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The City of Berkeley has managed to turn the bicycle into a weapon of civic destruction. Its bicycle policy is damaging neighborhoods, endangering bicyclists and undermining the legitimacy of governance while squandering millions of dollars. 

The proposal for Hopkins Street is a case in point. Known as the Hopkins Corridor Project, the proposal will come before City Council on May 10. It addresses Hopkins Street from Sutter Street at its eastern edge and continues west to Gilman Street. This stretch of road first goes through an area of mostly single family residences, followed by a segment with a public library and a stretch of city parks and other recreational facilities. It then enters a small but lively business district near the intersection of Hopkins and Monterey Street with food stores, a cafe, a hair salon, a dry cleaner, and child care centers. The westernmost section of Hopkins Street covered by the Project is heavily traversed by freeway commuters and is classified by the city as an arterial road. 

The plan calls for the creation of a two-way bicycle track on the south side of Hopkins Street running from The Alameda to Gilman. This type of bicycle track allows bicycles to travel in both directions on one side of the road. 

Transportation staff members know riding a bicycle in the type of two-way bicycle track the city is proposing would be more dangerous than simply riding on the main roadway with automobiles. A study published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety cites a bike track in Washington D.C. as a particularly egregious example. It is "about two-thirds of a mile long" and "is crossed five times by other streets and four times by alleys or driveways." The two-way bike track on Hopkins Street would be almost exactly the same length and would be crossed five times by other streets and twenty-eight times by driveways. 

During an on-line session with neighborhood residents, Transportation Division staff member Ryan Murray as much as admitted that the proposed two-way bicycle track would be dangerous. However, he used a weasel word when he noted that a section of the bike track that would run along side the city park had no driveways or intersections and was thus much more "feasible" than the rest of the bike track,which would be crossed by numerous driveways and intersections. 

Mr. Murray was merely adhering to the principles of Berkeley's Bicycle Plan which declares that the goal of bicycle infrastructure projects such as the Hopkins Corridor Project is to widen the appeal of bicycle riding "to a broader segment of the population" by creating a network of "low stress" bikeways throughout the city. The Plan defines "stress" as "the perceived sense of danger associated with riding in or adjacent to vehicle traffic." The perception of safety rather than the actuality of safety seems to be the primary concern. As Mr. Thomas explained, because he and his colleagues could not find an alternative that "we felt was...low stress," they chose to have bicyclists continue on the two-way track. 

There are other serious problems in addition to safety. The installation of the bicycle track requires the elimination of all of the parking along Hopkins from the Monterey intersection to Gilman. The result will be a major increase in congestion and a concomitant increase in greenhouse gas emissions as shoppers circle looking for parking, especially when afternoon commute traffic is present. Local business will be undermined as frustrated shoppers are likely to go elsewhere. 

Meanwhile, the City Council seems set on approving this project despite its obvious shortcomings. Moreover, no one has offered a reasonable explanation of its benefits. The shops at the Monterey Avenue intersection are easily accessible via the California Street bicycle boulevard. Very few bicyclists use Hopkins Street itself, a fact the city apparently did not wish to have on record since they never did a bicycle count. 

Bicycles can and should be an important option for transportation in Berkeley. The city already has a robust set of bicycle boulevards on streets with light car traffic that are both safe and "low stress." Cyclists can use them to reach most parts of the city, including the Hopkins Street commercial area. 

A few bicycle enthusiasts from organizations such as Walk Bike Berkeley and Bike East Bay appear to have an outsized influence at city hall. They seem to be driven by an ideological obsession rather than rational thought. A housing YIMBY group called North Berkeley Now! recently joined them in submitting recommendations for changes to Hopkins Street that go far beyond the current proposal. And since we have been told the Hopkins Corridor Plan is just a "concept" that will be more fully defined during the engineering phase, it is impossible to know how much of the bicycle enthusiasts’ recommendations will be implemented. 

The way the city misuses its own survey data to support its bicycle policy further reinforces the sense that its policy is not based on reality. During the on-line sessions with Hopkins Street neighbors, Transportation Division staff kept repeating that 70 percent of the Berkeley residents surveyed expressed interest in riding a bicycle but were concerned about the safety of doing so. They went on to make the claim that the presence of "low stress" bicycle facilities would lead to a 70 percent increase in bicycling. 

However, the survey itself was badly skewed. Seventy-nine percent of the people they surveyed said they had ridden a bicycle during the previous month. It is highly unlikely the survey respondents constituted a representative sample of Berkeley's residents. 

Mark Twain once said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." 

In Berkeley "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and bicycle plans."