Columns

The bad news is that Berkeley’s downtown retail district is sick, and Telegraph Avenue is catching the disease. 

The worse news is that planners are working hard to make all of this worse. 

Do most Berkeley residents and business owners want Shattuck Avenue downtown to lose travel lanes and parking spaces? Want left turns prohibited from Shattuck onto Center Street? Want downtown streets permanently choked down to narrow lanes or completely blocked to cross traffic?  

Does any reasonable person really believe that downtown Berkeley needs to become even more congested? If not, pay close attention to the city’s “Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza and Transit Area Design Plan.” This little-noticed planning effort could become an even bigger fiasco than the Ashby BART lot’s redevelopment-by-stealth. 

At an April 29 Downtown Plaza “public workshop” that I attended, the presiding city staff and most of their consultants were competent and courteous. And the plan’s original, limited goal of making the BART “drum” and brick plaza more attractive initially seemed worth considering. (Although I increasingly agree with participants who said to leave the structures alone —just add some cafe seating to help tame the space.) Disturbingly, though, this project’s scope has crept far beyond that basic goal in at least three unwelcome directions.  

First, all four “design options” that the consultants sketched out would facilitate AC Transit’s proposed “Bus Rapid Transit” (BRT) boondoggle by significantly changing the downtown core: They would convert mixed-use lanes to bus-only lanes. They would remove parking on both sides of Shattuck Square or elsewhere. And they would prohibit left turns onto Center. 

One particularly wretched option would replace Shattuck Avenue’s grassy median with an ugly, paved bus plaza—extending into a gray moonscape that would completely block Center Street to cross traffic at Shattuck. That ought to kill the city’s young “Arts District” in its crib by making it impossible for patrons to get to parking, let alone events. (Two major parking garages have entrances on Center west of Shattuck.) 

Significantly, Berkeley’s City Council has never approved cooperating with AC Transit’s controversial proposal for “exclusive” bus lanes. It may never do so: Judging from the thousands of signatures on petitions opposing it and from past discussion on these pages, that proposal is wildly unpopular. Faster buses are a great idea—on routes where they’d provide a real alternative, not right near BART. 

San Leandro officials have already flatly refused to surrender mixed-use lanes along that city’s portion of AC Transit’s proposed route. While Berkeley officials dither, San Leandro was perhaps inspired by Berkeley’s heritage of rebelliousness and free speech. 

Why did Berkeley’s Transportation Division spend $15,000 hiring consultants to plan for this unapproved and unpopular scheme? A staff member’s answer was convincing, if not exactly satisfactory: A regional agency contributed even more, contingent on the plan’s including BRT elements. 

Even so, did our City Council and city manager really intend to authorize Berkeley’s transportation manager to light a fuse leading to this bus-only lanes powder keg? 

Second, all four of the displayed options would narrow or close streets in unhelpful, if not dangerous, ways. They would choke down every Shattuck Avenue intersection with “curb extensions,” the sidewalk tumors that are spreading like an epidemic among Berkeley’s corners. 

As a bicyclist, I can tell you that these things are an obstruction and a hazard to cyclists. But they’ve become a fad with planners, just like designing around the automobile’s needs was dogma in the 1950s. Today’s planners assume that curb extensions improve pedestrian safety. But in nine years of asking, I haven’t found one planner who could identify any evidence for this.  

Worse, one of the sketches would arc a big new curb barrier right into cyclists’ path on Shattuck’s east side. Others would narrow Shattuck Square’s east branch, or Center Street east of Shattuck, down to tiny traffic lanes that would leave hardly any room for motor vehicles, let alone bikes. 

Again, does anyone really think downtown Berkeley isn’t already congested enough? If you oppose these notions, now is the time to ask our mayor and City Council to take a firm stand against them. 

Finally, the consultants devoted considerable effort to above-ground alternatives for the “bikestation” (bike-parking facility) that a cycling group currently operates inside the BART station. All this effort was basically wasted.  

The nearby Civic Center Garage already provides secure, attended bicycle parking above ground. Several city-owned bikes park there, as does mine. This garage is open much longer hours than the BART facility. It’s also just steps from the former Berkeley TRIP transit storefront, which could and should be reopened. 

But the consultants offered no plans for preserving or expanding this great facility. They hadn’t even heard of it. Why such blindsided, redundant planning? 

A guess: Last time I checked, about half of Berkeley’s “Transportation” [sic] Commission was directly or indirectly affiliated with the bike group, known as BFBC, that runs the BART bikestation. This gives those commissioners an inherent conflict of interest when steering initiatives like this one. In fact, the city attorney has ordered the commission to rescind at least one vote over this issue. Much of the other goofiness presented on April 29 may have been encouraged by this commission. 

Reality check: Handouts justified this whole overreaching planning effort as largely intended to facilitate transfers among buses and BART. That’s nonsense. Those transfers work fine now—although they’d work better if they were free. Any real navigation problems that transit riders experience could be solved with a simple signboard at the BART station. 

The complaints I hear most frequently about downtown Berkeley aren’t about making bus transfers. They’re that traffic is too congested and parking too scarce. Blocks of empty storefronts and closed movie theaters are mute testimony to the many people who believe this. They’re staying away in droves, with a nasty impact on the city’s tax base and vitality. 

And believe me, reserving whole lanes and removing scarce parking, for buses that run only every 10-20 minutes will simply make more people stay away. It boggles the mind that transportation officials are paying consultants to examine how to worsen these problems on blocks that still function, sort of. This approach has even worse implications for Telegraph Avenue’s economic health—something I’ll discuss in a future column. 

Michael Katz uses trains, buses, bikes, and automobiles to patronize cool businesses until they decay into Berkeley-standard empty storefronts. 

Editor’s Note: Since we’ve lost Zelda Bronstein to the mayoral race, we’ve opened up her former space in the Public Eye Column to other active participants who can write good essays of about 1,000 words on local politics.