Santa Clara trail closes this weekend for SB50

The San Tomas Aquino Trail in front of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California will close beginning the afternoon of Sunday, January 31 for Super Bowl 50 activities. The trail should re-open on or about Tuesday, February 9. The usual detour through the Great America Amtrak station park-and-ride lot is closed to all traffic. Suggested detours are shown in blue in the maps below.

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The trail will be closed between Agnew Road and Tasman Drive, even for those attending the Super Bowl game and related events in the vicinity of Levi’s Stadium. The first suggested detour is along Great America Parkway between Agnew and Old Mountain View Alviso Road, marked in purplish blue in the above map. The Super Bowl 50 Host Committee invites you to suck it up as you share this route featuring very heavy and ugly traffic with multiple opportunities for conflict.

The second suggested detour, highlighted in blue in the below map, takes you to Lafayette Street. There’s much less traffic and less opportunity for conflict since there are fewer intersections and driveways, but traffic speeds are much higher, and there are a couple of tricky spots where the bike lane disappears.

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The yellow highlight in the second map shows a temporary bikeway on Stars and Stripes Drive between the Great America train station, behind the Convention Center parking garage to the San Tomas Aquino Trail. This street has been closed to motor traffic but is currently open to those on foot and on bike traveling between the trail and the train station. I’m waiting to hear if this temporary bikeway will remain open next week. I’ll update once I hear for sure.

Access between Star and Stripes and Lafayette is through the train station itself at a traffic-signal protected crosswalk across Lafayette at Calle De Luna. This is also the temporary drop-off / pickup location for employee shuttles for Great America.


More Super Bowl 50 Bicycle Transportation News

The Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition normally provides valet bike parking for Levi’s Stadium events. Because SB50 organizers (the “Host Committee”) are a completely different group of people who are kind of tone-deaf about some of these local issues, SVBC was not invited to provide bike parking. The bike coalition has started a late petition asking the Host Committee to consider bike parking for the Super Bowl. I suspect the only way valet bike parking can be provided is if they follow Uber’s lead and become an event sponsor, but it can’t hurt to sign this petition.

SB50 parking is scattered all around the Levi’s Stadium area. Many attendees will need to hike over a mile from their car parking to the stadium, and no shuttle service will be provided. Pedicab businesses from all around the Bay Area will converge to Levi’s and provide bicycle rickshaw transportation between parking and the stadium. During events such as the Taylor Swift concert last year, pedicabs charged $40 per person per mile. Some bike rickshaw operators of my acquaintance tell me that attendees should expect to pay double that amount for the Super Bowl. Please remember to tip your bike rickshaw pilot.

Super Bowl 50 VTA Bus Bridge

Because of the Tasman Drive closure, VTA bus routes 140 and 330 will re-route around the closure between January 31 and February 9. On Saturday, February 6, all light rail passengers are required to disembark the train and ride a bus bridge between Lick Mill and Old Ironsides stations, adding roughly 15 minutes to an already long trip.

Super Bowl 50 VTA Bus Bridge

The day of the Big Game, Sunday, February 7, is a mess of closures, re-routes, bus bridges and inconveniences for anyone traveling between Mountain View and San Jose or Milpitas. Champion, Moffett Park and NASA/Bayshore Stations will be closed. The entire line between Mountain View and Baypointe will be closed to those without Super Bowl tickets, so service between Mountain View and Baypointe is via bus bridge.

Good luck on your journeys, and I’d love to hear of any variations from these published plans.

2 Comments

  1. I can avoid the detour mess easier on a bicycle. It was a shock to see it blocked off on monday night. I asked a Santa Clara officer in the morning if it would be open. I feel for the pedestrians who use the path to walk to/from their job to the train station. I bet there were at least a dozen people that missed the 6:04 Capitol Corridor train.They should shuttle the people who regularly make this route instead of telling them the route is closed.

  2. You can forget about the detour detours as well today. Lafayette is closed, at least the SB lane and Great America Parkway is likely impassable. One option would be to take Mission over to the Calabazas Creek trail or cut across on Agnew over to the Guadalupe River Trail near Ulistac.

    My ride plans today are to head 180* away from the direction fo the stadium and up into the mountains west of the valley.

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