Creekside trails in Santa Clara County solve a lot of tight spots with engineering bravado – the Stevens Creek Trail bridge over Caltrain and Central Expressway, and some of the street underpasses suspended over Los Gatos Creek, are examples of gaps that might have been better avoided 30-40 years ago by leaving a real trail corridor in the first place, but with things as they are, the gaps are stitched together with engineering bravado. There’s room for more of that, especially for counties that see bike infrastructure halfways equal to car infrastructure.

Regarding getting from Milpitas through the valley, there are clever ways to do it (via a trailway along 237 that switches from one side to the other; called the “unemployment trail” in the early 2000s), but there are a lot of bad ways to go and the good ways aren’t always obvious. Still less rough than how things are in NYC where I live now. :-0

Except from my blog post RE the San Jose leg of the run:
“The next two runs were horrible – that is to say, through San Jose and its suburbs, if indeed San Jose isn’t itself a suburb, as it seems to be, in some horrible residential analogy to distributed processing. After the Mediterranean scrub oaks and redwood forests I’d been through, 13 miles of Sunnyvale office parks made me think I was in a new ring of Hell that Dante had left out for being just too awful, even compared to burning ash and stinging flies.” Okay, so maybe I was exaggerating a little. But you get the point.