Pruneyard Vehicle Plan Raises Safety Fears

The Pruneyard in Campbell is reopening a drive aisle to cars on May 1, and that sounds small until you picture the exact space people are talking about. This is the open-air retail center’s most walkable zone — the part many visitors now treat like a plaza, not a road. Families let kids roam there. People cross casually between restaurants, shops, and the play area. The news is that management plans to put moving vehicles back through that space anyway, even after the city asked it not to. ### What exactly is changing? The change is simple. A drive aisle that had been pedestrian-only is reopening to vehicle traffic starting Friday, May 1, 2026. Pruneyard management says the point is to ease circulation inside the center and make parking simpler. Critics hear that and see the opposite — more conflict between cars and people in the one part of the property that feels safest to wander through on foot. ### Why are people so worked up? Because this is not some back-of-house service lane. The concern is about a high-foot-traffic area next to a children’s play space, where visitors have gotten used to moving around as if the whole thing were a shared plaza. One parent interviewed by NBC Bay Area said the problem is obvious: toddlers are still learning how to watch for cars, and the play area sits steps from where vehicles would pass. That is the whole fear in one image. ### Didn’t The Pruneyard always have cars? In a broad sense, yes. The Pruneyard is still a 27-acre mixed-use center with office buildings, retail, a hotel, and lots of parking. Cars have always been part of how the place works. But the center’s redesign also leaned hard into making it feel more like a walkable destination, with enhanced pedestrian walkways, an outdoor plaza feel, and what the landscape team described as a flush-curb plaza and children’s zone. So the tension here is real — the property has been marketed and designed to feel pedestrian-friendly, even while staying car-oriented underneath. ### Why can management do this if the city objects? Because The Pruneyard is privately owned. NBC Bay Area said Campbell’s mayor confirmed the city asked the center not to reopen the aisle, but management plans to move forward anyway. That does not mean the city has no leverage over long-term land-use plans. It does mean this specific operational decision appears to sit largely with the property owner, which is why the backlash is happening in public rather than through a fresh city vote. ### Is this just a local annoyance? Not really. It gets at a bigger fight over what these “lifestyle centers” are supposed to be. Developers want easy parking access and smooth internal circulation. Visitors want the illusion — and sometimes the reality — of a town square where you can drift around without constantly checking for bumpers. The Pruneyard’s own planning history talks about improving circulation for vehicles, pedestrians, and bicycles at the same time. Turns out that balance is easy to promise and hard to pull off in one exact stretch of pavement. ### What makes this feel especially awkward now? Campbell has been spending years improving bike and pedestrian connections around this area, including the Pruneyard Creek Trail extension and earlier portal work linking the center to downtown. Those projects push in one direction — safer, clearer non-car access. Reopening a central aisle to cars pushes in the other. That does not make the move incoherent, but it does make it feel out of step with the broader public-space story around the site. ### So what happens next? The immediate answer is: cars return, and everyone watches what that actually looks like on the ground. If traffic really does move better without creating scary crossings, the backlash may cool. But if near-misses pile up — especially around kids and weekend crowds — this will turn from a design gripe into a much louder political problem. The bottom line is that Campbell is arguing over one reopened lane, but the real question is bigger: when a place is built to feel like a public square, how much car traffic can it absorb before that feeling breaks?