A bright red ribbon fluttered in the wind against an overcast backdrop after Los Gatos Mayor Matthew Hudes used a pair of cartoonishly big scissors to cut it, officially opening a new bridge on the Los Gatos Creek Trail on Thursday afternoon.
The trailhead connector bridge is now open to the public, giving pedestrians, bicyclists and other trail users new paths between the Los Gatos Creek Trail and both sides of Highway 9.
Speaking from the bridge under Highway 9, Los Gatos Public Works Director Nicolle Burnham said the connection includes a concrete walkway into town from the trail to University Avenue. On the north side, there is a switchback to allow access to Highway 9 from the Highway 17 offramp. The project also includes retaining walls, ramps, handrails and trailheads.
The town “prioritized having this high-visibility connector on this key roadway,” Burnham said. “Highway 9 is a key road in town, and the other trail accesses are kind of in more isolated, less highly-used roads, so they’re less visible. So this provides a really apparent and easily accessible location for access to the trail.”
The bridge cost about $9 million, said Burnham, but the town could only afford around $1.5 million of that amount. The rest of the funds came from grants from partners. The Valley Transportation Authority, or VTA, provided the initial grants for the design from Measure B funds, a countywide sales tax that supports transportation projects.
“We were really fortunate to have good project partners,” Burnham said. “Caltrans was very supportive of the project. VTA was incredible supportive, not just with that initial design funding but with construction funding,”
Caltrans, Pacific Gas & Electric, Comcast, AT&T, Granite Construction and Zoon Engineering also collaborated on the project with the town.
The project began as a concept in 2008 before designs were drafted in 2020, Burnham said.
“I think any time you have big aspirational projects like this, it can take a number of years to figure out how to actually deliver the project and put together the money for funding,” Burnham said.
The bridge where the ribbon-cutting took place was prefabricated, built in South Carolina before being shipped across the country in one piece, Burnham said. Lane closures on Highway 9 allowed construction crews to lift the bridge from the highway and place it over Los Gatos Creek. Construction took about 18 months to complete.
Burnham said the next steps will be to get some signage up on the trail to direct people how to use the bridge to get to town and to neighboring communities like Campbell.
“This is something that has been a long time coming and will serve us for a very long time,” Hudes said. “And when I say ‘us,’ it’s not just the residents of Los Gatos, but it’s our visitors, it’s our businesses, and also it includes people who never knew about this and just have discovered this.”