Sacramento St in Berkeley is currently under construction for what is described as a “complete streets” project. Here is the existing conditions:
As you can see, this is an extremely wide 4-lane arterial running through a residential neighborhood. The roadway has very low traffic volumes, leading to speeding and dangerous passing. The obvious solution would be a road diet to reduce speeds and space for buffered bike lanes (or perhaps even cycletracks). Instead, the city is only proposing to put in some new intersection treatments without doing any lane reductions or other measures to reduce speeding.
Let’s compare to a very similar project going on along Oakland’s 14th Ave. Here is the existing road configuration, which as you can see is also a 4-lane residential arterial:
Given the similarity of the two streets, one might expect these neighboring cities to implement similar solutions. But aside from the intersection treatments, the approaches are quite different. Berkeley is not adding bike lanes and will maintain its street as a dangerous high-speed thoroughfare. Oakland is doing a full road diet to calm traffic. Thus, the Oakland project is complete, the Berkeley one is not. The sad thing is that the Berkeley project sits directly outside a BART station and connects to a popular bike trail. The top community concern in meetings was slowing traffic, so how did Berkeley end up doing the bare minimum?
[…] Oakland and Berkeley have very different notions of what makes a “complete street” (Systemic Failure) […]
[…] Two neighboring cities – Oakland and Berkeley – have very different notions of what makes a “complete street” (Systemic Failure) […]
To be fair, Sacramento runs parallel (one block away) from the California/King bike boulevard. I absolutely agree that Sacramento deserves an overhaul (too wide, lots of speeding) but I’m also generally in favor of separate car and bike routes rather than stuffing dangerous, half-assed bike lanes into bike-unfriendly streets.
The main point is to slow car speeds — the bike lane is the added bonus.
Moreover, it is official city policy to make all streets bike friendly. So while there is indeed a parallel route, that does not help if your destination is along Sacramento St. Sacramento hits the BART station and numerous other destinations, and is generally faster than the parallel routes which have Stop signs at.each.and.every.single.block.
Oakland’s 14th Ave also has an existing, parallel neighborhood bike route on 16th Ave to the east, and another one coming soon (already a “slow streets” segment) on 11th Ave to the west.
As you said, safer bike access is still needed on 14th Ave even with these parallel routes, as different bike riders have differing needs, preferences, and destinations.
But beyond that, the current condition of 14th Ave is dangerous for all road users due to high vehicle speeds and less yielding. As such a road diet will still help to improve everyone’s safety, not only bike riders. Similarly, without a road diet on Sacramento pedestrians and other vulnerable road users will still be at more risk, despite the bulb outs and flashing beacons.