San Jose council reviews transportation and airport budget; speed cameras set for fall deployment

San Jose city staff told the City Council on May 7 that the transportation and aviation budgets for 2026–27 will prioritize safety while supporting airport recovery and downtown parking adjustments.

John Russo, director of transportation, opened the session and said the department’s core focus is system safety across pavement, traffic maintenance and multimodal projects. “Most importantly, airport operations and the safety for the airport is Mookie’s top priority, as well as ours in terms of all the surface transportation safety,” Russo said.

Airport director Mookie Patel said passenger-satisfaction scores remain high even as business travel lags, and flagged an asset-preservation program to modernize aging facilities and improve the customer experience. “I think this year, we were ranked sixth in the world for on-time performance,” Patel said, and described retail redevelopment and lounge expansions planned to align facilities with traveler expectations.

On street safety, Russo said the city has been working to finalize a contract with a vendor for automated speed cameras and still expects deployment this fall. “We should be still on track for deployment and implementation this fall,” Russo said. He added that, under the statute allowing the program, “any net proceeds must be returned to those corridors for traffic safety improvements.”

Jim Shannon, the city’s budget director, said staff plan to move some operations costs into a traffic capital program and offset those costs with citation revenue, producing general-fund savings. “We can move that into the traffic capital program offset by those citation revenues, generating about $570,000 worth of savings in the general fund,” Shannon said.

Councilmembers asked for detail about enforcement and operations. Russo said three parking/traffic-control positions in the budget are intended to support speed-camera citation processing and that field deployment will depend on citation volume; he also described existing proactive programs that have yielded results on unregistered vehicles and abandoned-vehicle enforcement. “We’ve towed over 2,000 vehicles for that program and cited the same amount,” Russo said of the registered‑vehicle compliance work.

Council discussion also covered downtown and neighborhood parking proposals, with members seeking a “return to source” model to direct a share of parking revenue to affected business corridors and asking staff to address double‑parking from delivery vehicles. Several councilmembers emphasized Vision Zero quick-build projects and asked for data showing before‑and‑after safety outcomes on corridors where changes were installed; Russo pointed to two‑year monitoring results in one district that showed lower speeds and fewer crashes.

The council did not take any formal action at the study session; staff said they will return with additional detail in budget materials and memos and will provide traffic and citation-tracking data as requested. The session then moved to environmental and utility-service budget items.