The Willow Glen Business Association voted 10-4 on June 23 to put the brakes on the Lincoln Avenue road diet experiment, which it contends has driven down business profits.

The road diet has been hotly debated within the community since February, when Lincoln Avenue was temporarily restriped between Coe and Minnesota avenues to decrease the lanes from four to two.

Because of the business group’s stance, the San Jose Department of Transportation will not recommend that the city council make the reconfiguration permanent.

“Formal opposition from either [the business association or the Willow Glen Neighborhood Association] would create a situation where I wouldn’t bring a recommendation to mayor and council,” said Jim Ortbal, the department’s interim director. “We didn’t want to bring something to council that had opposition from either group.”

The vote followed the release of results from a survey sent to all 422 Business Association members late last month in which 64.66 percent of respondents said they would want to see Lincoln Avenue turned back into a four-lane road.

More than half of those surveyed said they have seen a drop in the number of customers coming in, as well as in customer satisfaction.

“As business owners, we don’t need another month to see how it’s going because we can look at our receipts,” Lynn Rovai, a board member and Willow Glen business owner, said at Tuesday’s meeting, where just a handful of people spoke in favor of the road diet. “If business was up, we’d be happy and flipping cartwheels down Lincoln.”

Just 137 businesses took the survey–32 percent of the association’s members. Businesses were given identification numbers associated with the survey to prevent duplicate entries.

The road diet experiment was marketed as a way to make Lincoln Avenue safer and more pedestrian friendly. The majority of businesses surveyed said they believe the road has become a more hospitable place for pedestrians and bicyclists, but 52 percent said they feel it’s now less safe for drivers.

District 6 Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio warned the 14 business association board members that there would be no money in the budget for further traffic calming or enforcement on the Lincoln Avenue corridor if the road diet doesn’t proceed.

He told the crowd, including about two dozen community members, that the experiment was meant to be the solution to issues that businesses and residents had raised over the years and that the city won’t be able to tackle them again anytime soon.

“We tried what people had been talking about for years,” he said before abruptly rushing out of the room to a council meeting. “We gave it our best shot.”

The Willow Glen Neighborhood Association also recently released its own survey, which revealed a community very much divided. Although more than 1,100 surveys were filled out, residents pointed out it was possible to take the online survey more than once.

When asked whether Lincoln Avenue should remain at two lanes, 39.96 percent said they “strongly agreed” and 35 percent strongly disagreed.

Both the Willow Glen Business Association and the Willow Glen Neighborhood Association were expected to take a stance on the road diet and provide feedback to the San Jose City Council. However, the neighborhood group may back out of that plan.

Neighborhood association president Chris Roth said voicing a group opinion on a divisive issue may be against the association’s bylaws. And now that the business association has opposed the road diet, the neighborhood group’s take on it seems moot.

The city council ultimately will decide whether the road remains at two lanes or returns to four, Oliverio said.

Oliverio wouldn’t say whether he plans to pursue the road diet by placing it on the council agenda for a vote despite the absence of a recommendation from the Department of Transportation.

The 90-day trial period has technically expired, but the striping will remain until further notice. Meanwhile, work on a two-phase repaving project scheduled a long time ago is supposed to take place next month and in October.

A 19-page traffic study by the city showed that 500 to 2,000 fewer vehicles traveled on the nine-block stretch of Lincoln Avenue that’s been reduced to two lanes and that motorists took other routes such as Bascom Avenue, Almaden Expressway or Highway 87.

The results also showed that people drove slower on that stretch of Lincoln Avenue and the commute there took two to three minutes longer, especially in the evenings.

The city council approved spending $25,000 for the project in June 2014 at the request of Oliverio, who said an experiment with results would be more practical than a formal, costlier environmental impact report.