In one of the first steps of an ambitious effort to transform San Jose’s Diridon Station into a “world-class transit hub”, officials have released an initial blueprint for what the station’s overhaul might look like.
The plan merely serves as a rough draft for what is to come — elevated tracks above downtown roadways, a station with two separate concourses near West Santa Clara and West San Fernando streets, shops and services in the station’s ground level and public squares for cyclists and pedestrians to easily move in between modes of transit.
The station’s redevelopment, which will take about a decade to bring to fruition, will serve as a key focal point in the robust revitalization of downtown San Jose’s western edges, which will include Google’s transit village.
“The ambition is to create a lively and active neighborhood that best services bikes and pedestrians in a safe and pleasant manner,” said Daniel Jongtien of Benthem Crouwel Architects.
The concept layout was the product of more than a year of planning between the impacted agencies and the community. In July 2018, the City of San Jose, Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority and California High-Speed Rail Authority formed a public agency partnership to begin reinventing the station.
The group then hired Benthem Crouwel, an architect that re-designed Western Europe transit hubs in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Utrecht and The Hague; and Arcadis, a design and engineering consultant. Over the past year, they’ve gathered public input through an online survey and dozens of community meetings, pop-up events and conversations with stakeholders and neighborhood groups.
The plan, which outlines the functionality of the station rather than its architectural design, envisions station entrances on both the east and west sides of the two concourses on Santa Clara and San Fernando streets. It also includes elevated tracks from Julian to Virginia streets, which will allow for safer and more efficient travel from the east and west sides of the city.
To accommodate the future expansion of service at the station, an additional track and platform have been proposed — widening the station’s footprint to the east. In order to accommodate that extension, the section of Cahill Street between Santa Clara and San Fernando streets would be restricted to cyclists and pedestrians.
Diridon Station currently serves as a transportation hub for approximately 17,000 daily passengers via light rail, Caltrain, Amtrak, the Capitol Corridor, ACE Train and bus lines. Within the next decade, BART is scheduled to expand through San Jose to Diridon Station. And eventually, the station could serve as a vital point for high-speed rail to connect Silicon Valley to the Central Valley.
Nearby, Google anticipates that its transit-oriented community featuring office buildings, stores, restaurants and open spaces on an approximately mile-long strip in downtown San Jose west of Highway 87 will serve 15,000 to 20,000 of its employees.
Between additional traffic driven by Google’s new campus and BART’s planned expansion, the Valley Transit Authority projects that the Diridon Station will serve more than 100,000 passengers by 2040, according to its 2019 Travel Demand Model.
At a Diridon Station Joint Policy Advisory Board meeting Friday afternoon, city and transit officials, as well as residents, voiced overwhelming support for the initial station layout and the elevated tracks that will improve travel for anyone traveling from one side of the tracks to the other throughout much of downtown San Jose.
But backlash brewed when they discussed the southern approach of the tracks toward the downtown station.
Early in the concept planning phase, officials and their team of consultants studied the viability of building a bridge-like structure — also known as a viaduct — to carry either some or all of the trains over the Interstate 280 and Highway 87 interchange. But the group decided against the idea after realizing that the substantial infrastructure would adversely impact currently unaffected neighborhoods, including Washington Guadalupe, Tamien and Alma-Almaden, citing visual, environmental and noise concerns.
“We find, unfortunately, that there’s more trade-off with the 280 viaduct than there were benefits,” Liz Scanlon, a consultant with the planning and design engineering firm Kimley-Horn, said during a presentation at Friday’s meeting.
Instead, the team decided that the safety, noise and visual issues would be better addressed by maintaining the existing track paths and making improvements such as building vegetation-covered walls and adding rubber bearings on the tracks.
Despite the assessment by the consultants, some of the advisory board members and most of the residents in the audience urged the consultants to continue studying the opportunity for a viaduct to absorb some of the impacts on nearby residents.
Roo Diridon — the namesake of San Jose’s train station — said he saw the viaduct as a way for the city to create an “iconic structure” that could help the city create an identity for itself.
“With the cooperation of the light rail authority, you very well could create something there that could be quite startling and remarkable that could help identify the city a little bit more dramatically than our airport flattened skyline,” Diridon said.
Bill Rankin, a member of the North Willow Glen Neighborhood Association, pointed out that the necessary track expansion without utilizing a viaduct would nearly cut Fuller Park in half.
“The impacts of a third or fourth rail line coming through the neighborhood to the south of Diridon are just too impactful for it (the viaduct) not to be studied further,” Rankin said. “These neighborhoods have been dissected, bisected and affected by transportation changes over the years. The environmental injustice that has been directed on these neighborhoods in the past cannot be ignored — nor should it be ignored in the future.”
The consultants hope to get approval to move forward with more detailed engineering and environmental design plans after receiving approval from the San Jose City Council at its meeting on Dec. 3 and the Caltrain, VTA and California High-Speed Rail Authority board of directors at their meetings in early December.
