Town open for business, closed to thru traffic
Hwy. 17 access closed at S. Santa Cruz Ave. per council decision
LOS GATOS — With expectations of more hot weekends ahead, the Los Gatos Town Council voted unanimously last week to close South Santa Cruz Avenue at Wood Road on weekends through Labor Day, including the Monday holiday.
The closures are directed at beachgoers who cut through Los Gatos to jump onto southbound Highway 17 just past Wood Road.
The council’s vote followed a presentation by Parks and Public Works Director Matt Morley, who discussed traffic volumes and travel times before and after the intersection was closed for three weekends in late June and early July.
For example, data that’s been collected so far shows it took about 17 minutes to travel from Winchester Boulevard and Highway 85 to Wood Road on June 18 at 11:35 a.m. The closure was not in place on that weekend.
But on the first Saturday closure, June 25, people apparently didn’t know about it and chaos ensued: Just before noon that day, travel time jumped to nearly 52 minutes.
The same trip took just over 15 minutes at 11 a.m. on July 2, when the road was closed. The road was closed again on July 9, and travel time was clocked at just under 12 minutes at 11:09 a.m.
But travel time shot up to nearly 21 minutes at 11:38 a.m. on July 16, when the road was open again.
The data was supplemented by anecdotal evidence from residents like Alan Feinberg, who observed that in 25 years of living on Pennsylvania Avenue, “we have never, ever seen traffic this bad.”
Feinberg believes the problems in his neighborhood are caused by people cutting through Ridgecrest Avenue from Highway 9.
“Cars (were) lined up bumper to bumper, stopped in their tracks,” Feinberg said, “not just from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other but on all the cross streets—Wissahickon, Walnut, Palm and Hernandez— all stopped dead for hours at a time. That’s crazy.”
Broadway resident Maria Ristow used the term “carmageddon” to describe the situation.
And Mayor Barbara Spector, who lives downtown, said the problem “really hit home” for her when people said they didn’t want to come to Los Gatos to visit her.
“They said, ‘We’re not coming there. If you want to see me, you come to where I am.’ We have neighbors who are trying to sell their house. They have open houses on Saturday and Sunday. They can’t do that anymore because nobody wants to come and nobody can come,” Spector said.
The business community is apparently split over the closures. Morley reported that a survey of 53 businesses showed “there was an overall consensus that the weekend beach traffic keeps local shoppers, diners and business regulars away from Los Gatos on the weekends.”
He also said multiple downtown merchants reported revenue losses of 30 percent to 50 percent.
A spokeswoman for Time Out shop owner Ginger Rowe said her sales were down 11, 40 and 16 percent during the three weekends South Santa Cruz Avenue was closed at Wood Road.
The following weekend, July 16-17, she said Time Out’s sales rebounded by 25 percent when the roadway was open. In addition to closing Wood Road, the town council voted to continue closing Massol and Tait avenues as a means of curbing that cut-through traffic.
Closing Ridgecrest will require Monte Sereno’s OK, although police chief Matt Frisby acknowledged that officers did put up a temporary, emergency roadblock last weekend due to safety concerns caused by the gridlock.