Published Tuesday, December 14, 2004, in the Berkeley Daily Planet

Two Lanes on Marin Avenue? A Design for Road Rage!

By Raymond A. Chamberlin

On Tuesday, Dec. 14, the Berkeley City Council will be asked to
approve city staff's recommendation to re-stripe Marin Avenue west of
The Alameda for only two auto lanes, plus a center left-turn lane and
two bicycle lanes, absent an environmental impact report (EIR). The
City of Albany has already approved the project for its portion of
Marin.

The Dec. 14 date was selected to keep most of Marin's users'
objections to the project out of the loop. Only a small fraction of
such users were ever officially notified, by the cities of Albany and
Berkeley, of how each was to modify Marin within its respective
boundaries.

This project is a thrust of the East Bay bicycle lobby to expand its
bike-route system under the veil of a 5-mph speed reduction on this
arterial. The current high speeds and dangerous driving on Marin
certainly needs curtailment, but it's clear from the official write-up
of the project, still online at www.albanyca.org/news, that the
redesign will 1) jam up traffic during commute hours, 2) cause cars to
divert onto feeder and residential streets, and 3) likely create a
more hazardous course for pedestrians crossing Marin.

Albany's police chief, having given up on using speeding tickets to
slow Marin traffic, insisted only an engineering solution would do the
job. But traffic crowding and physical impediments to speeding are
inherently hazardous and not substitutes for law enforcement. With
curb changes visualized in the next phase, this "study" phase is
offered as only a simple, reversible pavement-striping project.
However, some 40 concrete structures must be removed from the
centerline of Marin to accommodate the advertised left-turn lane, with
their replacement upon any decision to revert after the trial period.

Fire and police personnel have stated their concerns about
emergency-vehicle travel on the reconfigured Marin, but their concerns
were disregarded in the consultants' writings on the project, as noted
in residents' letters to the Council.

Most of the traffic and noise data claimed as excusing the need of an
EIR are either inadequate or based on inappropriate computer
simulations. Often single results are differently massaged to read
"more than one-minute" or "up to one minute," depending on the
particular political point of the moment. I drove Marin and two other
routes that would bypass the projected traffic-riled version of it.
My times on the alternate routes equaled the consultants' calculated
longer travel times on a lane-reduced Marin. See
<http://www.znet.com/~raych/MyEvaluation.htm>, a more technical
discussion than this. Apart from the issue of time, these routes
would avoid the constant start and stop on the modified Marin.

On this wholly residential arterial, the opportunities for turning
left into driveways are very frequent. Envision two well-calmed
drivers in the center lane, each unaware of the other's choice of
targeted driveway. Oops, their projections overlap, so it's back to
their respective through lanes or executions of dangerous diagonal
left turns.

And all that pedestrians get to improve their safety in crossing Marin
is a potential bone-breaking impact speed claimed as 5 mph lower than
before. No overpass, an admittedly expensive item, but one feasible
and not unaesthetic as erected at the Marin BART crossing. No
additional pedestrian-controlled traffic lights. Removal of all
centerline safety features in order to permit the center-lane hazard
of left-turners streaking across crosswalks while looking for holes in
oncoming traffic, or of others misusing this lane for passing --
likely worse than the second-travel-lane problem pedestrians currently
face.

Even most bicyclists are slighted by this project's design! Still
cramped by cars traveling at probably the same speed as before during
non-commute hours, pedestrians poking out from between cars to get
into their parked cars and doors opening for drivers entering or
leaving their parked cars would continue to threaten them. Only
substandard bicycle lanes will fit into the reshuffled Marin. Only
daredevil cyclists would use the reconfigured Marin. The commute
diversion routes referenced above would be superior to a bike-laned
Marin for your ordinary bicyclist. How has this easily foreseen
fiasco been so smoothly dumped upon us? By 1) today's scarcity of
public money, 2) excess laxity in criteria for public grants, and
above all, 3) inadequate resistance to infiltration by bicycle
extremists into positions in city and district governments and green
organizations.

Presently, bicycle activists run Berkeley's Transportation Commission,
known around City Hall as the Bicycle Commission. The bicycle
recreational lobby, which sees itself as a church of ecological
salvation and its fanatic disciples as superheroes in Spandex, seeks a
flexing of its muscles, not paths needed by civilized bicyclists.
These zealots see road constrictions not as safety measures taken in
the interest of pedestrians, but as means to get large numbers of
motor vehicles, eventually all of such, off all the rights of way they
feel are their inheritance in this, as they perceive it,
post-private-automobile era. The Internet is filled with the
fantasies of these vastly overspoken, underwheeled ideological blokes
who, in most of their power plays, are not seeking safety, not even
their own. They fantasize that choking traffic will cause a
significant number of commuters to switch to public transportation or
... you guessed it ... bicycles! Give me a brake (but no derailleur)!

One source of funds for this game is grant money from
clean-air-seeking organizations such as the Bay Area Air Quality
Management District (BAAQMD), a source Albany has tapped for
implementing their initial phase of the Marin project. The BAAQMD bit
on the road dieting line a few years ago, when Oakland was to change
its portion of Telegraph Avenue from four to two lanes. But the
bikers had overstated, in their grant application, the number of
transportation-mode switchers, and the grant was withdrawn. May
Albany's present grant likewise be reconsidered.

City staff claim the Marin project will be subject to dismantling at
the end of one year. But at the Berkeley Transportation Commission's
October 21 public hearing, staff conceded that no limiting criteria
had been set for determining continuation of the project after its
yearlong trial.

So raise your voice at the City Council meeting of Dec. 14 -- or
better still, use your City Hall connections to move this Marin issue
to a City Council meeting after the holidays, when it can be addressed
by many more of those it would affect. Don't just peg this project as
another politically correct Berkeley happening.


Raymond Chamberlin lives in the Berkeley hills.