Berkeley's Hopkins Street bike lane proposal heads to a vote 53%
By Rachel Swan67%
7/24/2026, 4:00:00 AM
Topics: City Council, Hopkins, Friends Of Hopkins Street, City Hall, Monterey Market, Elixir Salon, Middle School, Dediemar, Rashi Kesarwani, Donna Dediemar, Ben Gerhardstein, Mike Mah, Libby Lee Egan, Wahid Amiri, Marilyn Simons, Megan Barton, Shoshana Okeefe, Alexandra Sussman, Lee Egan, Walk Bike Berkeley, Councilmember Kesarwani, Barton, Martin Luther King Jr, Panier, Hopkins Street, Berkeley, Peralta Avenue, North Berkeley, East Bay, California, Sutter Street, Berkeley Public Library, The Alameda, Ohlone Greenway, Valencia Street, Richmond Street, Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, San Francisco, El Cerrito, Thousand Oaks, Westbrae, Nextdoor
BS Summary: This article contains 37 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Anecdotal, and Availability Heuristic, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 14.1% saturation with 193 hits. Analysis detected 2,055 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,366 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 51.8% and a BS Rank of 53% (10,369 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 52.60% of the article peer group.
They looked like parking tickets, tucked beneath the windshield wipers of every car on a busy North Berkeley thoroughfare.
But drivers who unfolded the paper found a warning instead.
“On July 28,” the flier said, “City Council will vote to remove hundreds of parking spaces on Hopkins (Street) to build bike lanes.”
The proposal to remake a commercial corridor with cycling paths was all but sure to move forward, the anonymous authors insisted, unless residents speak out.
It was the latest salvo in a battle that’s simmered for years, spanning two mayoral administrations, different iterations of the City Council, many lawn signs, at least one internal City Hall investigation and endless rhetoric about the war on cars.
All that drama will likely intensify on Tuesday, when Berkeley City Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani presents a new version of the Hopkins Street corridor project: bike lanes on either side of the road, protected by posts, concrete barriers or parked automobiles.
The paths would stretch nearly a mile from Peralta Avenue — where Hopkins intersects with the Ohlone Greenway — to the north branch of the Berkeley Public Library at The Alameda.
Painted bike lanes would continue another three blocks east, to Sutter Street.
Advocates like Ben Gerhardstein of the organization Walk Bike Berkeley believe they finally have the political juice to get this idea approved.
“Hats off to Councilmember Kesarwani for moving the community to make a decision,” said Gerhardstein, who is bracing for full-throated culture wars at the council meeting.
Donna DeDiemar, head of the opposition group Friends of Hopkins Street, is incensed.
“People who have nothing to do with this area are agitating for what they want everywhere, which is to push cars out,” she said, referring to bike activists from other cities who support the Hopkins Street vision of micromobility.
“There’s absolute unwillingness,” DeDiemar added, “to consider any other alternative.”
Plans to reimagine the mid-century road as a multi-modal artery began gestating in 2018, and immediately sparked controversy.
Hopkins Street, after all, is quintessential old Berkeley: organic produce, a fishmonger, free curbside parking beneath a canopy of elm trees.
Any attempt to change the look and feel of that landscape must run through the shredder of community politics.
A previous plan for a two-way cycling track on just the southern side of the street met fierce resistance before it was left for dead in 2023.
Emotions remain raw.
Merchants contend that lost parking equates to lost customers; Alexandra Sussman, owner of Elixir Salon, believes the toll on her business would be “unimaginable.”
Bike enthusiasts cite data on crashes and traffic injuries while underscoring the threat of climate change.
Some hype the roadway’s future as a transportation utopia.
Children would zip on electric scooters to Martin Luther King Jr.
Middle School, passing parents on matronly cargo bikes, the trailers loaded with groceries from Monterey Market.
Cyclists would bring more foot traffic to the delis, the sushi restaurant, the salon, the cheese shop, the pizzeria.
Exactly how much parking would be sacrificed is a matter of wild speculation, given that the city has not released designs or calculated the number of spaces.
Kesarwani called for a comprehensive “curb management analysis” to better accommodate drivers, perhaps by adding meters to encourage turnover on surrounding blocks.
With the information vacuum, DeDiemar has resorted to walking up and down the street, counting cars, and making her own estimates.
Councilmember Shoshana O’Keefe, whose district includes Hopkins, emailed the city’s interim public works director, Wahid Amiri, to get a more accurate projection.
His answer: approximately 145 spaces lost.
Amiri noted that his staff has not yet conducted a parking-impact analysis, though crews have visited the site numerous times and taken measurements “for the separated cycle track option.”
Most people trudging up Hopkins street with their shopping bags aren’t as intent as DeDiemar to check every car and curb marking.
Still, they know about the bike lane proposal.
They’ve seen the fliers, heard the arguments, and in many cases, already made up their minds.
“Taking away so many parking spaces from businesses and residents would really disrupt the community,” said Marilyn Simons, a retired librarian who was crossing the street to get to Monterey Market.
A garbage truck rumbled by, and Simons gestured toward it.
“You see?”
she said.
“There’s barely enough room for that truck.
Just think of what happens if we add bike lanes.”
Even bike lovers say they are torn.
“I know these shops run on low margins,” Megan Barton said as she locked her flat-bar gravel bike to a rack outside the market, and unclipped her Panier bag.
“Many elderly folks shop here,” Barton added.
“And they can’t all ride bikes.”
Libby Lee-Egan, a Hopkins Street resident and fervent proponent of protected bike lanes, has watched disenchantedly as the discourse frayed.
“There are comment threads on NextDoor where people are going absolutely feral,” Lee-Egan said, acknowledging that she hesitates to broach the topic with neighbors unless she knows their position in advance.
“One of my neighbors has five cars,” she said.
“I’m not talking to him about it.
I feel like he would bristle.”
A wry observer might describe the spat over Hopkins Street as a distillation of all the madness that can swirl around bike lanes.
The most passionate cycling activists want parity with automobiles.
The most infuriated motorists see bicycle infrastructure as the despoiling of neighborhood character.
The most anxious business owners believe they’ll face ruin if customers can’t park in front.
Similar fights have flared up over bike lanes on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, Richmond Street in El Cerrito and Valencia Street in San Francisco — a project that became so contentious, it inspired one merchant to go on a hunger strike.
In Berkeley, the divide is largely generational, and just as stark.
The Thousand Oaks neighborhood, which abuts Hopkins Street, harbors one of the oldest populations in the Bay Area, consisting largely of car-dependent homeowners, Kesarwani said.
Blocks away, in the Westbrae area, a growing population of young parents love hauling their children around in bucket-style bike carriers.
Some of them see the future of Hopkins Street as a statement of the city’s values.
The turmoil has begun to wear on Mike Mah, who sighed as he lifted his young son from the back of a cargo bike at Monterey Market.
“Like maybe it will pass,” Mah said.
“And it could become this totem to, ‘Oh yeah, we beat them.’
And then if they see a lot of people riding up the street slowly with their kids, then they’ll start to come around.
Or maybe they’ll just be stuck with something they didn’t want.”
But Kesarwani sees her proposal as the best chance for Berkeley to build consensus.
The one-way design is more intuitive for motorists pulling out of driveways, she said, because people tend to glance only in one direction for approaching traffic.
And notably, the project is no longer meeting resistance from Berkeley’s fire chief, who had voiced concerns in the past that bike lanes could potentially block access for emergency vehicles.
In an April memo, city staff indicated that both the one-way and two-way bike path scenarios had an “acceptable” width of 10-and-a-half feet to accommodate an emergency response.
Once the fire chief shifted his position, it changed “what became possible for Hopkins Street,” Kesarwani said.
Ultimately, she wants to trigger action on a roadway that has been frozen on the city’s list of priority roads for repaving.
To Lee-Egan, the correct solution is obvious.
She has installed a traffic counter at her house that sometimes measures drivers whizzing by at 45 miles per hour, a dangerous condition for any cyclist or scooter rider pedaling alongside them.
“If it comes down to safety versus parking, we cannot let parking win,” Lee-Egan said.
“That’s crazy.”
Others, like Mah, generally share Lee-Egan’s perspective, yet lack her happy-warrior zeal.
“Sure, I would love a protected bike lane,” Mah said, crinkling his brow.
“But I’ve been riding around this neighborhood long enough to know that people (drivers) don’t really like us.
I think the city would put the bike lane in, and there would be permanent resentment.”
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