The Valley Transportation Authority has developed the Valley Transportation Plan 2050, a proposal aiming to improve upon four main transportation categories: transit, highways and expressways, complete streets, and land use.

Each category has its own specific goals, sustainability in land use, efficiency with highways/expressways, safety for complete streets and transit will look to set the tone for what transportation will look like in Santa Clara County for the next 30 years. 

Transit

The VTA has also created the Visionary Network for transit, a sub-plan it intends to adopt in December, 2023. 

VTA senior transportation planner Janice Soriano-Ramos said at the forefront of the Visionary Network is the feedback the VTA gets from the public so proper adjustments can be made in regards to transportation infrastructures. 

“We really want to make sure that we can incorporate some feedback that you may all have about what sort of amenities that [we] can provide,” Soriano-Ramos said. “Whether it be new benches, more shelters, more lighting so that you feel safer at night in those locations.”

VTA transportation planner John Sighamony said this secondary plan will greatly impact executing the transit aspect of Valley Transportation Plan 2050. 

“We included the VTA Visionary Network for transit, that piece is actually going to play a major role in the Valley Transportation Plan 2050 process that is going to be our focus for transit for this plan.” Sighamony said. “It’s going to actually direct how we implement service in the upcoming years.” 

Highways and Expressways

Sighamony said the overarching goal of the highways and expressways vision is efficiency. 

“For our highways and expressways program, we do want to identify efficiency-based design practices for our projects,” he said. “We realized that we cannot build our way out of congestion,” 

A secondary goal is to decrease vehicle traveled miles, which directly correlates with congestion on the road, according to a sac.org report. 

“We do want to decrease (vehicle miles traveled), but we’re still trying to figure out how to do that by what percentage,” Sighamony said. 

Complete Streets 

The Complete Streets Program aims to make the streets of Santa Clara County safer. 

Sighamony said emphasizing the safety of non-drivers can help create more cohesive transportation overall. 

“While we understand that a lot of people in this county drive . . . we have to understand that we have to make it safe for those that don’t drive,” Sighamony said. “There’s people that ride bikes, there are pedestrians and obviously the kinds of service we have to make them all of them kind of work in harmony.”

Similar to the Visionary Network for transit, the VTA wants to incorporate a similar plan named Vision Zero that could potentially save lives. 

Vision Zero is an initiative that looks to reduce the amount of traffic deaths through “quick-build data-driven safety improvements” such as paints and signs according to the City of San Jose “What is Vision Zero?” webpage.

“For our complete streets program, we do want to develop a Vision Zero program,” Sighamony said. “We want to really look at reducing incidents between pedestrians and bicycles and cars.” 

Land Use 

Sighamony said they recognized the VTA’s lack of authority in terms of land use outside of its existing stations. 

He said partnering with member agencies can help counteract difficulties with making their transit network a catalyst for homeness. 

“We want to promote a jobs/housing balance and we really want to create a sense of place,” Sighamony said. “And a lot of this can only be done when we partner with our member agencies as they have a lot of land use authority.” 

The main point of success the VTA would like to achieve with their land use is to become more environmentally-friendly. 

Sighamony said an approach to achieving this is lowering driving time. 

“The focus of this land use is really to minimize the need to drive and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Sighamony said. 

Gretchen Baisa, VTA community outreach supervisor, said plans to continue listening and taking into consideration what the public has to say are in effect. 

“We really appreciated the feedback and the conversations that we had with the community on these two efforts and we decided to hold these on a regular basis,” Baisa said.