Why the Los Gatos Creek Trail Still Stops Cold at Meridian Avenue in Willow Glen

Ride the Los Gatos Creek Trail north from the Pruneyard, through Campbell, past the ponds at Los Gatos Creek Park, and the pavement holds steady for nine miles. Then, just past Willow Street in San Jose's Willow Glen neighborhood, it ends. Not at a trailhead. Not at a parking lot with a map kiosk. It ends at Meridian Avenue, mid-block, with no sign telling a rider where the trail supposedly picks back up half a mile away.

The City of San Jose knows this is confusing enough to publish a workaround. Its own trail directory page tells riders to leave the paved trail at Meridian, take the bike lane on Willow Street, turn left on Glen Eyrie Avenue, left again on Lincoln Avenue, then right on Lonus Street, where the trail's northern segment resumes and carries riders under I-280 toward downtown San Jose. It is the kind of detour a longtime resident has memorized and a first-time visitor discovers by accident, usually after riding to a dead end and pulling out a phone.

The bridge that was supposed to close this gap is forty years old on paper

The gap is not an oversight nobody has gotten around to. It shows up in the trail's original planning documents. A July 2025 walking tour of the corridor, compiled by longtime trail advocate L. Ames, traces one proposed crossing near the Stokes and St. Elizabeth Drive trail entrance back to the 1985 Los Gatos Creek Trail Master Plan. That plan called for a bridge at that location connecting the trail to nearby shops and medical offices on Westwood Drive. It was drawn before most of the housing between Meridian and downtown Willow Glen existed in its current form, and it still has not been built.

The same document walks through several other alignments residents have floated over the years, none of them finished: a route north on Meridian to Fruitdale Avenue, south on Cherry Avenue, and out to the end of Twin Brook Drive, or a path that uses Coe Avenue to reach the Three Creeks Trail and cross the creek on a different, newer bridge entirely. Every option requires either an easement across private or institutional land, a new creek crossing, or both. Forty years after the first version of this fix was sketched, the gap runs exactly where the 1985 map said it would.

Willow Glen did build a new creek crossing, just not this one

It would be easy to assume the city has simply neglected this stretch of the trail system. It hasn't, not entirely. A different bridge over Los Gatos Creek, a few blocks east near Lincoln Avenue, went through years of construction and legal fighting before opening to walkers and cyclists in January 2021.

That structure replaced a 99-year-old wooden railroad trestle that had carried freight trains before the tracks were pulled up. In 2014, the San Jose City Council voted to demolish the trestle and put a prefabricated steel bridge in its place, arguing the old wood structure could not safely be reused for a public trail crossing. The Willow Glen Trestle Conservancy, led by Ames, the same advocate behind the 2025 gap-tour document, disagreed and sued. The fight ran seven years, through environmental reviews, court injunctions, and expired permits that had to be renewed, even after the trestle was added to the California Register of Historical Resources over the city's objection. The last injunction was denied in the summer of 2020, the trestle came down, and the new steel bridge opened in January 2021, linking the Three Creeks Trail's dirt path to the paved Los Gatos Creek Trail.

A Willow Glen Neighborhood Association representative called the new crossing "an important trail connection not just for the city, but for the entire region" when it opened, according to a recap posted at wgtrestle.org. That's a fair description of what it does. It is not a description of the Meridian to Lonus gap, which sits on a separate stretch of the same trail system and was never part of the trestle litigation at all. Residents who heard about a new bridge going in near Willow Glen and assumed it finally closed the well-known gap were thinking of the wrong crossing.

The gap is still an open agenda item, not a closed file

The clearest evidence that nothing has changed sits in the Willow Glen Neighborhood Association's own meeting calendar. On September 14, 2026, the association held a meeting at the Baha'i Center in San Jose with an agenda that ran through routine neighborhood business: an update from Councilmember Mulcahy's office, an introduction to the district's new police captain, a briefing from the city arborist on street trees, and a discussion of turf reductions around Willow Glen. Sitting in that same list, as its own line item, was "closing the Willow Glen gap in the Los Gatos Creek Trail." The full agenda is posted on the association's calendar page.

That an unbuilt trail connection from 1985 is still being discussed in the same meeting as street tree maintenance says something about where it sits on the city's priority list. It is a live civic topic, not a forgotten one, but it has not moved from discussion to design to construction in four decades. The posted agenda lists the gap as a topic for discussion and does not announce a construction schedule, so the connection remains an open project that neighbors are still working on together.

The workaround that's actually in use

For anyone riding or walking this stretch today, the practical route is the one the city already publishes, and it's straightforward enough to commit to memory:

• Exit the paved trail at Meridian Avenue.
• Head northeast on the Willow Street bike lane.
• Turn left on Glen Eyrie Avenue.
• Turn left on Lincoln Avenue.
• Turn right on Lonus Street to rejoin the trail's paved northern segment toward downtown San Jose.

Cyclists who want to avoid the narrower stretch of Lincoln Avenue have a second option: continue past Leigh Avenue on the Willow Street bike lane and connect instead to the Three Creeks Trail at Willow Street and Bird Avenue, a longer ride that trades a few extra minutes for wider streets. Wikipedia's entry on the Los Gatos Creek Trail lays out both options in more detail, including the exact half-mile distance of the northern segment between Lonus and Dupont Streets under I-280.

None of this is new information to anyone who rides the trail regularly. Rider reviews on trail-mapping sites describe hitting the same dead end at Meridian and figuring out the same detour on their own, usually after checking a map mid-ride. What's less visible from the saddle is how far back the planned fix goes, and how a different, harder-fought bridge a few blocks away has nothing to do with solving it.

For now, the gap between Meridian Avenue and Lonus Street is still the gap it was in 1985. The steel bridge near Lincoln Avenue is a real trail connection, hard-won and worth using, but it answers a different question than the one the neighborhood association keeps putting back on its agenda every September.

If you're the kind of Willow Glen reader who tracks this kind of thing (or wants to, once you know where to look), Jerylann Mateo keeps an eye on the small, unglamorous civic threads that shape daily life here. Reach out any time you want to talk about what's actually changing in the neighborhood, trail gap included.