New walkway offers safety barrier between traffic and kids
walking to school
Gilroy – Middle school students walking along Santa Teresa Boulevard, the city’s western traffic artery, will be safer this fall thanks to upgrades to a bridge spanning Uvas Creek.

A project to install concrete barriers and mesh wire fencing along the bridge, just north of Ascension Solorsano Middle School, is nearly complete, according to Hosalli Gangadhara, a project manager with the bridge design unit of Santa Clara County’s Roads and Airports Department.

“A lot of kids going to school use that walkway and it is not protected from vehicles, so we put a barricade in there and put a fence on top of it so that it’s safe for these school children to walk (on the east side),” he said. “On the west side, we put some chain link fence there to protect people from falling off the bridge.”

Concrete barriers installed along the east side of the bridge are the standard issue found along much of California’s highways. With angled bases that narrow as they slope upward, the barriers are designed to redirect out-of-control cars back to the roadway.

Though inside Gilroy’s borders, the roughly $300,000 project fell within county jurisdiction as a bridge improvement. The bridge construction is largely finished, Gangadhara said, adding that workers were scheduled to finish re-striping the road today.

The bridge upgrade comes as a major phase of home development expected to cause large increases in traffic on Santa Teresa Boulevard. Developers of Glen Loma Ranch, a 1,700-unit housing project that will develop along the corridor over the next 10 years, expect to break ground on the first homes in the project within a year.

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