San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Berkeley bike lane project sparking friction
The signs popped up on newspaper racks and in the front window of an organic deli in North Berkeley, warning of a bike lane that would presage the end of democracy — at the behest of an all-powerful bike lobby.
Berkeley “has declared war on cars, street parking and small businesses,” read the notice at Magnani's Poultry, which sits on a snug, tree-lined stretch of Hopkins Street where officials plan to build the two-way bicycle path next year, installing barriers and rows of parked cars to separate it from traffic. Confined to the south side of the road, the path would necessitate removal of some 60 parking spaces.
Merchants lament the project, saying it would drive out their most reliable customers. Ardent cyclists say it doesn't go far enough — some want protected paths on both sides of the road; a few dream of banning cars altogether.
Observers see the whole saga as a distillation of all the madness that can swirl up around bike lanes, and people's inability to find common ground. One Berkeley resident who said he frequently drives to shop on Hopkins Street seemed to stiffen when asked about the bike lane as he ran errands on a recent morning.
“I just hate to see them lose all the parking,” the resident, Stan Pesick, said.
By the time the Berkeley City Council voted this month to move forward with the Hopkins Street plan, months of political discord had reached a boil. A 1mile strip dotted with craftsman homes and farm-to-table restaurants had come to symbolize a much larger battle for bicycle parity in the Bay Area.
Across the region, cyclists are demanding safe, unfettered access — and in some cases, a complete redesign of cities' busiest arteries. Motorists and business owners push back, invoking a
“war on cars” and even accusing urban planners of demagoguery.
“Parking is considered a fundamental right in our society,” said Tara Goddard, an assistant professor of urban planning at Texas A&M University who has researched bike lanes. Divisions over bicycle infrastructure usually form between three camps, she said: business owners convinced that most of their customers arrive by car, residents worried that traffic will spill into their neighborhoods and cyclists whom the other camps deem unworthy of so much road space.
Goddard called this phenomenon “the cyclist paradox.”
As a cyclist, “you're simultaneously an entitled jerk on your fancy road bike,” she said, and a poor person trying to seize the public right-of-way.
The fighting has become so intense that one transit advocate called for vigilante urbanism: In a recent Substack post, Darrell Owens, of Berkeley, urged people to install bike lane barriers themselves if the city lacks the will to do it.
“I really feel like this is a microcosm of a lot of what's wrong with discourse,” said City Council Member Sophie Hahn, whose district includes the project area. “The way the conversation comes forward is so harsh and dogmatic that real listening doesn't happen.”
Similar spats have flared up over bike lanes on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland and hard-won legislation to ban cars from the east end of John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park. For years, people have waged the same arguments, with cyclists citing the high number of traffic deaths, the threat of climate change, and the urgency to lure people out of cars — points that often ring hollow to opponents who view bike lanes as a bane on small businesses or an impediment to parents trying to drop their kids off at school.
To Daniel Rodríguez, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley, debates over bike lanes reflect a more visceral tension over the future of cities, and anxiety over a new paradigm of urban planning that no longer prioritizes the automobile. People often spar over roads and curb space because it stands for so many things that are beyond their control, Rodríguez said.
“Change is hard,” he added, noting that bike lane feuds pit the interests of future city dwellers against “the demands of today — businesses want parking.”
If the logistics of building a bike lane on Hopkins Street seem simple, the politics are daunting and the process has been slow, said Ben Gerhardstein, a member of the grassroots group Walk Bike Berkeley. Residents and city officials spent four years debating the Hopkins Street plan before the City Council approved a conceptual design in May, only to relitigate and nearly shipwreck the project during a marathon meeting on Oct. 11.
On that day, Hahn, facing pressure from constituents on all sides, proposed a “reconsideration” of the project's most contentious segment — a three-block shopping district from Gilman Street to McGee Avenue — that would lose virtually all its parking spaces to accommodate bicycles. It's the part of the roadway where traffic is heaviest and most dangerous, Gerhardstein said, with cyclists having to jostle among delivery trucks, and impatient drivers barreling through stop signs.
Hahn's bid to stall design and construction on those three blocks was unsuccessful. Instead, the council voted on what Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani called “an elegant compromise”: study of parking management, loading and economic impacts along the corridor. Hahn believes city officials may modify the project after finishing the study in January.
A few shop owners still hope city leaders will scrap the plan altogether, even as engineers contemplate the next phase: a westward extension of the bike lane from Gilman Street to San Pablo Avenue.
“I say just keep it the way it is,” Pete Raxakoul said, surveying the scene outside his shop, Raxakoul Coffee & Cheese, on a recent morning. The store sells everything from boba tea to vegan bacon to Japanese tea sets and, according to Raxakoul, many customers drive in from the Berkeley hills, though some travel from as far away as Pleasanton or Walnut Creek. He's afraid they'll stop coming once street parking vanishes.
Phyllis Rothman lives a block away and usually walks to shop or eat lunch on Hopkins Street, but said she shared concerns about the city stripping out parking spaces.
“I don't know what the point is,” Rothman said, sitting with her friend at a patio table outside Asaka Sushi & Bar, next door to Raxakoul's shop. She contended that the street redesign would inconvenience motorists and hurt merchants without providing much benefit to bike riders.
Adam Messinger of Oakland is determined to prove them wrong. On a recent Monday, he rode an e-bike to Hopkins Street and bought fresh cod from a fish market, an act of defiance to show that cyclists shop, too.
He wasn't alone: Several other cyclists rolled up to Monterey Market or other stores on Hopkins Street that morning, tethering their bikes to poles and buying groceries that they stuffed into cargo bags.
Messinger thinks the bike lane project on Hopkins Street is insufficient because it only covers one side of the road.
“It's a total compromise and a sell-out to cars,” Messinger said. “From my perspective, every major street in the Bay Area should have bike lanes on both sides.”
Some cyclists are boycotting stores on Hopkins Street because they are offended by the signs in the windows, Messinger said, adding that he views his shopping trip as a more effective form of protest. Owens, the transit advocate, said he's grown weary of “carmageddon” rhetoric around what he perceives as modest changes to the geometry of Hopkins Street.
“It's not even radical,” he said. “If I were in charge, I'd go full-on France style and just ban cars from Hopkins.”