The Irony on Homestead Road
- Alon Golan
- May 3
- 4 min read
A reflection on car culture, school traffic, and the infrastructure we keep failing to build.
Last month, I attended a recurring joint meeting between the Cupertino Union School District (CUSD), the Fremont Union High School District (FUHSD), and the City of Los Altos, with the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) attending as a guest. It was a routine interagency gathering — the kind where well-meaning people from different jurisdictions come together to coordinate on shared challenges. One of those challenges was the Homestead Road corridor.
For those unfamiliar, the Homestead Road project that was discussed concerns the 1.5 miles at the western end of Homestead Road, between Foothill and Hollenbeck/Stelling. This segment serves students at West Valley Elementary School, Cupertino Middle School, and Homestead High School. Despite the fact that it serves so many children, it is, by most accounts, a dangerous road for anyone not in a car. The bicycle lanes are just paint in the side gutters and sidewalks are narrow and full of poles and utility boxes. Yet it allots a large amount of road space to cars -- parts of it have 5 car lanes.
At the meeting, VTA presented the project's status. The project officially began in 2019 with a feasibility study, the output of which was a feasibility report describing the safety problems of students biking and walking to school and recommendations for what should be done. Then years of inactivity ensued as VTA searched for funding for design. In 2023, the initial design was completed. Now the project is in another period of inactivity as VTA seeks funding for final design, environmental clearance, and construction. While the VTA webpage estimates a completion date of 2027, VTA cannot give a confident date without securing funding.
This slow pace is largely due to the project being multi-jurisdictional, requiring coordination of 3 cities (Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Cupertino) and the County.
To be clear: the school district representatives and city officials in the room are not the sole bottleneck or grantors of funding. VTA is the project manager, and the staff present are seeking funding, not granting it. Grant decisions are made in part by a VTA staff grant team and approved by the VTA Board of Directors, none of whom were present at the meeting. The attendees' primary role is to coordinate and encourage VTA to find funding. The VTA staff, school district representatives, and the city officials are navigating a system that chronically underfunds anything that isn't made to serve cars. This is a structural problem as well as a cultural one.
But here's the moment that stopped me.
After the official meeting was over, the VTA representatives wrapped up and left, and the remaining attendees — school district officials and city representatives — stayed to plan their next meeting. Almost immediately, the conversation turned to scheduling logistics. Specifically: what time should the next meeting be?
Someone suggested 3:30 PM. And just as quickly, someone else raised a concern: wouldn't that be school pickup time? The roads would be clogged. Getting to the meeting would be a nightmare.
Let that land for a moment.
The people who have a say in the efforts to reduce car dependency around schools — to build the very infrastructure that would make it safe and easy for kids to walk or bike, and thereby eliminate the traffic that chokes these neighborhoods every morning and afternoon — were themselves paralyzed by that same traffic. Not as bystanders. As part of the decision-making apparatus.
This isn't a criticism of those individuals. It's a mirror held up to all of us.
We live in one of the most favorable places in the world for active transportation. The South Bay has flat terrain, reliably good weather, and public school attendance zones compact enough that many students live within a short distance of their schools. The conditions for biking and walking to school here are, objectively, excellent. And yet we have built a system so thoroughly organized around the car that even the people trying to fix it can't imagine getting to a meeting any other way.
Walking and biking to school are not hobbies. They are modes of transportation. But we have so miserably failed to build infrastructure that supports them — protected bike lanes, wide, shaded sidewalks — that such infrastructure feels aspirational rather than practical. Parents drive because the alternatives are made to be dangerous. Kids miss out on independence, exercise, and the simple act of getting somewhere under their own power. And the roads around schools become more congested, more violent and hostile, more expensive to maintain, and harder to fix.
The Homestead Road corridor project will eventually move forward, I hope. The people working on it care, and they're doing what they can within a system that makes progress very hard. This slow, difficult process is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a society that treats the car as the default, and everything else as an afterthought at best.
Every time school pickup clogs Homestead Road, it’s not because parents are selfish. It’s because we never built them a better option.
About the Author
Alon Golan is on the Board of Sunnyvale Safe Streets. He strongly believes in making the streets safe for all modes of transportation. In his spare time, he likes to think about how to fix the transportation problem in the US.
