Pre-filled emails: please add a personal note or story

Talking Points

***  IMPORTANT: Start the email/speech with a few lines on a personal note or narrative. It makes your comments much more powerful. ***

Send the email to citycouncil@cupertino.gov and cityclerk@cupertino.gov, with a bcc to info@walkbikecupertino.org so that we can track the number of emails sent.

Summary Talking Points

The vast majority of this road from Saratoga Ave in Saratoga to El Camino Real in Sunnyvale is already 2 lanes or 3 lanes. The lane reduction from 4 lanes to 3 lanes affects approx 0.03% of the road going north and 0.09% of the road going north. Rather than slow down traffic, streamlining the road to 3 lanes will likely make traffic flow more smoothly. For context, El Camino Real is 3 lanes along its entire length and handles far more traffic than De Anza Blvd.

The city transportation engineers conducted extensive traffic counts, data gathering, and traffic analysis, and considered expert opinion and similar roads, such as El Camino Real. They determined that the changes will not affect traffic flow on De Anza.

This is a safety issue first and foremost. De Anza is one of the most unsafe corridors in Cupertino with a high number of severe injuries in the past few years. It is listed in the Vision Zero plan as a very high risk corridor for pedestrians and cyclists. It is also listed in the Local Road Safety Plan as the second highest risk road (only behind Stevens Creek) for danger to cyclists and pedestrians.

• Safer for cyclists – Adding a buffer to the bike lanes will give greater protection from cars to cyclists
• Safer for pedestrians – Crossing 3 lanes instead of 4 lanes is much safer for pedestrians, especially seniors and children.
• Safer for car drivers – fewer merges are required due to lanes being consistent. Over 10K accidents are due to merges each year in California.

Electoral season is upon us and opponents of bike lanes are trying to stir up resentment and outrage to gain the public favor by spreading misinformation about the De Anza bike lane project.

Walk Bike Cupertino has always been extremely consistent in our support for safer infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. We are willing to work with anyone in the City Council to accomplish that goal.

Impact to neighboring cities

Both San Jose to the south and Sunnyvale to the north already have only three lanes of traffic on DeAnza. San Jose has recently  added the same buffers to their lanes on De Anza south of Cupertino. Our lanes, now with buffers, would continue theirs. There are only positive impacts or no impact to neighboring cities.

Traffic Volumes and Concerns about new delays

• The city staff have measured 24 hour traffic volumes in 15 minute increments in February and March of 2023. A quantitative analysis of the per-lane capacity was then performed.
• Thorough observation of similar corridors with similar traffic volumes was considered in the analysis as an indication of expected performance of the DeAnza corridor.
• El Camino has higher traffic volumes in places than De Anza, with the same three lanes. It does not see backups–there is no reason to think De Anza will see any, either.
• Based on analysis, real-world observation of similar roads, plus advice of California’s Technical Advisory Committee on CEQA*, no delays or traffic impacts are expected from this change.

City Plans support this change

This project was listed in the 2016 Bicycle Transportation Plan—eight years ago–as the top Tier 2 project. This project has been planned for a long time.

The recently approved Vision Zero plan identifies this corridor as a high injury corridor for cyclists and pedestrians. The Local Road Safety Plan also lists this as a high injury corridor.

Low Cost to implement buffer and it’s wasteful to spend money on microsimulation 

The cost of this project is very low, as it is just design and paint striping. 

Running a computer microsimulation would waste our city’s money which would especially be a poor decision in our current budget crisis. As our professional civil engineers on staff stated, “This approach would require lengthy and expensive evaluation of the corridor, and the results would not provide significantly more insight than the quantitative analysis performed.”

*Regarding the need for a formal traffic analysis, the state’s Technical advisory committee on CEQA says, “reducing roadway capacity (for example, by removing or repurposing motor vehicle travel lanes) will generally reduce VMT and therefore is presumed to cause a less-than-significant impact on transportation. Generally, no transportation analysis is needed for such projects.”

The information in this article is solely the opinion of the author and Walk-Bike Cupertino and does not reflect the opinions of any other organization or entity. For more information, contact WBC at info@walkbikecupertino.org.