Riding the King Tide

It was another year and another King Tide Ride, an annual ride sponsored by the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. In this blog, I’m going to talk about the educational aspects and also, all the warm, fuzzy, woo parts. I’ll start with the woo.

Because of rain, there was a lot of hemming and hawing about whether to do the ride. Would the trail already be flooded? And how would the King Tide contribute to that? So, I did a test ride the Friday before.

In addition to monitoring overall trail conditions, my goal was to check where the trail floods under 237 and get there thirty minutes in advance of high tide to observe how quickly the tide would come in and out. This would dictate whether we could ride through it on the way out to Shoreline or have to detour around it.

Peak King Tide, according to tide tables was supposed to be around 11:30am. When I arrived at 11am, the trail was already impassable for the unadventurous. I sat down, broke out my snacks, and watched.

This turned out to be a beautiful and meditative experience. I was reminded how important being still and watching the natural world continue around you can be. The water communicated its movement through floating debris – I could see exactly what it was doing. The earth pushed and pulsed like lungs breathing through water, slowly creeping up the trail.

One exciting moment was when a bicyclist came careening down the underpass right into the water. I’m not sure if she knew what was in store but the water came halfway up her bike. She made it through without a spill!

I’m gonna guess that over the course of the hour, the water moved up the trail three feet. You can see in the pictures the high water mark from the day before and then the new one in the pictures. Anyway, it was a beautiful experience to watch the King Tide roll in. And, after scoping out the conditions, we decided to ride, rain or shine.

I was curious to see how many people the weather would scare away and of the 60 who had registered for the ride, 20 of you were undeterred. Y'all are hard core! And now, on to the more educational aspects of the ride.

You can see where the original high tide mark was and then in the pic to the left the King Tide goes way beyond that mark.

I’m going to touch on four aspects:

-              Shoreline

-              Riverview Stormwater Garden and

-              The water tank at Lupe

-              New bike infrastructure

Riverview Stormwater Garden: For those of you who ride the Guadalupe trail regularly, you’ve likely noticed this project while it was being constructed. It’s just north of the VTA Headquarters where the Irvine Housing Development is located next to a park.

What is it? And what is the problem it is trying to solve? In a nutshell, this is a project that cleans dirty stormwater before flowing to the Bay.

Rajani from the City of San Jose told us there were many reasons for the project but the regulatory requirements (Clean Water Act) were the primary driver. This is an important point. While many of us believe that we all tackle environmental problems because it is the right thing to do, more often than not, it takes regulation to actually make it happen. We do it because someone tells us we must.

Rajani went on to tell us that this project is about stormwater - Water that hits the ground, flows into our gutters, and down the street drains. “Stormwater” is different than the water you use inside your home. That water goes through a whole different process.

Councilmember Cohen introducing us to the stormwater garden

 Once stormwater hits the streets, it becomes filthy. Since this is an SVBC sponsored ride, it’s important to note that stormwater is filthy from the pollution caused by cars amongst many other things. How do we prevent all that filth from flowing into our waterways and then out to the Bay? The Riverview Stormwater Garden helps solve that problem.

How it works: Water from a ~350 acre area between Tasman and Montague is captured via storm drains on the streets and routed to this “garden.” Once it arrives, it is stalled in an underground basin so that dirt is allowed to settle out. The water is then pumped into the garden where it spreads across the plants and soil.

Nature then works its magic, filtering out and eating pollutants. Yum! And thank you nature! Slowly the water percolates down, is captured under the garden, and then pumped into the Guadalupe River much cleaner than when it started.

Why San Jose: To back up for just one minute, I want to take a moment to explain some of the jurisdictional issues here. You might ask yourself, why is the City of San Jose building water infrastructure? Isn’t anything that has to do with water the purview of the Water District? If only it were that easy!

As a refresher, the Water District (Valley Water) does three main things:

1.        Water supply

2.        Flood protection

3.        Environmental stewardship

On the supply side, we (Valley Water) get the water. That water is then sold to different retailers, like San Jose Water, that is then sold to individuals like you. Once you use the water and for example, flush it down the drain, it is now the responsibility of a city. I’m overgeneralizing here but essentially, at that point, a city treats it and discharges it into the Bay. And sometimes even recycles it. So, in summary, Valley Water supplies the water which is then delivered to you via a retailer, and then after you use it, the cities are responsible for it.

Back to the garden: The stormwater garden also doubles as a recreational area with art, exercise equipment, and interesting structures to walk through. It’s the first of its kind in Santa Clara County and it is hoped that it will pave the path for many more to come. For more info on it, click here.

It is also a part of a county-wide effort to better manage, holistically and comprehensively, stormwater. The primary entity leading those efforts is the Santa Clara Valley Urban Stormwater Runn-off Pollution Prevention Program (SCVUSRPPP.) They have a plan that outlines many of these types of opportunities which you can read about here. Several of the projects identified in the plan have already been piloted, pilots that have been used to inform how Riverview came to be.

And let me just say, I’m not the expert on this. I’m relaying all the good information that was conveyed by the awesome City of San Jose staff. Thank you Rajani, Sarah and Richard as well as Councilmember David Cohen for meeting us at the garden on a rainy Saturday to teach us. We all got drenched learning about the stormwater garden!

Standing in the pouring rain learning about the stormwater garden.

And now back to the ride… We got to the 237 undercrossing right around 11am and even though the King Tide was already flooding the trail, pedaled through. It was still low enough to be able to do that.

Here's Mark Schroeder riding through the King Tide followed by our fearless group! This is the 237 undercrossing.

The red line goes around the top of the airport to then connect with De La Cruz which turns into Trimble.

De La Cruz: Before going on though and speaking of trail flooding, I wanted to also highlight a new piece of bike infrastructure. On the way to Alviso, there were two segments of the trail that were flooded, under Trimble, where flooding usually sticks for months at a time and under 101. As a result, we detoured to a new, gold-plated piece of bike infrastructure along De La Cruz.

You can see it on the map, including a fun curly q. This new section transforms an ugly and unsafe area for bicyclists into a lovely connection to the Guadalupe Trail.

Here's the entrance to the new bike infrastructure on De La Cruz. The City even put in pedestrian scale lighting.

Crossing Central to hop on the new bike infrastructure on De La Cruz.

A mysterious big tank: Once we hopped back on the trail, which by the way is right where Lupe the wooly mammoth is at, we stopped for a moment to ask Aaron Baker, Valley Water Chief Operating Officer of Water Utility, to tell us about the big tank we were looking at. You fellow bikers have probably wondered that too. It is a San Jose Water Company tank that stores water for things like fire suppression, supply, and other purposes.

Aaron also highlighted that the Water Company had recently replaced a pump there and how that relates to the cost of water, noting that much of our infrastructure was built between the ’30’s and ‘50’s. That means, it’s time for upgrades and replacements. That, along with regular maintenance of tanks like this (probably requiring a full cleaning every ten years for example) all cost money that we ratepayers cover.

On to Shoreline: We kept riding and finally got to Alviso to hear about the Shoreline project from Valley Water staff James Ujah and Mike Potter. This is the project that most everyone is already aware of and we’ve written about it in previous blogs so I’m not going to go into much detail. That said, one of the points made this time around that hasn’t been emphasized in the past is the reason these projects take so long to build. James mentioned a few of them:

-              Permitting with all the different regulatory agencies is like finding your way around the Winchester Mystery House

-              Rain causes project delays

-              Environmental requirements restrict the amount of truck trips per day to haul dirt (and it takes a lot of dirt!). We could only have 240 trips a day.

-              And the new thing I learned was that when you build a levy, you have to build a bit and then let it settle before you build more. That settling is necessary to keep the levy from washing away over time and this compacting process can take three to four months at a time. Add all of that up and you have projects that take a decade to construct.

For previous write ups on Shoreline and more info on this flood protection project, click here and here.

Before signing off, I want to give a shout out to San Jose Conservation Corps, one of the partners in putting the ride together. Edgar Echevarria and Dorsey Moore joined the ride and helped folks understand the role that SJCCC plays in trail maintenance. In fact, the day before on my test ride, I saw about six of their folks out there trimming back vegetation and making sure the trail was clean and ridable. You can find out more information about their work here.

Thank you to all of you who braved the rain to enjoy yet another annual King Tide Ride. See you all next year!

The new levy/trail.

Valley Water Director Ballard in her happy place.