San José Downtown West Mixed-Use Plan

Nelson\Nygaard reimagined the neighborhood with complete and connected multimodal streets that align the project to support San José’s travel mode share goals.

With over one million residents, San José is one of the most diverse large cities in the United States and Northern California’s largest city. Anchored around Diridon station, a major transit hub, the Downtown West project aims to transform a low-density 80-acre site into a vibrant transit-oriented and mixed-use community. Beginning in 2018, Downtown West is a planned multi-phase development of over 5,000 residential units, over 7 million square feet of office, civic, and retail space, and 15 acres of open space. The planned development builds on the context and character of its surroundings by reinforcing local and regional transit connections and strengthening links to Downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. The project sponsor is working with the City, public agencies, and local community to help bring the vision to life.

As the transportation and mobility lead, Nelson\Nygaard exercised its strength as national experts to reimagine the neighborhood with complete and connected multimodal streets that align the project to support San José’s travel mode share goals. Downtown West includes improvements to the public realm that optimize connections to nearby regional transit services, enhance local walkability, and improve cycling linkages to adjacent neighborhoods and regional trails. Nelson\Nygaard’s key deliverable was the Downtown West Design Standards and Guidelines (DWDSG) Mobility Chapter, which guides the active streetscape design of the phased development by promoting opportunities for creative and innovative streets that put people first, including shared streets, dynamic lanes, protected bike lanes, and protected intersections. Through the DWDSG, Nelson\Nygaard also advised how local policies and guides inform future Downtown Weston streetscapes, and potential exceptions to those documents.

In addition to the network concept and streetscape design work, Nelson\Nygaard developed two models. The transportation demand management (TDM) model informed a larger understanding of how the project’s proposed infrastructure and programmatic improvements could support City mode share goals and reduce parking demand, and the traffic modeling was used to provide a preliminary assessment of the operation constraints. Community engagement was a key aspect of the planning effort, and Nelson\Nygaard supported conversations with stakeholders like adjacent property owners and the public to provide high quality transportation options for people visiting and living in the district.