How San Jose small business owners have become transit advocates

For years, people in the Bay Area have been talking about the idea of Bus Rapid Transit: give a bus its own lane, special loading docks and control over stoplights, and you have a form of transit that’s faster than streetcars at a fraction of the price. But it hasn't happened anywhere yet – in part because of local resistance. In San Francisco, a plan to run so-called “BRTs” down the center of Geary Street has drawn opposition from a group of merchants who worry that it would make it harder for bus riders to get to their stores. That’s exactly the opposite of what proponents say the plan will do.

So in San Jose, where ideas for Bus Rapid Transit corridors are starting to solidify, planners are trying to bridge that gap. They’re sending out teams to talk with merchants along the proposed lines. The surveyors are plumbing business owners’ knowledge of the area and asking how to build something that helps rather than hurts.

KALW’s transportation reporter Nathanael Johnson went along on one of those surveys and he has this story.



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NATHANAEL JOHNSON: It’s a blustery winter day in downtown San Jose, and I’m following Serena Ip down Santa Clara Street. Ip is a grad student studying urban planning at San Jose State. Part of her education is to do some real work to help the city make the Bus Rapid Transit planned for this road, a success. Right now she’s going to do a formal survey with a barber:

SERENA IP: When you go in you can see – it’s completely old school, it has all the original chairs and everything. There’s photographs of newspaper articles showing how it used to look like, and now it’s sort of deserted.

JOHNSON: So here we are at – is it Licursi’s?

IP: Is it still open?

It’s got everything you’d look for in an old fashioned barbershop: faux wood paneling, a row of green cushioned barber chairs, and a copy of Playboy on the periodical table. A man steps out from the back room.

JACK LICURSI: Need a haircut?

He has thick bifocals and white hair that looks like it was carefully combed in the morning but now is sticking out in every direction. This is our man.

LICURSI: Yeah, I’m Jack Licursi: Barber of San Jose.

He’s been here for about as long as anyone could be – and as Ip promised, Licursi points to the newspaper clippings taped to the wall.

LICURSI: Oh, this is me over here – this is me selling lemonade out here back when they were taking up the railroad tracks, the train tracks, the trolley tracks. 1938, and I was selling lemonade for 3 cents a glass, two for a nickel.

Back then the trolley ran down this street and all the way up to the East Bay, and there was a lot more foot traffic. You don’t see any kids setting up shop on the sidewalk now.

LICURSI: You had an exodus from the downtown to the rural areas. I had customers who moved from downtown out to Camden Avenue and it became inconvenient for them. Times change.  

Ip begins asking the questions on the survey. It starts off with an inquiry about what Licursi likes about the area and what he thinks could be improved. He wishes there was more unmetered parking for customers, it’s dangerous at night, and he has a real problem with the bicyclists. Even though many of the college kids who come to get their hair cut cycle in, they all ride on the sidewalks, he says, and it’s not safe. Then Ip asks him about the Bus Rapid Transit plan.

IP: What’s your general opinion of BRT project? Are you very supportive, supportive, neutral, opposed, strongly opposed, don't know?

LICURSI: Well I’m wishful. I’m hopeful – let’s put it that way. I hope it affects me in a nice way, but it also can affect me in a very bad way.

Licursi has been around long enough to see other revitalization efforts fail. To make this work, he says, they’d have to do it right. They’d have to keep prices low enough so that people would ride. The stations would have to be clean and attractive. And everything would have to be designed so that it ran smoothly.

LICURSI:  I tried the light rail. I came down on 2nd Street just to try it one day and then I transferred to a bus, and I got to 4th Street and I was there for about 20 minutes – the fellow couldn’t get the lift to work for a wheelchair. I finally got disgusted and I got off and I walked to work. And I beat him. And I haven’t ridden a bus since, I’ll be honest with you.

It’s not a hard problem to solve, he says, if you just had a bus with a low floor at the level of the curb, wheelchairs could roll right on.

LICURSI: Easy access in and out. The way it is now only one person can get in at a time.

IP: You’ve got a lot of great ideas.

LICURSI: I don’t know, when you are older, you look for more conveniences.

Licursi shares some other ideas – maps on the bus that show you where you are on the line – maps of the neighborhood shops at each stop – wireless Internet at the stations and a monitor that shows local news, and when the next bus is coming.

But there are some things, he says, that have to stay the same. The road outside is four lanes wide, with a median and parking on both sides. But when he sees a picture showing dedicated lanes running down the middle of the street he shakes his head.

LICURSI: We don’t have wide enough streets for that.

He says most of his customers come by car, and he can’t see doing something that would reduce the lanes or parking. That kind of feedback is important for the pro-transit group TransForm, which is helping to organize these surveys. The point of all this is to get people like Licursi involved early. TransForm’s Chris Lepe – the community planner for San Jose – says, if people aren’t involved, the projects are less likely to help them – and they'll simply oppose those projects.

CHRIS LEPE: People might get the wrong idea because there’s just not info out there. Or they were notified too late in the process to have a say in the project. So this is our attempt to get in there early on in the process, get different communities and stakeholders involved in the process, so hopefully the project can reflect their needs.

Planners are also working on Bus Rapid Transit lines in the East Bay between Berkeley and San Leandro, and in San Francisco on Van Ness and Geary. It’s the Geary line that has drawn the fiercest opposition. Merchants there say their ideas have been ignored and their concerns dismissed. That project, which began in earnest in 2004, is still creeping forward. If it gets built, it would not begin service before 2015, more than a decade after the project started. If transportation planners in San Jose really listen to people like Jack Licursi, maybe they can avoid that kind of friction, and beat San Francisco in the process: San Jose anticipates finishing construction for the first BRT line in 2013.

In San Jose, I’m Nathanael Johnson for Crosscurrents.

Click here to read the final project report for the Santa Clara/Alum Rock Transit Corridor.