Public Comment

The merchants protest

The conceptual redesign of Hopkins that the council approved on May 10 calls for adding two 4-to-5-foot bike lanes plus a 3-foot buffer between the lanes and parking on the south side of Hopkins between Monterey and McGee—in other words, right in front of Magnani Poultry, Gioia Pizza, Monterey Fish, and other popular shops.

At the May 10 council meeting, Paul Johnson, owner of Monterey Fish, said that all the merchants with whom he had spoken were fine with repaving Hopkins but opposed to bike lanes on the street. Calling the plan “a recipe for disaster” that’s “so dangerous, it’s unbelievable,” he recommended putting the lanes on side streets.

Johnson also warned that the construction process would not be “a three-to-four month” undertaking but rather a project that would likely go “right through the holiday season and into the following year. By the time you people get done with this, we’re all going to be out of business.” 

His objections are even more striking when they’re set alongside the claims in the May 10 staff report that “[t]he proposed design concept was developed through a robust public and stakeholder engagement process” that included “direct conversations held between staff and…business-owners” among others. “This engagement,” staff write, “resulted in a greater understanding of the needs of these stakeholders.” How, then, to explain the staff’s failure to grasp the concerns of Johnson and his fellow merchants? 

Transportation planners did it 

The Hopkins project was entrusted solely to the Department of Transportation and transportation consultants. Transportation planners view people primarily in terms of their mode of travel: you’re either a driver, cyclist, pedestrian, or user of public transit. In like manner, transportation planners view streets primarily as sites of traffic; hence the designation of Hopkins as a “corridor.” 

In fact, Hopkins is much more than a corridor. It’s fronted by a library, a school, a park, shops, and homes. The Monterey-Hopkins intersection is a lively hub of commerce and sociability. The sidewalk on the McGee-to-Monterey block is thronged with people patronizing the stores, eating take-out, or just hanging out. After school, students are thick on the scene. There’s more socializing at Café Espresso on the northwest corner of the intersection. 

The intense shopping and the socializing are evident to anyone who’s visited, not to say frequented, the area. Weirdly, the “Project Goals” include “Transform Hopkins Street between Sacramento and McGee into a community gathering place.” Enhance, yes—but transform? It’s already a place where people gather. 

In a similarly disconcerting reference, the map that accompanied the presentation for the March 22, 2022 ,workshop (now removed from the city’s website), which focused on the segment from McGee to Gilman, labeled the segment of Hopkins from Carlotta to Hopkins Court a “Neighborhood-Serving Retail Zone.” The May 10 staff report refers to “local shops.” 

In fact, the shops in the area serve far more than the neighborhood. They are some of the most distinctive and distinguished retail establishments in the city, attracting customers from beyond the city. 

Astonishingly, Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, on McGee around the corner from Hopkins, is not included in the map’s “Retail Zone,” which only encompasses Hopkins. It’s astonishing, because, to repeat, anyone who’s visited, not to say frequented the area—and the disappeared March 2022 presentation references staff’s “forty discussions with business owners and representatives from Hopkins’ institutions (schools, churches)”—knows that Berkeley Hort’s customers and delivery trucks often occupy McGee and Ada, the street that runs on the south side of the block. A traffic-oriented study ought to have included the whole block and the businesses on it. 

All these businesses draw from a market that extends far beyond the immediate neighborhood, indeed beyond the city’s boundaries. Designating the retail zone as “neighborhood-serving” jibes with the snub of shoppers who access the businesses by car, by making it seem as if most customers walk and bike, which in turn jibe with the Traffic and Placemaking Study’s “Core strategy”: “Reduce vehicle miles traveled in the community by making cycling, walking, public transit, and the sustainable mobility modes the mainstream.” 

This is the “Complete Streets” strategy that, along with traffic calming and other tactics, is the conventional wisdom. Where, however, is evidence that these “sustainable mobility modes” can be mainstream in a city so lacking in public transit ? 

A single AC Transit bus, the 12, goes down Hopkins. It runs only twice an hour. I’m a fan of public transit (see my pre-Covid Clipper Card usage). But no way can the 12’s ridership—barely mentioned in the Hopkins Corridor plan—sustain the shops at the Hopkins-Monterey hub. Ditto for pedestrians. To thrive, these businesses also need customers who travel in cars. 

That’s especially true for older people who need to haul groceries and gardening supplies. To repeat, these shops attract patrons who live far from the immediate neighborhood. Distance plus age plus scanty transit add up to car dependency. Eliminating parking spaces will make it harder for older people to access the businesses. 

Apparently none of this matters to city staff. The map that accompanies the May 10 staff report has no indication that this is a business district and shopping hub; the “Retail Zone” label has vanished. Indeed, the other uses that front the street—residences, schools, churches, the park—are also unmarked. Hopkins is rendered merely as a funnel for traffic. 

In another slap at shops and shoppers, to make room for the protected bike lanes, staff removed the existing bus stop at the northeastern corner of the Hopkins- Monterey intersection. After the street is reconfigured, the closest that westbound bus passengers can get to the shopping hub is the stop at the northwestern corner of Colusa and Hopkins, across the street from the track, park, and pool at MLK, Jr., Middle School but two uphill blocks away from Monterey Market. 

The Transportation staff also ignored the hazards their design creates for people in cars parked on the block between McGee and Monterey/California. Drivers exiting their vehicles will have to step directly into auto traffic moving down a lane narrowed to ten feet. Then they’ll have to walk at least twenty feet (two 4-to-5-foot bike lanes, plus a 3-foot buffer between the lanes and parking, plus the seven feet the plan allocates for a parked car, plus the foot or two beyond the left side of their vehicle) to the curb, dodging cars and bicycles along the way. 

Passengers exiting from the right side of the car will have to walk twelve feet to the curb, dodging bikes. Returning to their cars with groceries, drivers and passengers will have to traverse the same moving obstacle courses. If they have kids with them, the trip will become even more challenging. 

Bike lanes’ murky impact on business 

Johnson’s comments elicited two responses from the council. Hahn asked that the city’s Office of Economic Development be involved in future work on the Hopkins project. District 8 Councilmember Lori Droste dismissed Johnson’s concerns about losing patronage, alluding to “many studies” showing that the installation of bike lanes is good for business. 

Since May 10, I’ve looked at the two reports that Droste specified, a 2020 study from Portland State that studied fourteen “street improvement corridors” in six cities, including San Francisco; and a 2019 study from the city of Toronto that examined the effects of bike lanes on business on Toronto’s Bloor Street. The researchers found that bike lanes had positive or “non-significant” impacts on businesses. 

I’ve also looked at a 2018 report co-authored by Karen Chapple—then still at UC Berkeley, now at the University of Toronto—Raleigh McCoy, and Joseph Poirier (CMP) whose investigation of bike infrastructure impacts on business in San Francisco and Alameda Counties. 

“Overall,” the co-authors concluded, “bike infrastructure does not have a definitively positive or negative effect on business performance. Instead, there are a multitude of other factors outside of planners’ control that determine sales or the likelihood that a business closes.” For example, “[b]usiness characteristics were overall the most reliable predictors of sales,” while “neighborhood characteristics were…poor predictors,” and “primary roads” were “associated with sales declines.” 

How, then, does the Monterey-Hopkins commercial hub, which is located at a chokepoint on a narrow, hilly street and heavily patronized by older customers, compare with the business areas studied in the reports? 

More generally, CMP found that “a clear narrative has not emerged” in the academic research across disciplines “that has examined the impact of bicycle infrastructure on business performance….While advocacy organizations have seized on research that finds a positive effect on businesses, there are limitations to applying this research at the broad scale that advocates would like.” Indeed, the Portland State and Toronto studies were all conducted by or in concert with bicycling advocates. Civinomics, the firm that did the survey of Berkeley residents’ parking preferences, is also pro-bike lanes. 

CMP further advise: 

“Research has also indicated that there could be a negative impact for businesses on corridors with bike infrastructure. Merchant opposition has been clearly documented, but research that looks at merchant attitudes over time tends to show a more neutral or even pro-bike infrastructure stance.” 

In short, proceed with caution—which is precisely what the city didn’t do. Besides failing to connect with many of the merchants, staff never studied the travel modes, the preferences of the area’s shoppers, or the area from which it draws customers. This disregard reflects transportation planners’ myopic vision and two other, linked factors addressed in Parts Three and Four, respectively of this dossier: the staff’s authoritarianism and the bike lobby’s leverage in City Hall.