Most trail gaps get talked about like a wound waiting to heal. Willow Glen's doesn't work that way. The paved Los Gatos Creek Trail ends at Meridian Avenue, picks up again at Lonus Street, and there is no paved path connecting the two. The city doesn't ask you to wait for a bridge that might never get built. It asks you to pick a lane, literally, based on whether you're walking or riding. That's not a broken trail. That's two different trails wearing one name, and residents have been using both for years without anyone officially calling it a system.
The Missing Piece Everyone Reroutes Around
The main segment of the Los Gatos Creek Trail runs 9.7 miles from Lexington Reservoir through Campbell and into San Jose, terminating at Meridian Avenue inside Willow Glen. The northern segment picks up separately at Lonus Street and runs half a mile under Interstate 280 into downtown San Jose. Nothing physically connects them. The City of San José's own trail guidance tells cyclists to exit the main trail onto Willow Street about 0.8 miles before they'd otherwise reach the Meridian terminus, then continue northeast on Willow, left on Glen Eyrie Avenue, left on Lincoln Avenue, and right on Lonus Street to pick the northern segment back up.
The Downtown Willow Glen Business Association describes the same gap in plainer terms on its own site: roughly a mile of missing trail between Meridian and Lincoln Avenue, with on-street bike lanes floated as the likely fix. That description has been sitting on the association's page for years. The gap has been the plan's "next step" since before most current Willow Glen residents moved in, and it's still the next step.
Two Routes, Not One Gap
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the trail maps: pedestrians and cyclists in Willow Glen don't actually use the same workaround, and that's by design rather than accident.
If you're on foot, the short version of the detour is the one the city posts: Willow Street to Glen Eyrie to Lincoln to Lonus, a few blocks of ordinary sidewalk that gets you between the two paved segments with minimal fuss.
If you're on a bike, the better move skips Lincoln Avenue entirely. Lincoln is narrow and busy through the heart of downtown Willow Glen, and the city's own cycling guidance steers riders away from it. Instead, cyclists exit the main trail just past Leigh Avenue, pick up the Willow Street bike lane, and connect to the Three Creeks Trail at the corner of Willow and Bird Avenue. From there, the Three Creeks Trail carries riders north to Lonus Street, where it ties directly into the northern segment.
The Three Creeks Trail isn't a detour improvised out of necessity. It's a genuine piece of infrastructure with its own history: a 0.9-mile paved path built along the old Western Pacific Railroad line known as the Willow Glen industrial lead, complete with a 1921 trestle bridge that once carried trains to the Del Monte cannery before Union Pacific abandoned the line in the early 2000s. The western alignment has been paved since late 2018. An eastern alignment toward Coyote Creek is planned but still unfunded, so the trail's usefulness currently stops at the Guadalupe River.
What that means in practice is that Willow Glen already has two working answers to "how do I get across this gap," and they solve different problems. One is a fast pedestrian shortcut through downtown. The other is a slower, safer cycling route built on repurposed rail infrastructure that keeps riders off Lincoln Avenue altogether. Closing the "official" gap with a single connector would flatten that distinction, not necessarily improve on it.
Why the 1985 Bridge Never Got Built
The Los Gatos Creek Trail's original master plan dates to 1985, and one of its unrealized pieces is a pedestrian and bike bridge that would cross near the Stokes and St. Elizabeth trail entrance, tying the creekside path directly into the shops and medical offices along Westwood. In July 2025, Willow Glen Neighborhood Association members walked and biked the entire stretch, alignment by alignment, documenting exactly where a bridge, an easement, or a difficult conversation with the city would be required to make any of the historic options work.
One recurring obstacle in that documentation is Cherry Avenue. The city has tried more than once to widen Cherry into a four-lane connector between the Race Street exit of Interstate 280 and the southern suburbs, and each time residents were told the plan was really just for a bike bridge, the drawings that surfaced showed a four-lane roadway. That history is why any new bridge proposal near Cherry gets read with more suspicion in Willow Glen than it might get anywhere else. It's less that nobody wants a connector and more that nobody wants a connector that quietly becomes something else.
The Three Creeks Trail's own pedestrian bridge, meant to span Los Gatos Creek and formally link its western alignment to the existing trail system near Lonus, has partial funding through the Santa Clara Valley Water District, but it remains in development rather than open. So Willow Glen currently has one funded but unfinished bridge concept and one forty-year-old bridge concept that keeps resurfacing in advocacy tours without ever reaching a city budget line.
What's Actually on the Table Tonight
The Willow Glen Neighborhood Association meets tonight, September 14, at the Baha'i Center, and closing the Willow Glen gap in the Los Gatos Creek Trail is on the agenda alongside a briefing from the city arborist on street trees, an update on turf reduction efforts, and an introduction to the new police captain. WGNA is one of the largest and oldest neighborhood associations in San Jose, with roughly 500 member households, and it was founded specifically to oppose an expressway plan decades ago. That founding fight is part of why trail advocacy here reads as patient rather than urgent. This is a group that measures wins in decades, not news cycles.
The rest of the fall calendar backs that up. On October 3, WGNA is running a volunteer morning at Frank Bramhall Park on Willow Street, spreading mulch to help the park retain water, an unglamorous task that says more about how this association actually operates than any single agenda item does. On October 19, the same Baha'i Center hosts a forum with District 9 council candidates Genny Altwer and Gordon Chester, which is likely where any real movement on trail funding gets discussed next, since council seats control the budget lines that would eventually pay for any bridge.
None of this means the gap closes soon. It means the conversation about closing it is still active, still local, and still happening in the same room where it's been happening for years. If you already live here and use the trail on a regular basis, the practical takeaway isn't to wait for a ribbon cutting. It's to keep using the two-route system that already exists: the short walk through downtown when you're on foot, the Three Creeks Trail when you're on a bike and want to stay off Lincoln Avenue. That system has outlasted one master plan already. There's no strong reason to think this fall changes that.
Willow Glen tends to work this way. The street grid, the creek, the neighborhood association's own founding fight against a freeway decades ago: none of it moves fast, but all of it gets discussed in public, in the same building, by the same people who've been paying attention the longest. If you're weighing what it actually means to live somewhere with this kind of institutional memory, whether you're already in Willow Glen or thinking about what a similar stretch of San Jose or the South Bay could offer, the team at Angelo Fierro Group spends its time in exactly these details. Start a conversation with us when you're ready to talk about what life here really looks like, block by block.
