Extra
Placemaking on Hopkins
Part 5:Learning to Love the Bike Lobby (the long version)
February – March 2022: Fronting for staff in public
Starting in late February 2022, Hahn touted the public process for the Hopkins project. A February 25 email from her office addressed to “Dear Neighbors” stated that she had received a thousand comments and thanked recipients for their input. “City staff,” Hahn wrote, “reached out to every business, institution, and school on the corridor, and my office had has held numerous meetings with residents and other stakeholders.” She also said that she had “previewed drafts of proposals that will be shared with you in coming weeks,” adding that “we are closing in on the ‘win-win’ outcome we all have hoped for.”
In a tribute to staff that she posted during the staff-run March 7 virtual meeting, Hahn expressed confidence that the hoped-for win-win outcome had been achieved:
“Everyone should feel confident that the team carefully reviewed all feedback they received from the community. They also reached out repeatedly to every business, institution and other stakeholder, making contact with the vast majority of those they reached out to. I met with the team every few weeks and can attest that they worked through a full spreadsheet of outreach contacts, tracking calls, letters, meetings, feedback, etc. We also discussed comments received, petitions, group and individual communications, etc. This was an extensive effort. Today’s recommendations provide fully protected two-way bike lanes and retain almost all parking on both sides of the street, while improving crosswalks, making median dividers permanent, and more. Safety for pedestrians and bikes is greatly enhanced, while still retaining parking. It was hard to get here, but it’s very promising that so much could be done.”
In late March, Hahn told Berkeleyside reporter Nico Savidge that staff had “‘come up with a plan’”—the then-final conceptual proposal for Hopkins—“that significantly increases safety for pedestrians and bikes…and they’ve been able to preserve a lot of the parking. I think they have achieved a really, really good rebalancing.’” She repeated that assessment at the May 10 council meeting: “I wouldn’t be supporting these changes if I did not think they were well-balanced.”
By “well-balanced,” Hahn presumably meant a plan that was arrived at by weighing varied perspectives against each other and assessing the trade offs in light of the plan’s stated objectives.
Unfortunately, as documented in the first four installments of this dossier, the Hopkins planning process involved no such consideration. From the start, certain perspectives were taken off the scale by the public officials who did the planning. Hahn formulated the alternatives along the same lines as city staff and the bike lobby: bike lanes/safety versus parking. Her dissident constituents framed the alternatives differently: bike lanes versus safety/parking/viability of the Hopkins shops.
I’d like to see the spreadsheets referenced in Hahn’s February 25 Chat post, as well as notes from the staff discussions of all the comments they received. Did they grapple with Donna DeDiemar’s critiques of their oft-issued claims, inscribed in the city’s Bicycle and Vision Zero Plans and justifying the project, that Hopkins is a high-injury street and that 70 percent of Berkeley residents would ride bikes on streets such as Hopkins if they felt safe? How about the concerns raised by dissident bicyclists about the safety of the bike lanes? Or the merchants’ fears about the loss of business?
The public has seen no evidence of such deliberation. Even if it had, a spreadsheet is no substitute for the lively dialogue that’s essential to democratically accountable governance.
April 26, 2022: Hinting at her frustration with staff
Behind the scenes, Hahn was frustrated with staff’s neglect of the “green infrastructure” and “Community/Placemaking” directives in her 2018 budget referral. They specified that, among other things, the money was to spent on the following:
- Study to include the entire neighborhood commercial area of Hopkins Street from McGee Avenue to Hopkins Court
- Exploration of means to create additional spaces for community gathering and to increase greenery and other placemaking amenities that harmonize with existing features in the corridor, with full access for all ages and abilities;
- Ensure design and style of improvements add to the charm and character of this highly valued and historic neighborhood commercial district; and
- Any other considerations that may further enhance placemaking and the safe and vibrant use of public spaces, including improvements to hardscape and greenery and enhancement of community-building and placemaking.
“I can turn this into an opportunity to think about this in a comprehensive way about this corridor, instead of doing piecemeal, one-off interventions, that the many, complex needs of that street be taken into account, and that they respect the quality of the built environment, public realm, the gorgeous trees, uniformity to the building size, a lot of developed all in one era. The area has a particular aesthetic and nice neighborhood features.”
She said that she used the term “placemaking,” because a “term of art in city and transportation planning.”
By late 2021, Hahn had begun to realize that placemaking was not getting the attention or expertise she’d envisioned and it needed. During one of the 2021 virtual workshops, she and I were sorted into the same Breakout Room. There she reminded the consultants that her item involved “culture and commerce,” not just transportation improvements.
In July, she told me that she was “absolutely horrified when the subcontracting firm told to do placemaking…clearly hadn’t read my referral.” Its representatives “started saying totally inappropriate things” that reflected “neither the letter nor the spirit” of her item—for example, “design by committee.” Hahn said that she told city staff, “This is not what was asked for or intended. We already have a place; the point is to enhance what we have and to build in a respect way, not to parachute in some elements.”
The consultants departed, but Hahn was still sufficiently concerned about the fate of placemaking to author a second budget referral, co-sponsored with Councilmembers Susan Wengraf and Rigel Robinson, that appeared on the council’s April 26 consent calendar.
The item called for allocating $300,000 in the FY 2023-2024 budget process with $150,000 in FY 2023 and $150,000 FY 2024, “for bike, pedestrian, and streetscape improvements to be implemented in coordination with protected bike lanes, pedestrian safety features, and re-paving of the Hopkins Corridor.”
It stated that “the imminent build-out of hardscape elements” such as repaving, raising crosswalks, and pouring of new curbs bulb-outs, islands, and other features,” scheduled to take place in 2023,
“provides a unique opportunity to refresh and expand bike parking, benches, bollards and trash receptacles, plant trees, install drought tolerant landscaping and bulb-outs, and provide other amenities for safety, utility, and community gathering—to accomplish the letter and spirit of the Hopkins Corridor referral.”
“While some funds already exist for these purposes, it is anticipated that additional funds will be needed to support installation of features across the corridor that harmonize with the existing neighborhood.”
May 2, 2022: Openly challenging staff, courting the bike lobby, disparaging critics, curbing public discourse
On May 2, Hahn upped the ante in her challenge to staff: She presided over an online community meeting ostensibly dedicated to replacing the bike infrastructure at the intersection of Hopkins and The Alameda. Its format would follow staff’s exclusionary lead. Its content was another matter: Instead of applauding a “win-win,” “well-balanced” plan, Hahn revealed her dissatisfaction with key aspects of the staff’s design.
As with the staff-run events, no materials were posted beforehand, making it impossible for the public to respond to the new, complex presentation in an informed manner. At the meeting itself, the opportunity for meaningful community participation was even more restricted than it had been during the workshops and webinars overseen by the Transportation Department: Early on, Hahn announced, “We’ve disabled Chat, because it’s distracting.”
In Part Three of the Placebreaking series, I noted ways in which Zoomed meetings are inhospitable to democratic decisionmaking. Now I’ll add that Zoom offers one advantage over a live gathering: Chat. The function allows people to send online messages to whichever of their fellow participants they choose, ranging from everyone to selected individuals. In the latter case, the communications are private. Contrast that with Zoom’s Q&A function, in which participants can only address the host of the meeting, and the host decides who deserves a response. On Chat, you can post links to documents that expand on or question the claims being made by the presenters. You can obtain otherwise elusive email addresses. You can cheer or fume. It makes for lively conversation and new connections. Absent Chat, the hosts are firmly in control. Which is apparently what Hahn wanted to be.
When we spoke over the Fourth of July weekend, Hahn marked upsides and downsides of Zoom. In the former category, she listed increased participation, and in the latter, the invisibility of everyone but the hosts and their guest presenters. I noted that Zoom has an option that allows everyone in attendance to be seen. Hahn said that was “challenging for a very large meeting.”
She was unapologetic about having disabled Chat on May 2. She compared exchanges on Chat to the side conversations and the talking and laughing at live meetings. In that context, she noted, people are asked to step out of the room. But Chat is silent, I said. “No,” Hahn replied,
“it’s actually quite distracting. Neighbors can have their own meeting. This meeting is being run by the people who called it. It’s not a forum where there isn’t some plan on the part of the people who called the meeting….I just disagree with you about this.”
We do disagree. For the most part, Zoom tips the balance of discursive and thus political power far over into the host’s court. Chat is one way to tip it back a bit into the public side. Hahn’s putdown of meetings called by “neighbors” as aimless belies a troubling disdain for grass-roots activism. Given her professed animus toward Chatting during an agendaized meeting, it was disconcerting to find her posting questions in Chat during the July 7 Zoom meeting about the “smart” kiosk slated for Solano Avenue, an event that was run by the city’s Office of Economic Development.
On May 2, it turned out that Zoom’s Q&A function didn’t work, so Hahn and company were forced to resort to Chat, which however they only activated at 7:15 pm, sixty-five minutes after the meeting had begun and fifteen minutes before it was scheduled to end.
What was truly distracting, then, was to hear Hahn allude during the meeting to the Hopkins project’s “broadly participatory, consultative process.” Hahn bemoaned the plan’s opponents, who, she said, “like things the way they are.”
That may be true of some of the opponents, but as an across-the-board description, it’s erroneous. To cite a prominent example: On April 24, Hahn received a letter with 112 signers asking that in the interest of cycling and pedestrian safety, the city should skip the bike lanes and just repave the street and add bulb-outs, raised crosswalks, stop signs, and striping.
On May 2, Hahn also claimed that “we’re not trying to take anything away.” In fact, as indicated by the official spreadsheet that emerged a month after the council’s May 10 meeting, the plan eliminateds60 parking spaces on Hopkins. More to the point, it eliminates 33 of the 51 existing spaces on Hopkins from Carlotta to Sacramento, the blocks where shoppers park.
True, on May 2 neither nor anybody else on the council, much less the public, had seen that spreadsheet. Posted by the Daily Planet as a visual for Part Four of this dossier, “The bike lobby rules,” the spreadsheet has yet to appear on the city’s website.
That said, even a glance at the Hopkins plan that staff had presented on its final online meeting, held on March 14, made it clear that a good number of existing parking spaces were slated for removal.
To justify the Hopkins project, staff leaned on city policy, opening every meeting with references to Berkeley’s Bicycle, Vision Zero and Climate Change Plans. On May 2, Hahn took a more elevated approach, presenting support for reconfiguring the street as a righteous crusade for environmental sustainability and mobility mode equity. She delivered a fifteen-minute sermon on climate change. Homing in on Hopkins, she declared that “[w]e need to support walking and biking”—especially biking—“more affirmatively.” It was urgent to “give safe passage to bikes,” she said, because there was “nothing for them.”
But the most striking deviations from both the staff-run meetings and Hahn’s prior public stance occurred when she turned to the meeting’s announced agenda, the bicycle infrastructure at the intersection at Hopkins and The Alameda. She had two guests, Deputy Director of Public Works for Transportation Javandel and Transportation Commission Secretary Karen Parolek.
Javendel had never appeared at any of the staff-run meetings, whose oversight was assigned to Transportation planners Beth Thomas and Ryan Murray. Neither had Parolek, at least not as a presenter. At those meetings, Thomas and Murray were joined by the transportation and placemaking consultants for whose services the city had initially allocated $200,000. In enlisting Parolek, presumably for free, Hahn tacitly challenged the competence of Javandel, his fellow staffers, and the consultants whom they’d hired.
Parolek is a prominent bicycling advocate who serves on Walk Bike Berkeley’s Coordinating Committee. She’s also the co-Principal and COF of Opticos Design. The company website describes her as “[a] passionate advocate for diverse, equitable, walkable and rollable communities, user-centered design thinking, and impact-driven business.”
During the Transportation Commission’s April 21 meeting, Parolek gained infamy in the eyes of neighbors opposed to bike lanes on Hopkins, when she read a letter that Walk Bike Berkeley had sent to Transportation staff that proposed numerous amendments to the staff plan for Hopkins. In apparent violation of the Brown Act, the only amendment that appeared on the commission’s online agenda was extending bike lanes to San Pablo. Moreover, there was reportedly no opportunity for public comment; nor did the commission deliberate before unanimously approving all of Walk Bike Berkeley’s recommendations.
One of those recommendations—“Extend the 2-way protected cycle track to the east across The Alameda to Sutter” and “Pair that with an update to the intersection design at HopkinsAlameda”—bore directly on the announced topic of the May 2 meeting.
On May 2, Parolek showed drawings of intersection treatments in downtown Ann Arbor that, she suggested, might be applied to Hopkins.
She also addressed a topic that was among the Walk Bike Berkeley recommendations but not on the announced agenda for the May 2 meeting: changing the staff’s plan for Hopkins from The Alameda up to Sutter. On that segment, which is sixty feet wide (compare with the 41-foot-width on the block from McGee to Monterey), the staff plan had situated the westbound bike lane on the north side of the street and the east bound lane on the south side. (The plan included in the May 10 staff report shows specifications for other segments of Hopkins, but not that one. They appear on the presentation at the March 1 virtual community meeting.)
According to my notes—this is another meeting whose proceedings has no official documentation—the key changes that Parolek suggested were to locate both bike lanes on the south side of the street, where they would be sandwiched between a 10-foot wide landscaped sidewalk and a 7.5-foot wide landscaped median.
When Chat was activated at 7:15 pm, a member of the public asked about the gas station at the corner of Hopkins and The Alameda. Right now cars can enter and exit the station from both streets. Many cars—and all trucks hauling gasoline—choose to enter via Hopkins. To do so, a driver now has only to cross a parking space and a sidewalk. Parolek’s plan would require a driver to traverse 43.5 feet: an 8-foot parking space, a 10-foot landscaped sidewalk, two 6-foot bike lanes, a 7.5-foot landscaped median, and a 6-foot sidewalk. Javandel said that the city was trying to contact the owner of the gas station to discuss the proposed change.
Another member of the public observed that Parolek’s examples of bikeways at intersections were all drawn from an urban locale. What about a residential street with lots of driveways? Parolek shrugged off the question, stating that these were examples she had at hand.
With only a week left before the May 10 meeting, there was little opportunity for the public to engage either Hahn’s office or staff in discussion about Parolek’s proposals.
May 10, 2022: a panicky appeal for support
The Hopkins project was Item 33 on the council’s May 10 agenda. The council meeting began at 6 pm. At 2:43 pm, Hahn sent out an email that upped the political ante by explicitly pitting her design against the staff’s plan, sharpening her censure of bike lane opponents, and officially publicizing her rapprochement with the bike lobby.
The email opened as follows:
“Tonight the City Council will vote on a Conceptual Design for the Hopkins Corridor. After over a year of consultation and very high participation by the community, staff has presented their proposal, including detailed drawings, which can be found HERE. I have filed supplemental materials that revise some of staff's recommendations and add requests for their consideration, which you can find HERE.”
Readers who clicked on the second HERE were transported to the supplemental proposal submitted by Hahn and Mayor Arreguín. It appeared in “Supplemental Packet 2,” meaning that it was submitted less than five days before the council’s meeting but before 5 p.m. on the day of the meeting—in other words, much too late for in-depth public perusal, much less any dialogue with its sponsors.
Described as an “’omnibus’ motion,” Hahn’s and Arreguín’s supplemental first recommended that the council adopt the staff recommendation, with their amendments to the conceptual design, starting with replacing the proposed design for the Sutter-to-The Alameda segment with two-way parking-protected bike lanes on the south side of Hopkins. (In fact, the accompanying illustrations show the lanes protected by a 10-foot landscaped sidewalk, not parking.)
The supplemental also called for redesigning “the ‘Alameda Intersection’…to implement appropriate elements for the extended two-way protected bike path/cycle track in lieu of the existing and proposed four-sided bike slip lane design” and providing pedestrian safety elements.
The supplemental included Parolek’s drawings of bikeways at an intersection in downtown Ann Arbor, along with a photograph of a landscaped strip with a loading sidewalk for parked vehicles, punctuated by walkways—described as “evocative of how the landscaping and parking sidewalk beyond the two-way bike path/cycle track can look/feel on the Sutter-to-Alameda segment; a watercolor drawing labeled “Artistic Rendering Upper Hopkins courtesy of Alfred Twu,” the Yimby house illustrator; and artistic renderings of the segment of Hopkins from The Alameda to Sutter by “UCB students” Brandon James Yung and Angela Clearwater. Yung and Clearwater’s bird’s eye view of the segment showed homes on the south side of the street right up to the Alameda intersection; there was no sign of the gas station.
The supplemental’s second recommendation was that the council adopt as a referral Kesarwani’s supplemental proposal to extend the bike lanes and pedestrian “improvements” from Gilman to San Pablo, “contingent on holding two community engagement meetings to seek input from stakeholders.”
All of the above were asterisked to indicate that were had been suggested by the Transportation Commission, as indeed they had: They were among the recommendations that at Parolek’s behest the commission had railroaded—should I say, rolled—through the Brown Act on April 21.
The Hahn-Arreguín supplemental made three more recommendations: “Ensure Community Building/Placemaking elements are developed and implemented simultaneous[sic] with Complete Streets/Traffic elements”; Restate elements already under consideration and refer additional community suggestions for the Engineering Phase”; and “Consider funding sources.”
Back to the email proper: The opening paragraph was followed by an appeal set in large, bolded font: “I need your support tonight to ensure the very best outcomes.”
What followed was confusing. Hahn had begun by challenging the staff plan. Now she went after critics of the staff plan:
“While many people strongly support the work proposed for Hopkins, many others are concerned or opposed. Unfortunately, I see a lot of misinformation circulating—that no parking will be available for customers at the shops or that pedestrian safety has not been considered, for example. These rumors and misrepresentations are simply untrue.”
The censure was disingenuous. If members of the public were ignorant about the Hopkins project, Hahn deserved a fair share of the blame. In the two and a half years since the public planning process had gotten underway, this missive, issued hours before the meeting at which the council would act on the plan, was her first detailed communication to the public about the project. She implied that everyone who opposed the Hopkins plan was putting out false information. As documented in the earlier installments of the “Placebreaking on Hopkins dossier,” that’s simply untrue.
Next, verging on a Brown Act violation, Hahn wrote: “A Conceptual Plan will be passed tonight—I know how to count votes.”
She then reiterated her call to support her proposed changes to the staff plan:
“What I support is in the supplemental materials I have presented, so you know exactly where I stand. One of the key features of my proposal includes getting rid of the current crosswalk configuration at Hopkins and the Alameda, along with a green parkway for the upper blocks of Hopkins.”
“My proposal also requires staff to bring in Landscape Architects to ensure ample benches and other ‘street furniture,’ abundant landscaping, the use of high quality materials and finishes, and other elements that I believe really make a difference for our community.”
“If you come out in support of this project, I need you to clearly state you support my supplemental proposal. If you are opposed, I hope you will also support my proposal—as the best alternative.” In other words, accept that bike lanes are going on Hopkins (“I know how to count votes”), and concede that what I’m proposing improves on the staff’s conceptual plan.
The second page of the email had two parts: A curious disquisition on the meaning of a conceptual design (who cares?), followed by “A NOTE REGARDING LETTERS RECEIVED.” The latter read as follows:
“Our office has received over 1,600 emails on the topic of the Hopkins Corridor plan,, some expressing support and enthusiasm and others concerns and even alarm, all evidencing the deep love—I’ll venture to say passion—this community has for this treasured area.”
“Having lived in North Berkeley and shopped on Hopkins most of my life—I remember experiencing Monterey Market (in a different location on Hopkins) as a toddler, with the piles of fruits and vegetable looming above me—I share that love and passion.”
“Because of the volume of incoming correspondence, I regret that I have not been able to respond to each of your notes individually. I want to assure you, however, that I review every message, and our City Staff has taken account of the thousands of suggestions and comments received by email and at community meetings. Your time, care, and input are deeply appreciated.”
Given her swipe at critics of the Hopkins project, it’s hard to accredit Hahn’s professed appreciation of her correspondents’ input. And while nobody should expect a councilmember to respond personally to 1,600 emails about the same issue, Hahn could have issued an update that provided accurate information about the staff’s work. When I asked her why she didn't, she reminded me that she’d had a very bad case of Covid. Fair enough. But that doesn’t justify defaming bike lane opponents as deceptive.
May 2017: Seeking a flexible, publicly accountable Bicycle Plan
City staff do not work for the mayor and council. Berkeley has a city manager form of government, which means that staff answer to the city manager, not the elected officials. In theory, the city manager answers to the mayor and council. (The council’s aides are do constituent work, not policy.) This means that the electeds must depend on staff whom they do not directly control to carry out their plans and policies.
Everyone on the dais has to navigate this administrative minefield. To understand how Hahn maneuvered during the Hopkins planning process, it helps to know that she’d already tangled with Transportation staff over the bike lobby’s agenda, and lost.
As the council prepared to deliberate on city’s draft Bicycle Plan on May 2, 2017, Hahn proposed that the following amendment be inserted into the plan’s Executive Summary:
“All elements in the plan are subject to further revision and consideration on a project-by project basis. As a single-mode plan focused on cycling, this plan considers but does not study or address in an in-depth manner the needs or concerns of pedestrians, individuals with disabilities, public transit, businesses, residents, delivery and semitrailer trucks, automobiles, parking and other individuals or modes that have a stake in the reconfiguration of our streets and sidewalks. As each project is taken up for possible implementation, all stakeholder constituencies will be consulted.”
“In addition, all elements of each proposed project, from the street, intersection or site selected to the type of details of the bicycle facilities or amenities proposed will be determined through a process that includes outreach to community members and study of alternatives.”
“In commercial and manufacturing districts, particularly in West Berkeley, the special needs and hazards associated with these uses, including frequent passage, parking, and unloading of trucks of all sizes shall be considered such that the economic functioning and economic viability of these areas are not unduly burdened.”
In defense of her amendment, Hahn noted that “[f]or all the great work that staff had done” on the draft Bicycle Plan, “important constituencies were not consulted, including
small businesses such as Ace Hardware,” which had moved to Milvia, a street slated for the removal of parking to make room for double bike lanes. Other constituencies, specifically AC Transit and the Alameda County Transportation Commission, had been inadequately consulted.
Hahn also cited problems with the bike infrastructure at the intersection of Hopkins and The Alameda, which was completed in November 2016, the same month that she was elected to the council. She called it
“a hastily installed project that involved not one drop of consultation with anyone in the community, that had negative impacts on AC Transit, handicapped parking, short-term parking in front of the library, entrance to and egress from a heavily used gas station, confusing elements for pedestrians and bicyclists, and…cars rolling up over the median, blown-out tires, a stream of people going into the gas station for help.”
During public comment, Karen Parolek criticized Hahn’s amendment. She stated that, as a member of the Transportation Commission’s Bike Subcommittee, she had worked with city staff on the plan. Staff, said Parolek, “has done an amazing job—the public outreach has been fantastic.” Advertising her credentials, Parolek added that she “professionally work[s]to design walkable, bikeable neighborhoods throughout the country.” She called the draft “one of the best bike plans I have seen.”
Then came her objection to Hahn’s amendment:
“I am concerned about the political process…This is a single-mode plan, and that’s a challenge….When this goes in front of parking needs, business needs, neighbor needs, the Bike Plan’s going to be the first one to go.”
To avert that outcome, Parolek proposed that the following sentence be inserted after Hahn’s amendment:
“For the network identified in this plan to work, it must be complete, without gaps, so completing the low-stress network is a priority for the city to meet our Climate Action goals.”
In other words, the bike lobby knows that a democratic planning process requires engaging the claims of other parties and would thereby compromise its own agenda. Hence, it demands that other claims be discounted, and that its own take precedence. To silence the opposition, the bike lobby uses crisis-mongering. Why must democratic procedures be rolled back? Because climate change.
As the council deliberated, nobody challenged Hahn’s claims that staff’s consultation with important constituencies had been inadequate or simply nonexistent. In fact, nobody mentioned them at all. Nor did anyone defend the project at Hopkins and The Alameda. Arreguín, an avid cyclist, called it “a mess.”
Nevertheless, while only Councilmember Kriss Worthington went so far as to call Hahn’s amendment “insulting to staff and the people who worked on the plan,” it became clear that as far as implementing the Bicycle Plan was concerned, the council majority was unwilling to incorporate an amendment in behalf of democratic public process.
Councilmember Susan Wengraf, who’d seconded Hahn’s amendment, and who five years later would cast the sole No vote on the Hopkins plan, proposed an alternative that eliminated the controversial language about “further revision and consideration on a project-by-project basis,” calling only for stakeholders to have an opportunity to provide input as each project is implemented. The only part of Hahn’s amendment that appears in the Executive Summary of the approved Bicycle Plan refers to “the special needs and hazards associated” with commercial and manufacturing uses. By contrast, Parolek’s proposed addition appears in full:
“As each project is taken up for possible implementation, stakeholder constituencies will be consulted and have the opportunity to provide input. In addition, in commercial
and manufacturing districts, particularly in West Berkeley, the special needs and hazards associated with these uses, including frequent passage and parking, loading and unloading
of trucks of all sizes, shall be considered such that everyday functioning and economic vitality of these areas are not unduly burdened. Furthermore, for the network to work, it must be complete, without gaps. Completing the low stress network is a priority for the city to meet our Climate Action Plan goals.” (Bicycle Plan, p. ES11)
October 2019: Abstaining on budgeting 50% of repaving funds for bikeways and high-collision streets
At the council’s October 23, 2019, meeting, Hahn again challenged bike lobby hegemony. This time the object of contention was part of the “Bicycle Lane and Pedestrian Street Improvements Policy” proposed by Councilmember Robinson, Worthington’s successor in the south-of-campus, District 7 seat, and co-sponsored by Arreguín and Councilmembers Lori Droste and Kate Harrison.
The item began with a “Recommendation” to “Refer to the City Manager to develop a comprehensive ordinance with input from the Public Works & Transportation Commissions governing a Bicycle Lane and Pedestrian Street Improvement Policy” that would do several things.
The council unanimously approved :
“Requir[ing] simultaneous implementation of recommendations in the City’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Plans when City streets are repaved, if one or more of the following conditions are met:
- Bicycle Plan recommendations can be implemented using quick-build strategies that accommodate transit operations.
- Pedestrian Plan recommendations can be implemented using quick-build strategies that accommodate transit operations.
- The Bicycle Plan recommends studying protected bike lanes as part of a Complete Street Corridor Study in the Tier 1 Priority list.
- Improvements are necessary to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
- “Prioritize bikeways and Vision Zero high-fatality, high-collision streets under the five-year Paving Plan by requiring that 50 percent of the repaving budget go towards such streets, sunsetting this requirement once these streets meet a minimum surface standard established with input from the Public Works and Transportation Commissions. Bikeways are defined as the street network that the Bicycle Plan recommends for bicycle infrastructure.”
Noting that the city’s current $6-7 million in funding for street paving was itself “totally inadequate for a city of our size,” Wengraf observed that his measure would leave only $3.5 million for paving the rest of the entire city. “We can’t just start grabbing at the limited resources we have for special interest groups,” she said. “It’s not the way it works. Or, it’s not the way it should work.”
Calling for a process that’s “holistic” and “more democratic,” Wengraf offered a “friendly” amendment to Robinson’s item that would route the 50% proposal through the Public Works and Transportation Commissions. Robinson rejected her amendment.
Hahn also criticized Robinson’s proposal as undemocratic but did so along somewhat different lines. She, too, emphasized that Berkeley had “miniscule” funds for paving but focused on how it had people “fighting over crumbs.” “Our bike boulevards are starved,” Hahn said. “But so is every other priority in Berkeley with regard to our Complete Streets.” She continued:
“For me to say that the real and desperate needs of our bike boulevards, which I fully recognize and support, are going to take precedence, locked in a certain amount of money, that we are going to say that these other starving, desperate needs are going to have less because of this, I just think it’s a really futile and not necessarily strategic way for us to address the myriad paving needs that we have.”
In addition, Wengraf and Hahn questioned the geographic fairness of giving bike boulevards top priority. Each represents a council district in the hills with lots of crumbling streets but no bike boulevards. Wengraf held up the map in the Bicycle Plan and said, “See that white space?” She was referring to her district.
By contrast, Hahn was on the defensive about her district’s needs:
“People look at the hills—and I represent another north Berkeley hill district—and they say: It’s not that densely populated, it’s single-family [homes]—although now everyone can have an ADU—and there’s no bike boulevards there, so why should they get anything?”
Moving from socioeconomic class to geography, she said that, given the Hayward Fault, the slide zone, and District Five’s “heightened fire danger,” “they probably shouldn’t have built anything there at all. But we did [build], and there’s houses there. Good people live there, people who participate in Berkeley, people who value Berkeley, people who vote Yes on every tax.”
Then she reverted to her stronger argument: “Imposing something rigid onto a system that has a delicate balance is not the way to go.”
Just as at the May 2017 deliberations on the Bicycle Plan, here, too, none of the other councilmembers addressed the short-circuiting of democratic process.
Mayor Arreguín’s remarks, to take a notable example, were a study in killing the messenger by changing the subject. Arreguín began by deeming the city’s paving budget a matter for longterm consideration. Then he shifted the question of democracy away from process and toward socioeconomic “equity,” specifically to “mak[ing] sure that south and central and west Berkeley get their share of resources to make their streets safer.” Holding up a map of the city’s high-collision streets, the mayor noted that a lot of them were in those parts of town.
He did not say what everyone knows: those are also the less affluent areas of the city. In effect, he cast Wengraf’s and Hahn’s defenses of their districts’ needs as elitist.
Arreguín also framed their positions as pro-driving and thus anti-safety and reactionary:
“If we want to create a low-stress bicycle network, as our Bicycle Plan calls for, we need to make our streets safer….We’re moving into a completely different era. Fifteen years from now, we’re going to see an increase in electric vehicles, micromobility, and transit as a means of transportation….We need to design our streets for the future, not just the way they are right now. These investments are not just important for people who are riding bicycles….This is a pretty dramatic change in our policy, but it’s one that needs to be seriously studied by our staff.”
But Robinson’s measure did not merely direct staff to study the dedication of 50% of paving to bikeways and high-collision street; it directed staff to prepare an ordinance to that end.
As reported in Streetsblog, Robinson acknowledged that dedicating 50 percent of pavement funding to bikeways and high-collision streets went beyond the Seattle and Cambridge ordinances that served as models for his measure. “‘As far as I know,’ he said, ‘that may be a novel approach.’”
As Streetsblog did not report, after announcing that she has “a budgeting background,” Kesarwani asked Robinson if the “method to arriving at 50 percent” involved “any science. He replied that it was “a nice round number that should be really appealing.’”
Despite that patently unscientific response, Kesarwani then joined the mayor and five other councilmembers in voting to approve the 50 percent recommendation. Wengraf voted No. Hahn abstained.
Hahn told me that the first time she met with members of the bike lobby—my term, not hers—was at the May 2 online event. But in the five and a half years since she’d been elected, she’d been regularly meeting with their agents on the city staff and the council; and she’d encountered them in person during public comment. She’d repeatedly seen the majority of her elected colleagues wield the bike lobby’s inflated claims to override her calls for democratic process and fiscal pragmatism, not to say common sense.
Not to question the sincerity of Hahn’s newfound enthusiasm for cycling, but I’m guessing that those bruising defeats helped to shape the conciliatory path—that is, conciliatory with respect to the bike lobby—that she charted through the Hopkins planning process.
May 10, 2022: All in with the bike lobby
At the May 10 council meeting, the Hopkins project was the last item (#33) on the agenda. It was introduced by Javandel; by Parolek, who as chair of the Transportation Commission presented recommendations that, she said, the commission had unanimously approved on April 21—recommendations, she omitted to say, that never appeared on the commission’s agenda, and that were approved without an opportunity for public comment); and by Kesarwani, who’d submitted a supplemental that reiterated the commission’s recommendation to extend the buffered bike lanes to San Pablo.
Hahn spoke next. The confrontational tone of her emailed appeal for support was gone. In it place was a gracious air. Instead of taking potshots at opponents of the Hopkins plan, Hahn thanked “the community” for its “incredible input.” Rather than touting her proposal as superior to staff’s, she said that it “builds on theirs.” Bike facilities on Hopkins, she said “were anticipated in the city’s Bicycle Plan; her 2018 budget referral simply “asked for a much broader, more visionary plan” that emphasized placemaking.
A caveat: “That doesn’t mean that we already have a place—we do.” Her goal, then, is to
“enhance and build on the incredible place that we already have: the avenue, the beautiful alleés of trees, a commercial district that’s beloved, we have schools. We have religious institutions, preschools, our beautiful historic public library. As we evolve as a city, I want us to enhance what we already have.”
Hahn then elaborated what such enhancement should involve. It was the first time she’d elaborated on her goals for Hopkins; her budget referrals had both appeared on the council’s consent agenda; both were approved without discussion.
To date, she said, the (staff) presentations of the changes on Hopkins had focused “on technical issues, how the street space ends up being divided up.” By contrast, “the pieces of my referral” address “placemaking—benches, wall features, pavement that is not just concrete or asphalt, and some planting and trees.” As she spoke, the mayor displayed a photo of the North Berkeley branch of the public library. Hahn continued: “We need to bring in a landscape architecture firm and build out these elements using high quality, permanent materials.”
Next, as viewers saw the materials that had been presented at the May 2 meeting—Parolek’s slide of a bike lanes at a downtown Anne Arbor intersection and the artistic renderings of buffered bike lanes-plus-greenway on Hopkins up to Sutter—Hahn said that the existing bicycle facilities at The Alameda intersection would be removed, making way for a design that would be “much more familiar and rational” and “more traditional.” East of the intersection, “we would gain a beautiful landscaped strip.”
Also displayed was a list of sixteen “elements” described in the Hahn-Arreguín supplemental as “important to the community” and “already under consideration for the Engineering Phase” or as “suggestions referred for consideration.”
Besides recommendations to widen bike lanes, to establish Residential Preferred Parking “both on and/or surrounding Hopkins Street,” and to improve pedestrian safety, among other things, there was a proposal to “increase parking availability.” That meant: “Implement enforced time-restricted parking, with or without meters, around the perimeter of the ‘Berkeley Horticulture’ block, including along the Hopkins Street commercial block-face, and consider implementing in other adjacent commercial areas, to encourage turnover of spaces for customers.”
Hahn also mentioned the possibility of adding a few parking spaces on the northwest corner of the Hopkins-Monterey intersection on Hopkins in front of the café, stating that “[w]e are very cognizant that many people cannot access this area by bike and foot.”
She said that she put of all these “details…in this item, so that you”—by whom I presume she meant the “community”—“could feel confident that they are going to get done.”
When Hahn spoke again, two hours later, she was back on the offensive. That’s because in the interval, criticism of Hopkins bike lanes had been voiced by twenty-five of the sixty-four people who spoke at public comment and, most forcefully, by Wengraf.
Speakers at public comment were given only one minute. Exercising a councilmember’s prerogative, Wengraf took twelve. As detailed in Part Four, she used some of that time to grill Javandel about the number of parking spaces that were designated for removal. But she’d prefaced that interrogation with a tribute to the scene at Hopkins and Monterey, where she said, she’d been a customer for forty-five years:
“You can buy everything that you need—fresh produce, fish, fresh poultry, grab a piece of fabulous pizza—and never have to go to a Safeway. It’s exactly what Berkeley wants—locally owned, independent businesses—and most of them are minority-owned.” Wengraf said it was her “primary destination for marketing.”
She also called it a “community center. You go and you do your marketing, and you walk from shop to shop, and you run into neighbors and friends and friends of your children.”
“The city,” she said, “should be putting energy into nurturing this. This is exactly the kind of synergy of commercial uses that we want. It’s true it’s a little funky. I sort of like that funkiness. People have made benches and put them outside it’s a little eccentric, but it’s Berkeley.”
Wengraf spoke about how the loss of parking would adversely affect the shops, and how that afternoon the business owners had told her that they felt their concerns had been ignored.
She also said that the proposed plan would make the street more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists. Noting that the safety issues are all in the area between McGee and Sacramento, “this one little segment where the stores are,” she proposed installing a stoplight at Hopkins and Monterey and asked if she would accept that as an amendment. Hahn said she would “love” the idea. Javandel said the consultant had advised against it, given the proximity of the stoplight at Hopkins and Sacramento, adding that it would cause a backup. Wengraf noted that there’s already a backup.
Wengraf also thanked Hahn for her years of work on the Hopkins planning the divisiveness around the project, she expressed solicitude for her colleague, calling it “a no-win situation for you.”
Other than endorsing the stoplight idea, Hahn did not return the collegiality. Instead, she implied that, having lived longer in Berkeley than Wengraf, or for that matter, than any of her fellow electeds, she was better qualified than the rest to appreciate the pleasures of the Hopkins-Monterey hub:
“I didn’t keep track of everybody who said how long they lived in the neighborhood, but I think I might be the person who’s lived in this area and shopped in this area longest. 1961—Councilmember Wengraf, can you top that? Sixty-one.”
Wengraf, laughing: “No, I can’t top that. Sixty-nine.”
Hahn: “That’s what I thought. I moved to Berkeley when I was two months old.” She proceeded to review her “lifelong memories of shopping and enjoying this area,”: “looking up at the big bins” as a toddler shopping with her mother—a line from her afternoon email—attending story time at the North Branch library, walking to King Middle School as a student, having her first crush at the school, and meeting her best friend at King, where the two still walk around the track. Her children played soccer at the school. “I care so deeply about these neighborhoods,” Hahn explained. “And it’s hard for me when the community says I don’t.”
She finally caught herself, observing, confusingly, that “[i]n some ways, it doesn’t matter; we represent everybody in Berkeley, whether they’ve been here one day or a hundred years, but I’ve also just had so many emails suggesting that I don’t care.”
Where Wengraf described her experience as an adult (in 1969, she was 24 or thereabouts) shopping and hanging out at the Hopkins-Monterey intersection, Hahn’s only reference to the commercial hub recalled her experience as a toddler shopping with her mother. She did say that nowadays her mother “probably” shops four times there a week. But that was to back her claim: “I know about senior access to this area.”
More striking is the difference between their aesthetic sensibilities. Wengraf lauded the funkiness, eccentricity, and DIY character of the commercial area. Hahn’s praise went to formal aspects of the Hopkins townscape such as the beautiful allée of trees and historic library.
Given the ongoing crapification of downtown, Hahn’s respect for Berkeley’s architectural heritage is in many ways a good thing. And everyone, not just BAHA members, should cheer her success in getting the city to replace the ugly, dysfunctional concrete islands at the Hopkins-Alameda intersection with something that, it’s to be hoped, looks good and increases bike and pedestrian safety.
But Berkeley’s appealing built environment takes varied forms. The charming qualities at Hopkins and Monterey—the things that make the place a “place”—are not the work of “Landscape Architects”; they’re product of amateur improvisation irregularly undertaken over the course of time. It would be a tragedy if in the name of “placemaking,” they were effaced.
Charitably viewed, Hahn’s remarks could be attributed to the hurt occasioned by the accusatory emails, to her lingering Covid symptoms, and to the lateness of the hour (it was 11:30 p.m. when she began to speak).
A less charitable take would regard them as an evasion of criticism that putting bike lanes on Hopkins would jeopardize the businesses. The Hahn-Arreguín supplemental, with its recommendation that the Office of Economic Development be brought in to future planning tacitly acknowledged that there had been a problem. At the council meeting, Hahn said that OEO would “revisit the businesses’ concerns.” “If they don’t want meters,” Hahn said, “they don’t have to be put in.”
She offered no such option with respect to the merchants’ chief concern: the installation of bike lanes. On the contrary, she doubled down in her advocacy of cycle tracks on Hopkins.
First she cited “something we’ve completely missed,” something that “one of my very favorite people in the world, Nancy Pelosi says all the time: It’s for the children.” Hahn listed the schools in the area—besides King, “the second largest school in the Berkeley Unified School District,” there’s St. Mary’s High School, “one block away,” four preschools, “elementary schools within blocks of this area.” “We’ve all forgotten that one of the main reasons we want protected bike lanes here is for the children,” so they can learn how to ride bikes and they can ride with their parents. Now she sees kids riding on the sidewalk because they’re “terrified” to ride on the street.
Then Hahn addressed “the other end of the spectrum,” the oldsters, alluding to her mother’s frequent patronage of the shops—presumably by car—and hence her own familiarity with senior access.
She conceded that “we have to accommodate people coming in vehicles….Unfortunately, the parking issue has been misrepresented and over-emphasized to a degree that is not conforming with reality.” That had to be a swipe at Wengraf. Ditto for Hahn’s assurance that “we’re still keeping like, 99, 95 percent of what we have for people who are coming here in vehicles. We’re not taking it away.”
As noted in Part Four, to cite these percentages—shortly after midnight, Arreguín would also quote the 95 percent figure—is to dodge questions about parking and accessibility to the shops. According to the city-produced spreadsheet that I obtained a month after the May 10 meeting, of the 60 parking spaces slated for removal, 51 are on the blocks from Carlotta to Sacramento, where shoppers typically block. That’s a loss of 65 percent. Something substantial is indeed being taken away.
Then Hahn made a statement that offers a clue as to why her constituents accuse of her not caring about their concerns:
“I actually think it’s unfortunate that we have focused so much on bikes in this study, because my referral was for pedestrian safety and placemaking and, yes, bikes, too. But I want to say why we end up talking about bikes so much.”
It’s as if the bike lanes were an afterthought, when in fact they were always the main act in the Hopkins show, as everyone, except apparently Hahn, understood.
When she went on to explain the preoccupation with bikes, it became clear that by “we,” she meant the bike lobby, not her constituents. In a reprise of her remarks at the May 2 meeting, she first asked her listeners to pity the poor bicyclists, who, in the creation of a car-centric world, “got nothing.” Pedestrians at least got a “lane”—the sidewalk—though they, too, need protection from “king” car. Now, bikes “are struggling to get something, a safe place protected for them to have a right of way.” Bike lanes as reparations.
But in Hahn’s view, the provision of bike lanes redresses something far more consequential than discrimination against cyclists: the devastating threats of climate change. “We have a crisis” that “requires us to make changes in our own daily lives.” She rattled off assignments:
“If you drive a gas car, you need to get an electric. If you drive an electric car, try an electric bike….Maybe you can walk and bike some of the time. Eat less red meat. We all have to make adjustments….Think about the children. what is the world we’re leaving them? And it is inconvenient. It is inconvenient to adjust to Covid, it’s inconvenient to adjust to fires, drought, sea level rise. Can we adjust to bike lanes in our own neighborhood? Yes, we can. We can do this. We have to do it. We have to make adjustments that are uncomfortable in our own neighborhoods.”
“I have been imagining what it would be like to impose this on my own street. And, it would be an adjustment. We would have to park our cars in tandem. But…I actually would welcome it. And so if anybody wants to do this to my street, which is Shattuck Avenue, the residential part, let’s see if we can get some bike lanes there.”
Then she moved to adopt her supplemental as written, with Kesarwani’s supplemental amended to bring its proposal to extend the “bicycle-pedestrian safety improvements” to San Pablo back to the council for approval with a target date of October.
Hahn emphasized that her referral directed the city manager to implement all the community-building and placemaking elements simultaneously with “to the greatest extent possible….I want us to do that piece.”
She also asked for a deeper evaluation of a signal light at Hopkins and Monterey.
And she directed staff to go back to the businesses and have Economic Development staff, working with the city’s traffic engineers and the landscape architect, to “help with that.” redoing the sidewalks, having street furniture, bulb extensions with café tables, bike parking around the corner. She said that the business owners, including “some who’d spoken that evening,” “were more positive” when she’d met with them in the past. Surely she was referring to Monterey Fish owner Paul Johnson, whose comments were anything but positive.
Arreguín seconded the motion, which the council approved by a vote of 8-1, with Wengraf voting No.
The tough job Hahn was elected to do
Hahn is right when she says that meeting the challenges of climate change requires us to make uncomfortable adjustments in our daily lives. What she doesn’t seem to get is that self-righteous lectures are not going to persuade people to make such adjustments voluntarily. Nor will such harangues legitimate data-challenged projects that governments impose on resentful subjects.
On May 10, Hahn repeated her claim that the Hopkins plan was “well-balanced.”
Really?
Did staff research the percentage of shoppers who drive to the businesses on the block? Did they try to determine where those shoppers drive from or how their inclination to shop on Hopkins would be affected by the installation of cycle tracks on the street? Did they find out how many residents would lose their on-street parking spaces and, of that number, how many lack a garage or even a driveway where they could park? Did they review the objections of dissident cyclists who say that bike lanes would make Hopkins a dangerous place to cycle? Did they grapple with the questions that DeDiemar raised about the validity of the city’s reiterated claims that 70% of Berkeley residents would cycle if they felt safe on streets such as Hopkins and that Hopkins is a high-injury street?
And having done all, or even any, of this, did they weigh their findings against their rationales for the bike lanes?
They did not.
Hahn has a tough job. To realize her plans, she has to depend on staff, whom she doesn’t control and, for good reason, doesn’t entirely trust. But she wasn’t elected to hype their work. If she wants to stop getting emails accusing her of ignoring the community, she needs to show that she takes her constituents’ concerns seriously. That means crossing staff. It also means going up against the council majority—most importantly, the mayor, a fervent cycling evangelist.
She once had the courage to take such a stand. Does she still?
