4th Street Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Project

Part of the 4th Street Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Project Effort

The City of San Jose wants to make 4th Street a safe street for you and your family to walk, bike, and drive. To do this, we must repave and redesign the street from Hedding Street to Technology Place. The dashed green line in the map below shows this location.

Shows the reader the project location
The green line shows the location of the 4th Street Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Project

We will repaint the crosswalks and add three types of bike lanes to 4th Street between Hedding Street and Technology Way. You can see what the bike lanes look like in the pictures below.

Shows an example of a protected bikeway
A protected bike lane is a space for biking between the sidewalk and motor vehicle traffic.

Buffered Bike Lane

Shows the reader what a buffered bike lane looks like
A buffered bike lane has a painted buffer between the bike lane and motor vehicle traffic.

Basic Bike Lane

Shows reader what a basic bike lane looks like
A basic bike lane does not have a buffer, but does provide a space for biking.

Most of 4th Street includes two wide vehicle traffic lanes in each direction. Wide traffic lanes tend to increase the likelihood of speeding, and the severity of crashes. Narrower and fewer lanes help reduce speeding and improve safety. This change also creates space for bike lanes.

We created two design options for 4th Street between Hedding Street and Rosemary St.

  • two vehicle lanes and adds a center turn lane, basic bike lanes, buffered bike lanes, and protected bike lanes.
  • The second option removes vehicle lane and adds basic and buffered bike lanes only. It also has less of an impact on speed reduction. We prefer the first option because it slows vehicles down and allows us to put in protected bike lanes.

Both options keep the existing street parking between Hedding Street and Rosemary Street. Parking needs to be removed between Rosemary Street and Technology Way to install buffered bike lanes.

The City of San Jose has implemented over 30 lane reduction projects. Each project required us to look at traffic data to understand how the street functions. For 4th St, we analyzed existing and future projected traffic volumes to see what the impacts to residents could be if we removed lanes. The analysis showed us that fewer motor vehicle lanes could handle those volumes.

We have a virtual community meeting scheduled for October 14, 2021 at 6:30pm. The two different design options will be explained at that meeting. Please register for the Zoom meeting by clicking on this link: https://www.movesanjose.org/register/4th-st-bike-ped/

For those of you who cannot attend, we plan to upload a video of the meeting to this website for you to watch. Please enter your email address at the bottom of this web page so you know when the video is uploaded.

The project manager for 4th Street is Nick Danty. Please email Nick at Nick.Danty@sanjoseca.gov if you have questions.