When I first got involved in local government, a woman who was like a grandmother to me began sharing old newspaper clippings. She grew up in Los Gatos and lived here into her 90s, long enough to watch orchards become neighborhoods.
One clipping covered a 1970s Town Council election in which all five candidates named fixing traffic as a top priority. Clearly, that didn’t happen. Along with housing, traffic is still one of the two issues I hear about most from residents.
With another beach traffic season behind us, it’s a good time to reflect on this decades-long challenge and look ahead.
The problem
Beach traffic typically hits Los Gatos on one to two dozen hot weekend days a year, and anyone who lives here knows how brutal those days can be.
Residents often feel trapped in their own neighborhoods. What should be a quick drive to the grocery store can take an hour. On the worst days, some residents can’t get out of their own driveways. I’ve even heard from residents whose doorbells were rung by strangers stuck in traffic asking to use the bathroom.
Our small businesses pay the price, too. Summer weekends should be among their busiest days, but instead, merchants watch gridlock outside their windows while would-be customers sit in their cars. Many business owners have told me that beach traffic rivals online shopping in its impact on their sales.
Traffic is also a safety issue. Ambulances have to fight their way through stopped cars to reach our neighbors. The heaviest traffic days also tend to be our hottest, highest fire danger days. For families in the hills with limited ways out, the thought of evacuating through bumper-to-bumper traffic is frightening.
Navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps have made beach traffic far worse by sending drivers off the freeway and into our neighborhoods. VTA data shows that during peak weekend hours, roughly 24% of cars on Highway 17 cut through town.
Past attempts
Despite years of effort, the problem persists. Los Gatos has tried closing South Santa Cruz Avenue at Wood Road (near the Toll House), piloted one-way traffic downtown, restricted turns in the Almond Grove neighborhood and worked directly with navigation companies to keep traffic on 17. Unfortunately, these efforts helped only marginally or simply pushed traffic into other neighborhoods. Enforcement has its limits, too, because in the time it takes an officer to write one ticket, dozens of other drivers have made the same illegal turn.
It’s clear that small fixes can’t solve this big problem. We have to address the root cause.
Today’s solutions
Solving beach traffic starts with being honest about what we can change. About a million people live in San José, and on beautiful summer days, many of them want to go to Santa Cruz using the only convenient route there. Our goal shouldn’t be to stop beach traffic, but to keep it on Highway 17 and off our local streets.
The problem starts near the Lark Avenue exit, where Highway 17 narrows from four lanes to two in about half a mile. Drivers see brake lights at that merge and exit to cut through town.
That’s why I’m excited about the Highway 17 Corridor Congestion Relief Project, a partnership between the Town, VTA and Caltrans. Advancing this project has been one of my top priorities as mayor, and last month the Town Council heard an update directly from the project team.
The project adds a third lane in each direction between Lark Avenue and Highway 9, moving the bottleneck past the last exit into town, so drivers have little reason to leave the highway. It also reconfigures the outdated Highway 17/Highway 9 cloverleaf, which I consider the most dangerous interchange in town, replacing it with longer ramps and a far safer crossing across Highway 9 for pedestrians, bicyclists, and cars alike.
As Vice Chair of VTA’s Capital Program Committee, I helped secure $11 million for this project’s design and environmental review, which are nearly complete. The next challenge is funding construction for a project now estimated at $178 million, most of which VTA will cover while helping Los Gatos pursue grants for the rest.
But construction is still a few years away, and residents shouldn’t have to wait that long for relief. In the meantime, I want to pilot something more creative: congestion pricing on South Santa Cruz Avenue and Highway 9, the two southbound on-ramps drivers use to cut through town. The tolls would only switch on during peak beach traffic, and prices would rise with demand, negating the incentive to leave the highway.
The beauty of a pilot is that if residents dislike the tolls more than the traffic, we can turn them off.
Finally, we need better alternatives to driving. I’ve worked to add bus benches around town, and I support our Transportation Commission’s proposal to give every Los Gatos High School student and staff member a free VTA pass, along with making transit free for seniors.
I feel a real obligation to act on this issue, and I would rather make a mistake of action than of inaction. A quote attributed to Teddy Roosevelt has stuck with me: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
Someday, someone may come across a clipping of this column. My hope is that they’ll smile, because this time, Los Gatos did the right thing.
*Rob Moore is the mayor of Los Gatos
