The “Bicycle Boom,” an era in the 1970s where Berkeley created many bike lanes, used a survey of Berkeley citizens on their bike routes. This led to the first Berkeley Bike Plan of 1971, according to the 2017 Berkeley Bike Plan. California students bike to school at twice the national average, per the California-National Household Travel Survey. The Berkeley Bike Draft Plan, which was designed by Alta Planning, was created due to Alameda County’s requirement that a bike plan be updated every five years. The draft plan can be accessed via berkeleybikeplan.org, and comments are being accepted up until Friday, Sept. 26, 2025. One of its key goals is to aid students in their journeys to and from school.
Therefore, the proposed bikeway network includes a new Bicycle Boulevard network on streets such as Grant, Rose, Bancroft, Addison, Woolsey, and California, as well as upgrades to the bike paths on Channing Way and Sixth Street. A Bicycle Boulevard is a street that is designated to limit cut through traffic and prioritize through traffic by bicycle, according to the City of Berkeley website. These upgrades would increase safety, by adding a striped buffer to the roads or green thermoplastic striping.
Safety is an issue among bikers in Berkeley; according to University of California Berkeley’s California Active Transportation Safety Information Pages, in the past three years in Alameda County, there have been on average 57.7 bicyclist fatalities and serious injuries per year. On Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025, a Berkeley Scanner article reported that a woman was injured in a bicycle accident on Tunnel Road and taken to Highland Hospital. 10 days earlier, The Scanner wrote that a student riding a bike was injured in an accident outside of Martin Luther King Middle School.
Safety can be a particularly important issue among Berkeley High School students who bike. Manasi Lamichhane, a freshman at BHS who bikes to school, said, “(biking to school is) really difficult because I don’t have a guide, because I bike alone ... The cars do like to get really close, (when I’m biking), which makes it really hard.”
Students tend to bike home or to school at busy hours when there are a lot of cars on the roads. A document provided by the Transportation Department at Berkeley Unified School District states, “Traffic near (BHS) can be highly congested ... Riding a bicycle to downtown Berkeley during commute hours can be challenging.”
Class 1 bike lanes (fully separated lanes), Class 2B lanes (a striped buffer), and Class 4 lanes/cycletracks (vertical barriers such as bollards) would separate the bike lanes from the automobile lanes and are all rarely implemented in the plan.
Instead, many Bicycle Boulevards would be built. Bicycle Boulevards are streets on which bikes, cars, and other vehicles ride together. They are meant to be implemented only on streets that have low density and are generally safe. Berkeley’s Bicycle Boulevards were conceptualized in 1999, and the unique purple signage was first implemented in 2003 after being created in community workshops.
In the same community spirit, outreach was an important part of the development of the plan, which started in July of 2022 and is now being continued through a virtual workshop held on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025. Online engagement was used in order to continue outreach despite health concerns due to the pandemic. The pandemic also played a large role in safety concerns around biking; both pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities and injuries increased significantly from 2020 to 2022.
Alameda County requires that the bike plan be updated every five years to be funded. This helps prevent outdated plans. As was discovered during outreach, many people found the plan inadequate. One-third of all comments noted that large intersections should be improved for safety.
Despite this, the draft plan does not arrange for bike lanes on large streets and crossings like Shattuck, University, and San Pablo Avenue. These streets are near BHS and have many shops and important locations on them. BHS sophomore Ben Schechter said, “I wish that there were better routes to get to key Berkeley locations.” Projects that are already being funded and planned are largely Bicycle Boulevards. Although some projects are already being designed, Berkeley is still looking for feedback on the draft plan. Community members with concerns can reach out to [email protected].