ongoing projects, enforcement programs, education efforts, and other initiatives focused on reducing traffic deaths and severe injuries. The website has two main sections, the first being Vision Zero Action Plan and Data Dashboards, and the second being Supporting a Safe System Approach. The Vision Zero Action Plan and Data Dashboards section includes the 2025 action plan, two newly created crash data dashboards, and a priority safety corridors map. The supporting a safe system approach section presents all traffic safety efforts in the city, as shown on the right. The goal is for transparency, making it easier for the public to understand what's happening on our streets, what the city is doing to improve safety, and to stay informed and engaged in San Jose's Vision Zero efforts. We also now have a dedicated Vision Zero email address, so community members can more easily reach the team with questions, feedback, or concerns, and that's at visionzero.com. vision.zero at soundsleyca.gov. The website includes these two new public-facing crash data dashboards. The first is the All Traffic Crashes dashboard here, an interactive map that shows all crashes reported to the Soundsley Police Department. Filters include time period, location, age group, crash type, crash severity, council district and equity priority areas. The dashboard also allows users to explore crashes by street user type and severity, making it easier to identify trends and high-risk locations. This dashboard is now publicly available at the website shown at the bottom of the slide. The second new dashboard focuses specifically on KSI crashes, aligning with one of the main goals of our KSI reduction in the Vision General Action Plan. This dashboard helps highlight the city's most critical traffic safety concerns where the highest risk crashes are happening and which types of road users have been involved. The filters are similar to the all traffic crashes dashboard and this dashboard is also now publicly available at the website shown at the bottom of this slide. The Vision Zero program continues to strengthen partnerships with key local, regional and national partners. With Salisbury Police Department, staff continue coordinating targeted enforcement efforts and collaboration to improve and automate crash data reporting and data sharing. We've also started coordinating with regional trauma centers and public health centers to really explore secure data sharing opportunities to help support a more public health informed approach to traffic safety. And this also includes identifying e-bike and e-scooter crashes where they may not be reported to the police department. At the regional and national level, we continue collaborating with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's Regional Vision Zero Working Group and the National Vision Zero Implementer Peer Exchange. These partnerships allow San Jose to learn from other cities, share our best practices, and stay connected with dozens of Vision Zero programs across the region and across the country Another area we focused on is school safety coordination during ongoing school closures and consolidations. Unfortunately, San Jose had 11 school closures in 2025 and there are seven more in 2026 with Toyon Elementary School being added onto the list above. In response, the school safety team has been working proactively with our walk and roll program, school staff, school district leadership to address the changing traffic patterns and circulation needs at these consolidated schools that will now be taking even more kids. The goal is to help students and families continue getting to school safely as traffic travel patterns shift. As part of DOT's ongoing roadway safety efforts, the city continues updating speed limits to better align with state law and with engineering best practices. Last year council approved speed limit reductions on 18 roadway segments in August and another 19 in December. And DOT plans to go to council later this month for an additional 14 speed limit reductions. This fiscal year we will complete 470 Vision Zero projects across the city as shown on this slide. Sorted by project type on the left and by council district on the right. The distribution across council districts is data driven based on the community's needs. In March, DOT constructed a roundabout at Daniel Maloney and Neiman to improve safety at that intersection. It's designed for slow overall vehicle speeds and reduced conflict points, helping improve safety for everyone using that intersection. We also installed a traffic signal at Branham and Kings Park to improve both safety and traffic operations for all road users with a new pedestrian connection from Kings Park directly to Marshall Cottle County Park. This fiscal year, DOT used several pavement projects as golden opportunities to also deliver quick build safety improvements along priority safety corridors. These improvements were completed on corridors including Jackson, Meridian, Camden, Blossom Hill, and 10th Street. Additionally, DOT expects to complete 53 pedestrian safety and traffic calming projects around the city this year. Full details about all of these projects can be found in the memo as well as in the attachment C. To better understand how these new quick build safety projects are performing in San Jose, the Vision Zero team conducts before and after corridor evaluations. Since launching this effort last fiscal year, our team has completed the five corridor evaluations listed here. Additional year one evaluations are currently underway for Branham and Moorpark. The school safety program continues its focus on improving safety at and around K through 12 schools across San Jose. This fiscal year, we completed 38 school access and circulation studies, evaluating traffic flow around schools and their parking lots, pedestrian and bike access for students, and overall traffic safety in the school areas. In addition, 138 high visibility school crosswalks have been installed this year. To date, this team of two has upgraded nearly 1,500 school crosswalks citywide in collaboration with the Pavement Program and other projects, as well as completed 87 school access and circulation studies. The Walk and Roll Program continues to provide active transportation safety education at schools across San Jose through activities like school assemblies and bike rodeos. With a staff of four, they have accomplished all of the activities listed in this slide for just this fiscal year. I think it's really awesome that they have 774 bike helmets that they'll be able to give out to students this year too. The city is currently piloting red light running cameras at four key intersections in San Jose. Citations began being issued on January 9th and the pilot program is to run for a year. In the program's first two months, over 2,100 citations have been issued, and in the first four months, nearly 5,000 have been issued, really highlighting the extensive red light running that is predominant at these intersections. Staff have completed the vendor selection process for the speed safety camera pilot program and have identified a preferred vendor Once the contract is executed, staff will move forward with the implementation and coordination for 33 speed safety camera systems across the city. Installation of the cameras is anticipated to be completed by September. This fiscal year, DOT submitted five grant applications totaling about $2 million to support Vision Zero related projects. As of May 20th, two Measure B bike and ped planning grants were awarded along Oakland Road and Stevens Creek for studies. Two applications are currently under review by the funding agencies. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jordan Moldau to share a few of the comments for BPAC.

Thank you. The Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee appreciates the opportunity to present a T&E. I'm Jordan Moldau, chair of BPAC. We submitted a memo with committee accomplishments and recommendations aligned with San Jose's Vision Zero goals. First, our accomplishments. This fall, our partnership with Integrated Waste Management reached a milestone as IWM affixed reflectors to carts along six streets. This pilot serves two purposes, improving cart visibility to cyclists at night and prominently displaying keep cart out of bike lane to the property owners. Anecdotes suggest that compliance improved following installation, though more work is still needed. As a point of observation, almost every empty cart was in the bike lane on my way here today. BPAC duties include community engagement. We table at Viva Calle most recently in April. We see enthusiasm for safer streets and cycling in our engagement with residents from throughout the city. Now, our recommendations. BPAC fully supports Council's direction to deploy quick builds as quickly as possible and believes that more progress on this front is essential. We urge improving the median speed of quick builds from conception and identification to delivery, reinvesting savings into delivering more quick builds each quarter. We recommend that delivery metrics be shared via public dashboards. Post delivery reports and photos posted online would help build support for future investments. BPAC urges more quick builds near schools including holistic treatment of daylighting and no return on red measures. In the picture you'll see two of the intersections that the team worked on with the high visibility crosswalks as well as the daylighting implementation with the plastic delineators and we'd like to see that holistically around all of our schools. We also recommend reducing school speed limits to their lowest legal thresholds and request a staff report on current school speed limits. BPAC recommends treating trail underpass cleanup as a transportation priority. Flooding along San Jose's river trails is short in duration but long in impact. While river levels typically recede within 24 hours, poor drainage and delayed post-storm cleanup leave slick residue in undercrossings for weeks or months, effectively disabling large portions of the trail network. At our December meeting, BPAC held a discussion with PRNS to learn about trail maintenance. The discussion highlighted structural and organizational constraints contributing to extended underpass hazards. The cumulative effect is a perception that trails are deprioritized relative to roadways, despite their function as transportation corridors. We recommend that the city treat underpass cleanup as a transportation reliability issue, comparable in priority to roadway flooding. We recommend benchmarking response protocols against peer cities, evaluating the cost benefit of owning specialized equipment, and pre-budgeting the PRNS-DOT collaboration for predictable winter workloads. These challenges are concentrated in a handful of underpasses for a few months each year, so meaningful improvements are achievable with minimal budget impact. Briefly, some other priorities we have. Regarding reimagining Santa Clara Street, BPAC strongly and unanimously champions the linear park concept with transit lanes, but modified to include a car-free promenade for cyclists and pedestrians. Regarding the airport's effort to close the public assets points for cyclists to get from Central Expressway to Airport Boulevard, at our most recent meeting, BPAC voted unanimously to adopt the following two statements. BPAC urges the city council, DOT, and airport department to amend the relevant plans to ensure bikes are permitted on Ewert Road in perpetuity. BPAC also affirms that a bicycle connection around the north side of the airport, south of 101 and De La Cruz Boulevard, is important to the bicycling community, regardless of any other connections that are built in any other locations. This concludes our recommendations. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us on all matters of street safety. I'm available for questions, and now back to Jim and John.

Thank you, and we'll open it up to questions and comments.

All right, thank you. I want to just start first by thanking Vice Mayor Foley for leadership on this issue over the years and for always grounding our conversation in why it is that we are why we do this and get regular updates. Do we have any members of the public?

Yes, Jeff, please make your way down to the podium. You will have two minutes to speak.

Good afternoon. My name is Jeff Englander. I'm a resident of District 1. I am on the buyback committee, but I'm representing my own views. I've also been a rehab director physician at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center for 40 years and taken care of many people who've had catastrophic injuries, who have survived their injuries. So it isn't just the people that die that are problematic, but people who have severe injuries are also living with those injuries, usually lifetime. I want to commend the Department of Transportation on lowering the speed limit by Prospect High School. I don't know if that has anything to do with the Costco project that is nearby, but it's in my neighborhood and I notice right away that people are driving more slowly by Prospect High School. I don't know why all schools could have a 20 mile per hour speed limit. I grew up in Ohio. I never saw a 25 miles per hour speed limit in the Midwest, so why can't we do that? I also think that around libraries, because young people as well as older people use the libraries quite a bit, and those should be considered safe zones or safer zones to drive by. Those are the main comments that I have. I wanna commend Jordan for doing such a great job and leading BiPAC over the last year. It's been a pleasure to serve on that committee as well. Thank you.

Back to the committee. All right, thank you, and we will start with Vice Mayor Foley.

Thank you. This is always a real important program for me to hear about and for us to learn about, and particularly because, as I started off talking about the fatalities, but thank you for also elevating that these are not just the fatalities. They are serious issues. uh... injuries that have occurred to that affect people lifelong so uh... we need to we need to do better uh... thank you for the presentation jim and thank you jordan for the presentation from the pack and for your involvement there i i'm the liaison to be packing uh... kyle laveroni goes regularly and reports back to me what's going on so i appreciate your advocacy There's a lot of good work that you're doing as far as the quick builds and creating bike lanes, but there's always more. What can we do? Because we know that the fatalities and the serious injuries are the number one cause is speeding. We are doing, we are creating quick builds and slowing down traffic, but some of the fatalities of the names I read are DUIs. So speeding, wasn't what caused that, drunk driving did. What can we do to an education component or an infrastructure component to slow down more traffic for speeding? And from education, how can we continue to remind people not to get behind the wheel if you're impaired?

Thank you, and a very important question. While you are correct that unfortunately over this last couple of months, we've actually suffered a lot of DUI crashes that resulted in terrible fatalities. So while our infrastructure improvements don't necessarily perfectly match up with trying to resolve that, we have been reaching out to both the California Highway Patrol and San Jose PD to see if there's anything else we can be doing on the behavior part of that. And that would be both enforcement, The operations that CHP and PD will do for DUI checks, which they're going to be increasing is my understanding. We're working with them on that. And then overall, some of the education that both of those agencies can do and do do. So both of them are aware of this as what we've been through this year. And it's not just here. It's elsewhere, as CHP is describing. So we're trying to reach out on that side the issue as well so it's enforcement and education and both those agencies are going to be key to that so we're trying to see if we can do some more on that side

Well, I appreciate that, and as I look through this list, I see two names. One of them, both were fatalities on a street in my district. One woman, innocent driver, was on Foxworthy, a street that is very narrow. You couldn't have really done much more to narrow that street where a man was... very much impaired and flipped her van over. She passed away immediately. He died later from his injuries. And then just recently, near one of my schools, there was a drunk driver who hit two pedestrians who were walking on the sidewalk. They didn't suffer serious injuries, but they were injured. So as a result, and people say, well, why don't you do more? Why don't you slow down the traffic or post slower speed signs around schools, which I completely agree. But when you're working with an impaired driver, that doesn't matter. in you after the accident or the crash i should say over by uh... one of my schools i asked my captain police captain to send traffic enforcement unit over and he did and he issued a lot of citations to people who were running the stop signs speeding ninety percent of them were either teachers or parents so it's uh... It's behavioral. That's the education piece. I am completely supportive of reducing the speed limit as our schools. What are we doing? Have we considered reducing the speed at all of our schools? And how would we go about doing that?

I don't think we've really gone to that level of detail because there's about 250 schools in the city. It's pretty cumbersome. So trying to figure out how to do that. It's also, I don't believe we're allowed to do it everywhere because if you're on a 40 mile per hour street, 35 mile per hour street, that's a pretty huge reduction to ask. And I'll be perfectly honest, 25 is a pretty high bar to ask on some of those streets. So that's where those digital radar signs come in to really grab the driver's attention. Many of them are time of day, so they're only on during those pickup and drop-off times when people might not realize it's a school zone on that street. But in the residential areas, it could be considered, but one of the things to keep in mind is it gets... much more complicated than changing one sign because in a school zone in a residential street it's just the house shape sign that says school but if you make it different than the 25 posted now you have to put a 25 when chill 20 when children are present you have to move that school zone sign behind it 150 feet so add that up times probably two-thirds of the approaches to our schools And the reason why I know that is because we had done the 15 mile per hour pilot 15ish years ago. And it turned out to be a whole lot more work than we had bargained for going into it. And we had done before and after studies at those schools. I think there were four roadways. Two of them went up a mile per hour. One went down half a mile per hour and one was unchanged. We can consider it. Of course, we'd be totally open to doing that, but there is not the greatest of track records. That 25 versus 20 really would change too much of the driver characteristics. And keep in mind when it's those congested kind of areas, like Dana and the Rose Garden area, you can't do 25. You just can't. There's too much going on there. There's too many students walking, biking, pickup, drop-off, double parking that we have enforcement issues with. All of those things make it that 25 versus 20, they're probably going 10 at best on that street. So case by case, we could certainly consider it, but it could be a pretty overwhelming task to look at for 260 streets.

Thank you. I will add to my colleagues that every budget season as we go through how I would like to request the mayor to allocate some funds, I first look at traffic safety and where I can put in enhanced cry swaps or the radar cars, signs that you're talking about, because they do work. So I would encourage my council members when they're looking at that next year, look at your budget and see if you have any money. And I know council member Campos and I both put in for road improvements and if the council approves it tomorrow, those will go through. So that's great. I know I just have a short time, but I don't want to forget a couple of things that Jordan brought up. And one was the trail maintenance underneath the, in the underpasses. What can we do to address those issues more readily? What's the process now, and how can we make it safe for bicyclists who are riding under the underpasses?

Yeah, good question. While that is not an area that the Department of Transportation maintains, it is the city, it's parks that does that, or the water district, so that's where it gets a little complicated. Just sitting here today, I don't think I have a perfect answer for you in terms of how to speed up that cleanup, but it is definitely something that causes those bicyclists that use it every day to now have to find a reroute. A couple of months ago, we did bring that reroute plan to council, but that's not the answer. That's just to get them off while there's no way to get through that area. I think we're going to have to come back to you and actually see if what between DOT, Parks and Rec, and the Water District, how we can actually have that to be something that's more promptly taken care of. I don't have an answer today, but we'll have to look at that.

Great. Thank you for considering it and seeing how you can move it forward. The other thing, Jordan, you didn't talk about the leaf piles. I'll just throw it out there that people continue to put their leaf piles in the bike lanes. Not a good place to put them. I want to get rid of the leaf piles. I want to give out the regular garbage cans so they could just put them in their trash or their leaf piles in there. But that's a whole different discussion. And the other thing is regarding the stickers and the pilot program. Any consideration for increasing the pilot program and putting those stickers on either all of our garbage cans as we replace them? What's the process that we would go through for that?

We will have to get back to you because I don't know how that would be an ESD. They're in charge of all that. So I don't think anyone is opposed to that. It's just getting it to implement. Stickers don't cost a lot of money. Probably the getting them on every barrel.

If I could add to that. So I know that there's a survey out right now that IWM has put out to bicyclists and residents for them to give their feedback. I imagine that next time they come to BPAC in the fall they'll probably have an update. Great. Because it was implemented in October. I will say I volunteered for a couple hours to put some of the stickers on the trash cans, and it's surprisingly more work than I imagined. So luckily it doesn't need to go on every cart in the city because not every street in the city has a bike lane. So it does narrow the scope a bit, but it is still a pretty big scope. So I don't know what they'll come back with, but I'm also interested in knowing.

Okay, thank you. I will move approval of the report.

Second. Okay. I just want to ask a question about the red light camera. I saw the comment about the pilot for red light cameras. Unlike the speed cameras, this is not something that we have to pilot. I mean, red light cameras are implemented. But this pilot ends, and then what happens? I mean, do we have an ongoing plan for continuing to have red light cameras at certain intersections? Possibly.

The funding that was provided a number of years ago by council was just for one year and to give it a hard look and see if these would be something that would actually be effective at one of our big problems, red light running. We can see in our early data that there's a lot of citations. These are ones that still have to go through the Superior Court for processing because they are moving violations so there's a lot of work that the court still has to do so we don't have We've got the front end numbers over these couple of months. We don't have the back end numbers, how many have made it through either paying a citation or being dismissed or whatever. So we've got to get some more information. So to answer your question, after one year we're coming back to council to describe all that and see if it was a valuable program or not to continue that. And so we'll find out how many citations got carried all the way through to... How many citations, how many made it through the courts, what kind of fees and fines were paid, and whether or not it's made a difference in terms of reducing the numbers over time, now that somebody might be... actually have to pay or have points against their license.

Can we tell in one year? I mean, I guess the question is, is one year enough time to be able to tell?

We will do our best. The backlog right now is in the court system, so hopefully we can get enough of the data out to see if we can read into what those trends and that results would look like.

But we wouldn't be removing cameras. I mean, cameras are installed, right?

We're going to leave them there as long as... This was city-funded, so we're not using anyone else's money in it... right now currently legal to be doing this in the state so we took advantage of it so we'll we will see in a year and we'll present that whether or not we want to continue that or not okay did you want to add something i will just add that the number one intersection for those citations are is in my district camden and bascom

i see another hand is going to be more careful and there's one in your district i see you see another hand that's going up by councilmember tortillas i just wanted to thank staff and jordan for the the presentation here all of this important work uh one quick question for john if you could just speak a little bit more on the issue that jordan raised around that specific road near the airport i believe it's ewert if you could provide more context on what options we may have moving forward

So if anyone is not familiar, there's a roadway that's actually on airport property. It's actually called Uart Road. However, it's not a public street. It's actually just airport property and has been used by the airport to access previous parking areas and other facilities in there. The airport deems it necessary to close that road for various reasons, and they would be the best to answer that. There is still some discussion about how to do this with airport and the other city of Santa Clara and the county that have facilities, Trimble, De La Cruz, right along that part of the airport site. So there's still some discussion going on with that, but I don't have an answer as to whether or not the airport could or should leave it open. That is, it's a decision that they would need to make, and I believe it's surrounded mostly around security, but that is my understanding.

Thank you. That is very helpful context. Beyond that, I just want to thank also BPAC for their comprehensive report. I agree with a lot of the recommendations in here, trying to get faster throughput on our quick builds, more reporting, seeing if we can scale that network up. And then also just want to highlight again reimagining Santa Clara Street, big proponent also of the linear park concept there, trying to get dedicated transit lanes, and to the extent possible, given the limited space, seeing what we can do to better accommodate bikes on Santa Clara as well. I know we have a bike network that kind of runs on some of the parallel streets, but every day out on Santa Clara when I'm walking, I still see bikes on Santa Clara, even lacking any infrastructure. So it's clear to me that moving forward, there will always be demand for some bike access on Santa Clara. How we can best accommodate that, given all of the other goals that we have for that corridor, would be good to understand. So thank you.

Thank you. And seeing no other hands, let's vote on acceptance of the report. Okay, motion carries 5-0. We're coming on to our third of four items. I've made an executive decision about postponing item four on the agenda since we have a budget hearing tonight and a lot of us have some preparation we want to do before that. I think we're good because we only have two items on the August 12th agenda, and we've confirmed that there's not a time-sensitive need. So thank you, Laurie and your team, for waiting it out. We will see you back here on August 12th at our next T&E meeting. And we will now move on to the third item, which is our Move San Jose annual report.

We're going to get started, but I'm going to jump to the back to stop all my talking.

All right. Good afternoon. Yes, I'm going to give John's voice a break. I'm Jessica Zank, Deputy Director for the Department of Transportation. I am here today for our annual Move San Jose Plan report alongside Ramses Madu, Wilson Tam, Lance Knox, and of course, John. The purpose of our Move San Jose plan, which was adopted in August of 2022, is to have a citywide plan with accompanying strategies and key performance indicators that helps us understand our city, the areas in most need of improvement, and then really annually monitor and report transparently on how we're doing against those goals. So there is a ton of information in the report, in the memo, in the attachments. We will not go through all of it today for the sake of time, et cetera, but we will highlight some of the key findings and information. And with that, I will pass it to Ramses.

Thank you so much, Jessica. Ramses Madu, Division Manager, Planning Policy and Sustainability for DOT. So as Jess was already starting here with, is the larger context of transportation planning Here's a sampling of the major policies and plans that we have adopted or are working on that guide what we're doing transportation-wise across the city. Many of you up there have helped us get some of these done and many of you up there are trying to help us get more of them done. These basically define what are the different projects across the city we're trying to get done. Move San Jose as a plan is the umbrella plan that helps us prioritize what comes out of all of these different plans. As Jess said, this plan is our kind of overall prioritization system. It helps us use data-driven metrics to drive where those decisions should, or help drive those decisions to good places for us. And it makes sure that we're continuously listening to community feedback. I'll remind us, the general plan has set out incredibly ambitious goals for transportation in the city. And we as staff, our job is to implement the goals that were given by council. You can see here the pie charts. The dark part is the drive-alone rate versus non-drive-alone rate. And you can see when us as staff are pushing for more bike lanes, more transit pieces, more pedestrian environments, this is what we're driven by, by the things that council has told us to do. Move San Jose, which was adopted in 2022, boiled down the long, long list of transportation policies in the city into these nine goals. And then there's 26 strategies that implement those goals. They are in Appendix B, I believe, of the report. And they turn those importantly into these key performance indicators. And these are what drive our data systems to help us track what's going on there. We've recently or finally got a big data subscription, which helps us feed this, what's called the decision support system. I'll touch on that in a second. But importantly, out of those plans, as well as other elements in the city, we have over 500 different projects in the city, and that number does not yet incorporate everything we've been asked to do, right? And so how do we now prioritize across that massive list when we're choosing that next best project to put our effort into? And so that's what the decision support system helps us do. It puts all of those different projects on the same playing field data-wise to help us evaluate them and get a sense for how will those different projects change the transportation system to move towards our goals. The decision support system is our kind of, it's our AI brain that we've been developing. It's a cutting edge piece of software that we've gotten both local as well as state funding to develop. Helps us track current behavior, does the evaluation I just talked about, helps monitor the system performance and estimate where things need to get done, and helps us, like I said, inform prioritization decisions. Now, moving into some of the results that we're actually getting. I'm not going to talk very much about this one, as you just heard from Jim and team about transportation safety. But I will say transportation safety is the foundation of multimodalism. You don't get somebody to bike, you don't get somebody to walk, you don't get somebody to take transit if they don't feel comfortable out on the street outside of their car. And so as we continue to try and bend into multimodalism in the system, this is priority number one. There's no way to get somebody to take that light rail without them feeling like they can get out of the light rail and walk to their job or home on the other side. All right. Another big one is environmental progress, right? One of the big driving forces behind transportation is trying to reduce what we're doing out there environmentally. It continues to cover around 50% of all of emissions in the city. Now, the way we're measuring this through our data systems is multifold, but the most important ones we're tracking is the parts of the system that are going to continue to drive. We want them to become green, right? And we're really seeing, this is the place we're seeing probably the most progress in all of these different metrics. We're seeing a huge increase in both the amount of chargers are out there, and if you look at the memo, the vehicles as well. So we're really seeing huge increases in these ports, and we're seeing, if I remember the number right, it's about 18% per year increase in the number of registered electric vehicles. I think we're up at around 80,000 in San Jose, which is a huge number. Now, another thing that's worth talking about just for a minute is vehicle miles traveled, because I know this is being carried around in a lot of different discussions. So vehicle miles traveled is a... metric that the state of California has required of us to measure in CEQA circumstances. But it's also a very good measure of understanding how an individual site, how much travel by vehicle is being produced through that site. So if you think about a downtown site where there's great transit and there's great walkability and all that, you're going to have a low vehicle miles traveled, even though you might have more trips coming out of that building. But in a very suburban place, you might have something like 95% travel coming out of that. And so that's the basic measurement. There's a lot more to it, but just trying to give a quick link into that because I know it's coming up in other discussions around development. We, from state rules, we're supposed to be reducing it overall. We also adopted this as a rule in our city to reduce it. And we want to see it reduced. We are seeing an increase on the longer term of things and a decrease in the shorter term. And a lot of that has to do with return to office policies coming in. And with that, I'm going to pass it off to Wilson.

Thank you, Ramses. Wilson Tam, transportation planning manager at DOT. So I'm going to talk about the next category called the multimodal access and equity, which is one of the goal areas in Move San Jose. Multimodal access and equity focus on how easily people across the city can reach destinations using different modes of transportation options. When we evaluate the transportation network, we continue to see important connectivity gaps. Connectivity between low-stress bicycle facilities remains limited citywide, and around two-thirds of the street segments have been designed to support the Complete Streets initiatives that we have set up to accomplish. At the same time, there are encouraging signs of progress. One notable accomplishment is that we have been able to implement Transit Signal Priority, or TSP, which is a technology to force the traffic signal to turn green light whenever a bus arrives in front of the intersection. and TSP has been implemented across the city and early results have shown that travel time savings have been accomplished of up to three minutes on some frequent routes or 20% improvement in travel time. However, despite these improvements, many destinations remain significantly more accessible by car than by transit. Roughly speaking, in 2025, as you can see, Only 40% of the jobs reachable by car within 30 minutes can also be reachable by transit. So there's a gap in terms of how many jobs we can reach within 30 minutes of transit versus car. So these findings reinforce the need for us to improve network connectivity across all modes and strengthen the first and last mile connection. In terms of the final category here is about travel behavior trends. This focuses on the travel behavior and what it tells us about the opportunities in mode shift. The data shows that approximately one-third of all trips in San Jose are now two miles or less in length, thanks to potentially remote working or working from home. an increase of 6.5% from 2024. We also see similar growth in non-commute trips. These shorter non-work trips represent some of the strongest opportunities for walking, biking, micro-mobility and transit to compete with driving if safe and convenient facilities are available. The city is looking to capitalize on this trend by expanding its bike share network with 32 new stations beginning later this year, and most of which will be located in East San Jose. These investments provide residents with additional transportation choices and can help reduce resilience and reliance on driving for short trips. This is the last slide of the presentation. So the previous slides focused on performance, showing how the city is tracking across various goals like safety, environmental sustainability, access and travel behavior. Equally important is how the DSS uses those performance findings to help identify project candidates that are well positioned to address the gaps and the challenges we have highlighted. When we evaluate the projects across through the DSS, there are 500 projects that have been planned through different initiatives. We found that the highest performing projects frequently occur along the high crash corridors. Areas with limited multimodal access and corridors that strengthen first and last mile connections. In other words, the projects that rise to the top are often located in the same places where the performance monitoring shows the greatest need. We also find that the strongest performing projects collectively influence more than 20 of the city's 36 KPIs and advance eight of the nine goals that you saw in the earlier slides of the presentation. The main takeaway is that the city has a set of project candidates that are strongly aligned with the challenges identified in this year's report and have the potential to advance safety, access, equity, and environmental objectives at the same time.

And I want to add one thing on that last slide, which is we're still working on the next iteration of the decision support system, but there'll soon be a public interface to this that'll help folks track these projects and how these metrics work across these projects. A little bit like a participatory budgeting kind of exercise so folks can play with that.

And that concludes our presentation. OK. Well, thank you very much. It's a great body of work, and I'm struck by the complexity of this city-wide transportation system and all the variations of what needs to be done in various parts of the city. The work that you do is impressive compared to what a small city might do where there's a lot more uniformity across a small city and a city of a million people and having to balance and prioritize. Just wanna thank you for that work. Do we have any public comment?

Yes, Jordan, please make your way down to the podium.

Thank you, staff, for the presentation, and I have to say I love the amount of detail that was added into this presentation compared to last year and the amount of attachments, so thank you. I know the data is probably proprietary, even though it's taken from our cell phones, but to the extent that you could put an aggregated GIS map of all those things, that would be great to have to be able to zoom in and see which areas are the high levels of stress versus the low areas, low areas of stress. And I'm glad to see that VMT is decreased from last year, but it's still higher than where it should be and not on a trend line to meet our goals. So I'd like to know what can we change about how we operate in order to get us back on track to meet our goals despite our small budget. A third of all trips being less than two miles, not great that people are still relying on their cars for such things, but that does mean it should be really easy to make improvements. If we get people on bay wheels and online scooters, then that's a third of all VMT that we could, well not a third of all VMT, a third of all trips that we could get rid of. Baywheels changed their pricing model last year and it's now cheaper than it used to be for short trips. So I think we should really lean into advertising that price change and get more people onto Baywheels. Park SJ also has a contract with the Downtown Association to advertise all of our plentiful parking downtown And we need to start advertising transit and biking just as much as car driving so that people are aware of it every time they see an ad for an event downtown. Finally, there was a question on the last presentation about drunk driving. And if we have better access to transit, more density, easier to walk and bike places, there'll be less people in cars in general, and therefore there should be less drunk driving. So we really need to keep investing in that.

Back to the committee.

Okay, I'll start with Council Member Ortiz.

Thank you, Council Member Cohen. I want to thank staff for their presentation as well. Appreciate the robust amount of information and data that was presented to us. It's good to see the expansion plan for the multimodal transportation. Especially, I represent District 5, so that's really good. Previously, I was on the Emerging Mobility Transportation Committee that the city had, and it's good to see a lot of the discussions that we had when I was a member actually come into fruition. So excited about that. I wanted to know if we could go back to the slide that had data in regards to the usage of the e-bikes or the e-scooters. It'd be good for me to understand, right? And it seems like the vast majority of our e-bikes and e-scooters there in downtown San Jose, is that correct to say?

currently um the service area for the bikes themselves is basically downtown plus a bit and now it is expanding towards your district right so all those new stations that expands that area i mean truly they could ride anywhere and just come back and then scooters have currently mostly downtown and they're expanding to different neighborhoods as the kind of rides show up for them yeah then i guess it may be a little bit hard to you know examine this at the

at the data level, because given they're all placed in downtown, but when we start reaching into East San Jose or more into North San Jose, I don't know if there's some in that area, it'd be good to see where they're actually taking the bikes to, if it's to work, if it's to, as one of the speakers, Jordan, had mentioned, going out to eat in downtown. That way, we could be more intentional with our placement of these e-bikes and e-scooters. Because it'd be good to know, like, all right, the ones that are being placed in East San Jose, people taking them to work or are they taking them when they're going to go out to a bar or vice versa even though you know drinking and driving a scooter is probably not as you know not not safe not any more safer than a car either but um uh but you know just just be good for us to to get an understanding that way we get our bang for our buck based off of placement of these and have we looked at that that level of usage at this point? Are we looking at where they were taking the bikes to?

We have like trip information at a high level. We don't have trip purpose information kind of by default. People don't tell us, hey, I'm going to the bar, or hey, I'm going to go see my grandma, right? What we know is they're traveling from this place to that place, right? And so you can kind of infer some of that information.

Well, I mean, like, if people are taken into the Eastridge, you know, transit center, then we know, okay, they're going, that's why they use an order to the, you know, Penitentia Creek transit jump on this and stuff like that. Are we looking at that yet? Or if they're going to North San Jose, we know they're taking it to employment hubs.

Yeah, so we can look at some of that information. I don't have any insights off the top of my head about that, but we do have access to some of that information in a larger data system that helps us track that plus scooters.

Yeah, the only thing I would add is that, as you mentioned, most of the locations are currently within the greater downtown, so I think it will be really interesting and helpful as both scooters and bike share expand. We'll be able to match destinations to purpose a little bit better because right now, If you're traveling within downtown, your purpose could be a lot of different things without a clear way of understanding what you're asking for. But I think we can look at it better when we have bigger geographies.

Thank you. Okay, Council Member Campos.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, staff and members of the public who presented this information and for all the information today that is all very interconnected and relevant and incredibly important. I just wanted to ask a question about the multimodal access and equity work. In South San Jose, I learned through the West Valley Community Services that a lot of my residents are reaching out through WVCS to use their VIA program, which allows them to call a vehicle to pick them up and get them to their community services. And I noticed that some of the key words in the multimodal access and equity, walking, biking, and transit, The emphasis I picked up on was really on the walking and the biking part and so I'm curious about where the possibility for micro mobility like smaller multi passenger vehicles that VTA doesn't offer because VTA is focused on mass transit and yet There are pockets throughout the city and throughout the county where those large vehicles don't really make sense, but we still need people to get to the transit stations from their neighborhoods, especially older adults who might have walkers. people with disabilities who might need a wheelchair or families with one young children who who want to get their stroller pretty easily on there and you can't do that on a bike or a scooter so um where where would that fit in or what would it take for the city of san jose to explore opportunities like that for our residents

Yeah, great, wonderful question. It's something we've been trying to tackle for quite a long time, actually. VTA went to a core lines model where they're really investing their dollars in making sure their big trunk lines are getting as much service as possible, and they've moved away from what they call the coverage model, where they were sending mid-sized vehicles into neighborhoods because they basically weren't getting the ridership to support it. And that's really hurt us to say our transit basically is not accessible through a lot of the city. So we are launching, actually, by the end of this year, Palenda, which is an on-demand shuttle service, pretty much exactly like what you're saying. It's serving much of D5 and D7, yeah. And what it is is an on-demand shuttle. So folks are going to be able to call it. They'll get picked up at or very near their home and at or very near their destination. And it is trying to aggregate rides. We're seeing a lot of these systems. There's one in Cupertino, one in Milpitas. And the thing that took us so long to get one going is the sustainability of such a thing. It costs a lot of money to run these things. And showing up at people's neighborhoods, especially when you're thinking about equity and money and all these kinds of things, and saying, hey, we have this really cool thing for you for a year or two, and then it disappears, one, it's not going to have as much effect, and two, it's a little bit of pull the rug out from under you kind of thing. And so we really tried to work out a system that would make it into a community-run system, hopefully, in the longevity of it. We're purchasing the vehicles versus renting them, all these kinds of things. And so we're continuing to do that. So hopefully that pilot will be launching at the end of this year. By the end of this year, everything seems to be green for that to happen by the end of the year. And if it's really successful, one, we hope VTA will take it over and run it instead of us because we are not a transit agency that we seem to be taking more and more transit work on because we basically need to. And two, we're really hoping that sustainable funding patterns emerge as the program matures.

Thank you. Did you want to add any additional?

Two really quick things. I think the local investment plan that VTA is working on, microtransit and expanding that, is definitely one of the things that's been talked about to complement the core service via bigger transit vehicles. And then the second thing is just I think that the VTA access program also, you know, it does a pretty good job of firsthand experience this year of how it works. And it does work pretty well for people with disabilities and certain older adults if they qualify. So just in the spirit of having more awareness that that service is out there. and pretty reliable once you get accustomed to it.

Thank you for that. So I heard that awareness leads to success if we can demonstrate that people are using it. Is there anything else that council can be doing to support this being a successful effort?

if you're talking about the one that we're running um yeah i mean i think it's we don't have a big marketing budget there's some right um and it is one of these things where if a whole bunch of people don't start using it it's just going to dry up because we need to prove the value right that's what we have to do it's public money it's got to be as valuable as possible in its use right so the more we can get folks out there knowing what it is and things like that you guys have a certain level of marketing ability because of who you are right so if you can help us with that that'd be great and that and then help us advocate for continuing funding for it thank you i imagine there's a an uptake delay though i mean you can't launch something test it for six months or a year and say no one's using it because it has to be a period of time where people

learn of its existence, figure out that it works, and start using it, so we have to be thoughtful about that. And I hope that when we're buying these vehicles, we're buying electric vehicles for this system.

I actually, I'm not sure if we are, I think we are, but large vans of that size that are electric are actually hard to find. So we're, I think that's what we're doing, but I'm not going to say yes until I'm absolutely certain. We'll follow up. I will follow up. I'll make a note to follow up on that.

All right, Council Member Ortiz.

Yeah, when Councilmember Campos was speaking, that was exactly what came to mind, our conversation in regards to the last mile solution, I think they're called. Because usually it's that last mile that's hard to solve for many commuters or transit enthusiasts. What I believe that pilot came from, it came from a committee that was started of neighborhood leaders from both District Five and District Eight. I don't think we had District Seven leaders We had quarterly meetings and those meetings were staffed by VTA staff and city, I don't think DOT was too involved, but I think every once in a while DOT would be there. But mostly VTA in response to the Eastridge to Bart regional connector and the fact that there wasn't gonna be enough funds for an Ocala stop. And so we had some very vocal neighborhood leaders who pushed on both the city and VTA to come up with a solution for families in that area who wouldn't be able to access the light rail or the Eastridge Transit Center easily, and so that kind of was the overall solution. And so definitely community organizing, finding interested neighborhood leaders, and then holding VTA accountable for you know, investments, because I believe the grant came from VTA, right? The funding is VTA.

It's Measure B's Innovative Transit Grant Program.

Yeah. And so, like, you know, VTA PAC is, I don't know if you're on, well, I'm on VTA PAC, so nobody else is on VTA PAC, but that's, definitely things that people should be watching if they are interested in accessing or replicating this program.

Thank you. Would you like to make a motion to accept the report?

Sure. I make a motion to accept the report.

Second.

Okay. I have a couple questions. Can you put that slide back up that was just on the screen a second ago? This slide talks about increased transit time versus geography. A little confusing. We'll dig into it a little bit more later. I see some dark blue dispersed amongst green and it's kind of hard to understand exactly how that's the case. Is this based on where people are, starting their trips, where they're ending their trips, or just in general, how is this measure generated?

Yeah, there is a lot going on, so I'm going to give Lance a warning that this is going to come to him because he is our data expert. But essentially, what this metric does is compare how well transit will get you from A to B to how well a car would get you from A to B.

And I'm just asking, A being where you start your...

Yes. So, yes, this is from where you start your trip. So the dark blue is the... percent additional time compared to transit. So the lower the better. So if it's yellow, it's taking you longer starting from that specific census tract to whichever endpoint.

So if you live in one of these areas, it'll take you this percentage longer to use transit than to drive. All of them take longer. No place takes less time, which is the concern, obviously, off the bat. But Some take significantly more time. But it's interesting, for example, I looked at North San Jose and I see that blue patch. I'd be curious to know why that patch is better off than the areas around it. So those kind of things are something to look into and just understand what is it about these areas that lead to that. On the next slide, I just wanted to quickly ask the question, obviously we have downtown covered with green. The purple is where we're moving, which is out to East San Jose, which is great to sort of connect East San Jose into downtown. When are we thinking about moving north? Because I can imagine that north triangle of North San Jose being an important destination or starting place for all the dense housing that's up there.

Well, we're getting requests to go north and south with this system right now, which is good. Hey, demand is great. We love it. We love it. We love it. We did do a pilot up in North San Jose with dockless bikes even, which are more, if you remember what those were, they got taken off because they were very hard to manage. And they just didn't see the ridership needed to sustain them. And this is a little bit of that, what we started with. And I think that the big narrative point here is we have a long way to go, especially in places like North San Jose, with building the infrastructure to actually get people on their bikes to support a system like this. Because if we had a really great system of bikeways up there that served many more sites, these things would probably get a lot more use. And so I would say we're always happy to explore. We did have to get a lot of grant money. And we're supporting the operations here in the east on this. And so we can try to go that way. But I will say we've tried. And I think we still have some more baseline work to do to really make it competitive.

Only thing I'd add real briefly is just you can see how close these dots are to each other and that the redundancy of stations is very important for the bike share system to work reliably for people. You know, you can encounter issues where a station is full temporarily or it's empty temporarily or if it's offline temporarily. And all of this means that it stops being a consistent, reliable system unless you could get even on foot from one to the other, which I think is another challenge for some parts of North San Jose. Certainly not all of them, but that kind of level of density and breadcrumbs, you do have to really make sure that that can be followed. in any system expansion. And so that's part of the art of citing these and such as well.

I'll add one more thing. Let's get a lot more housing up there and that will make it work well, right? Is that we need more trips of that lower distance, right? A lot of people are coming into North San Jose for work and the jobs housing balance up there is still needed.

But there's, I mean, we hope that many people who are moving into the denser housing up there are also wanting to work there, but they might be more than half a mile from their office, and having this option might be beneficial. So something to study and think about. I appreciate that. And another conversation for later time, maybe it's a little peripheral to this, but how rideshare is affecting these behaviors, these transit times and all that. Well, you know, VMT might be going up, people might be using rideshare and not personal vehicles, and then, thinking bigger about how this affects parking needs and other things. We've had just a lot of conversation recently about the downtown and not building enough parking and what that means, but I'm thinking about how we might collectively understand our parking uh... inventory and how it's utilized better uh... to to be able to allow us to build with less parking but still have parking available you know as i was thinking as i was even reading the article in the paper this weekend and thinking through thinking well there's a lot of empty parking we know in other locations near places where there's no parking and if we can figure out how to bundle off-site available parking with construction we can build cheaper but still offer parking for people in a way that better utilizes what we've already built in the city. So just a lot of stuff I'd love to think about going forward, and perhaps you already are.

I mean, we're definitely thinking about that. We've got a position opening in my team soon, if you want to join. Great thoughts. So, yeah, I mean... The more we can make these things efficient in use, the better the land use can be, the better the transportation system is. We all know that surface parking lots are basically a waste of space in a lot of ways, though they're needed in a lot of ways too, right? But at the same time, yeah, you drive through North San Jose in particular, and there are surface parking lots. There's seas of them. and some of them are full and some of them aren't, when it doesn't always relate to whether those buildings are in use or not, right? And if we could start sharing that, it would be great, though you could talk to some of these tech companies about sharing parking lots, and it's pretty intense. They do not want their populations mingling, so there's a lot there.

We have to start thinking differently about how these things are used, and maybe I'll be available sooner than I had anticipated.

Thank you for the presentation, and let's vote.

Okay, motion carries 4-0 and we are on to open forum.

Jordan, please make your way down to the podium.

Hope to see you all at Viva Cay this weekend over in downtown and Japantown and Monterey Road. I wanted to share a story from BPAC a few weeks ago. Sorry, take a step back for a second. While you're in downtown, go check out 3rd and 4th Street with our new concrete protected bike lanes. They're really great. Someone, a member of the public visited BPAC a few weeks ago. To say that now that there's those concrete bike lanes have been built in downtown. He's now biking to work About three out of five trips a week and he lives in South San Jose. I think district 10 Not sure if he's biking all the way up there if he's taking light rail But regardless it really shows that if you build these things some people will change their behaviors and Every study basically shows that the biggest segment of the population is people who are interested in incorporating active transportation into their workflow but are hesitant and concerned about it. So the more we build nicer infrastructure, the more people will actually use it. There was a question about things that we can do about drunk drivers. I know we always want to try and do as much as we can in the city as possible, but I urge you all to get involved in advocating for statewide legislation. I think there's been three years in a row, bills that were trying to enable some kind of speed limiter devices in cars that have not made it through because there's still this association of driving and freedom, even though every scooter on the road has a speed limiter that prevents it from going 15 miles an hour. um so definitely get involved in state level advocacy and there's definitely some places in the city where it's faster to bike than it is to drive if you incorporate the time it takes to walk to and from your parking spot so keep that in mind thank you back to the committee thank you we are adjourned at 3 26 p.m

Thank you.