Ride the Stevens Creek Trail from Shoreline Park toward Sunnyvale this month and you will hit the same wall cyclists have hit for years: the path simply stops at Heatherstone Way and Dale Avenue, dumping you onto surface streets to finish the last stretch into town. Meanwhile, a few miles away in Sunnyvale, a freshly renovated park reopened this spring with a redesigned pond, a new playground, and a game area for cornhole and ping-pong. Both projects have been in the works for a long time. Only one of them is actually done.
That gap between what gets built and what stays stuck is the real story of outdoor Santa Clara County this summer, and it explains more about how this county spends its recreation dollars than any single ribbon-cutting does.
The trail gap everyone already knows about
The existing Stevens Creek Trail runs about five miles from Shoreline Park in Mountain View to that dead end at Heatherstone Way and Dale Avenue, a route residents use daily for commuting, dog walking, and training rides. The missing piece, a 0.8-mile extension to West Remington Drive in Sunnyvale, would also connect to Mountain View and Alta Vista high schools, according to reporting from the Mountain View Voice.
This isn't a new idea. Back in 2015, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Los Altos jointly studied extending the trail through all four cities, splitting the vision into four connected sections stretching from Heatherstone Way all the way to Rancho San Antonio County Park. Eleven years later, only the first of those four sections has cleared its next procedural hurdle.
Why it's taking so long
In May 2026, the Mountain View City Council voted 6-0 to begin the preliminary design process for that first 0.8-mile piece. One council member, John McAlister, recused himself because he lives near the planned route, a small detail that tells you how local and how long-anticipated this project actually is.
Here's the part that surprised even longtime trail advocates: the design and environmental clearance phase alone, before a single shovel goes in the ground, carries a roughly $6 million budget and is expected to take about two and a half years. Most of that cost has nothing to do with paving a bike path. It comes from mitigating the highway barrier along State Route 85, a design decision made decades ago that now has to be worked around every time anyone tries to connect a trail across it.
Jim Meyerson of Friends of Stevens Creek Trail put the mismatch bluntly:
"It takes 10 years to get permission and six months to build a trail."
The funding itself is a patchwork: some from a Valley Transportation Authority grant, some from Mountain View's Park Land Dedication Fund, and some contributed by Sunnyvale. That's three separate funding sources for eight-tenths of a mile, which is a useful reminder that regional trail connections crossing city lines and state highways move at a fundamentally different speed than a single city's own park project.
What already got built while you wait
Compare that timeline to what Sunnyvale already delivered this year. On May 21, 2026, the city held a grand reopening of its Community Center grounds after a $14 million renovation, a project that stayed inside one city's budget and one jurisdiction's approval process. The 2-acre park now includes a new playground and picnic areas, a game area with ping-pong and cornhole, amphitheater-style seating, a redesigned pond and fountain, renovated walking paths, a small mountain biking trail, a new bathroom, public Wi-Fi, water-saving irrigation, and furniture made from recycled plastic, according to the city's own account reported by the Mountain View Voice.
| Project | Cost | Timeline | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sunnyvale Community Center renovation | $14 million | Single construction cycle | Open, reopened May 21, 2026 |
| Stevens Creek Trail extension (0.8 miles) | ~$6 million for design phase alone | ~2.5 years just for design and environmental clearance | Preliminary design just approved, construction years away |
The contrast isn't about which city cares more. It's about scope. A contained park upgrade with one funding source and one approval body can go from plan to ribbon-cutting in a normal construction window. A trail extension that has to negotiate a state highway, multiple cities, and multiple funding pots gets stuck in the review layer long before construction even becomes a line item.
The detour you'll actually hit this month
If your usual route runs along Los Gatos Creek Trail, the unofficial town promenade that carries walkers, new parents with strollers, and marathoners-in-training for eleven miles between Lexington Reservoir and downtown San Jose, know before you go: a section is currently closed due to a failed culvert, with detour signage in place near the fishing dock area, according to Santa Clara County Parks' active closures page. A separate 100-foot section elsewhere on the same trail is also closed for unsafe conditions, with a short marked detour.
If you're rerouting anyway, two nearby options are worth the drive. St. Joseph's Hill Open Space Preserve climbs through 270 acres of chaparral to a hilltop vista at 1,250 feet, with the parking lot and entrance on Alma Bridge Road just east of Lexington Dam. Vasona Lake County Park, just off Blossom Hill Road, offers 150 acres including a couple of miles of paved bike path and a lake for a flatter option while the creek trail detour is in effect.
What's worth putting on the calendar
While the big regional connections stay in planning purgatory, the smaller, single-venue events keep running on schedule. The Santa Clara County Fair returns to the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds starting August 19 for five days of carnival rides, live music, and the Junior Livestock Show & Auction, and the fairgrounds have also been hosting a free Thursday-night live music series all summer.
Downtown Los Gatos ran its own free Wednesday-evening jazz series at Los Gatos Town Plaza this summer, drawing residents with folding chairs for an easy weeknight outing. And in the city of Santa Clara, a summer-long calendar of Night Markets transformed the downtown corridor with food, music, and local vendors, part of a broader civic push tied to the city hosting Super Bowl LX and six FIFA World Cup 2026 matches at Levi's Stadium, according to the City of Santa Clara's 2026 community events page.
The pattern, if you're paying attention
None of this is really about trails. It's about how infrastructure money moves in a county built on overlapping city lines and a state highway system that predates most of the cities it runs through. When a project lives entirely within one city's parks budget, like Sunnyvale's Community Center, it gets built on a schedule you'd recognize from any home renovation. When a project has to cross a highway right-of-way and coordinate two cities' funding, like the Stevens Creek Trail extension, the paperwork alone outlasts most residents' patience, even when everyone involved agrees the connection should exist.
That's useful to know the next time a "coming soon" sign shows up at a trailhead near you. Some of those signs mean months. Others, as Los Gatos and Mountain View residents have learned firsthand, mean a decade or more.
Tracking which projects in this county actually move and which ones sit in review is the kind of local detail that comes from following these towns closely, not just visiting them. If you're weighing a move to this part of the Peninsula, or already here and curious what a particular block, trail, or park upgrade might mean for a home you're watching, Chris A. Sabido has been following Santa Clara County and the broader Peninsula market since 2005. Book an appointment to talk through what's actually happening on the ground in the neighborhood you have in mind.
