Colin Dentel-Post, the ACTC assistant director of planning, and Matt Bomberg, a staff transportation engineer, told the Infrastructure Committee of Oakland\u2019s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission on November 6 that the the bike and bus lane part of the project has changed from a quick-build with \u201ca lot of paint,\u201d \u201csome posts,\u201d and \u201cmaybe some concrete curbs\u201d to a full-blown capital project with more durable materials and \u201cintensive treatments\u201d that will lead to \u201ca more robust, safer, long-term project.\u201d<\/p>\n
A safer project is a more expensive one
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/bike-and-bus-labe-project-on-san-pablo-avenue-in-oakland-oaklandside-1600x891.png\")
A slide from s Alameda County Transportation Commission presentation shows the current proposed treatment of San Pablo Avenue in Oakland. Credit: ACTC<\/p>\n
The project ballooned, the engineers said, after they consulted with city officials and residents from the various cities involved in the bus and bike lane corridor project, who all shared their own must-haves. They heard loud and clear that stakeholders wanted more substantial infrastructure to make the road safer and easier to travel on.<\/p>\n
Agencies didn\u2019t want buses and bikes sharing space, communities didn\u2019t want mixing zones, disability advocates didn\u2019t want bike-pedestrian mixing, businesses needed certain loading accommodations, more lighting needed on side streets, bus lane intrusion countermeasures were needed, and Caltrans needed a more rigorous environmental and geometric approval process, Dentel-Post said at the meeting, which also included staff from Oakland\u2019s transportation department.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked whether the project could experience further delays and further cost overruns, the ACTC staff said their new time and cost estimates were conservative, though \u201cno one can predict the future, and certainly projects do experience delays,\u201d Bomberg said.<\/p>\n
For advocates who showed up for the BPAC infrastructure committee meeting, it was a frustrating development.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBetween the neighbors I talk to, there\u2019s a parent who crosses the street daily with kids, a person with a disability who can\u2019t drive anymore who has to be on foot there, and someone who\u2019s been hit by a car,\u201d an East Bay resident said at the meeting. \u201cWe just want to see it happen. We want you guys to feel the urgency and get creative. We want to experience this before more people get hurt or killed in this corridor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Robert Prinz, Bike East Bay\u2019s advocacy director, led the meeting as the committee\u2019s co-chair. He expressed dismay that ACTC had not communicated the timeline and cost issues earlier.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prinz told The Oaklandside he was shocked by the agency\u2019s estimate that construction on the bike and bus lanes in Oakland wouldn\u2019t begin until 2030 and asked about what factors drove the higher price. He said that a source told him that part of the higher price was due to Caltrans\u2019 insisting on narrowing the San Pablo Avenue sidewalks in order to create wider travel lanes, but he said ACTC and Caltrans haven\u2019t confirmed that. The Oaklandside reached out to both agencies about this claim and have not yet heard back.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe public communications about the project have been very minimal,\u201d Prinz told us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The redesign of most of San Pablo Avenue \u2014 the stretch from Oakland to Richmond<\/a> \u2014 has been in the works for a decade. It\u2019s been focused on making the road safer and more accessible in anticipation of an influx of property and business development. Data shows that the avenue\u2019s current design is not ideal. ACTC has said that more people got into collisions on San Pablo than on any other central traffic corridor in the county, with pedestrians and cyclists accounting for 64% of injuries or deaths<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Dentel-Post and Bomberg, the two other parts of the San Pablo project\u00a0 \u2014 the parallel streets<\/a> and safety enhancements, mostly in Berkeley and Albany \u2014 are close to being fully designed. The safety enhancement design is 95% complete and has been cleared by environmental review, and the project will open to bids from construction companies by the summer of 2026. The bike corridor designs are 100% complete, with construction contracts going out to bid this spring.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lessons from International\u2019s \u2018disastrous\u2019 bus lane Most of the key challenges the design team has faced over the last two years in planning the three-part project have been resolved, the engineers said, but some substantial changes were required along the way.<\/p>\n For example, for the parallel streets plan in Berkeley, the team chose low-profile, mountable traffic circles that could accommodate large trucks, like those of a fire truck, in an emergency. For the bike and bus lane project, deciding whether to add the dedicated lane next to the sidewalk or in the middle of San Pablo meant learning lessons from the International Boulevard bus-rapid-transit project.<\/p>\n That project, completed in 2020, faced serious problems<\/a>, as impatient drivers used the bus-only lane to bypass slow traffic<\/a>. This has put bus riders, including children and seniors, in harm\u2019s way as they cross the boulevard. In the last two years, OakDOT tried to solve these problems by adding bollards to block drivers from entering the bus lane and are in the process of adding a speed hump to slow down those who continue to do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n ACTC engineers said they were seeking to avoid this issue on San Pablo Avenue by placing the bus lane next to the sidewalk. They said the bike lanes will also be protected in some sections by hardened separators or by being elevated to the same height as the sidewalks.<\/p>\n \u201cOakland does have side-running bus lanes on East 12th Street,\u201d Prinz noted. \u201cThe East 12th Street ones haven\u2019t been perfect, but they haven\u2019t been as disastrous as the International ones were.\u201d<\/p>\n Removing parking spaces to make room for buses, cyclists To accommodate the bike and bus lanes along the Oakland stretch of San Pablo Avenue, ACTC staff said they expect to remove most vehicle parking \u2014 a key provision International Avenue businesses fought against<\/a> in the late 2010s and won. However, that still didn\u2019t prevent some businesses on International from experiencing displacement<\/a>, partly due to the length of the roadway construction.\u00a0<\/p>\n ACTC staff said they went door-to-door along San Pablo to assess businesses\u2019 needs so they could try to accommodate them.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re trying to do the best we can on side streets to figure out whether parking meters would be helpful, whether they would discourage customers, whether loading zones are needed, and whether customers are low income,\u201d Dentel-Post said. \u201cWill it work perfectly? Definitely not.\u201d<\/p>\n Bomberg noted that one of ACTC\u2019s unsexy but essential tasks was figuring out how to work up project specifications for projects that span multiple jurisdictions, each with its own restrictions.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFinding a way to harmonize all those tasks so that the contractor during construction isn\u2019t having to use different concrete mix designs at two adjacent intersections, it\u2019s been a significant area of work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n One road redesign that will benefit from this complicated development work is 65th Street.\u00a0<\/p>\n Stretching from the edge of Emeryville, near its popular Greenway<\/a>, to parts of Berkeley and North Oakland, this street is being redesigned as a critical connector between the San Pablo Avenue project and the I-80\/Ashby Avenue Interchange project<\/a>, the ACTC engineers told the BPAC committee. The latter involves building a bridge over Interstate 80 so people can walk or bike all the way from Oakland to the Bay Trail<\/a>. ACTC staff told the BPAC committee that they had added speed humps and parking-protected bike lanes to their 65th Street plans.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c65th Street is gonna get really important,\u201d Bomberg said.\u00a0<\/p>\n “*” indicates required fields<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People who live, work, or shop on Oakland\u2019s San Pablo Avenue will have to wait a little longer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81528,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[32931,3267,3571,764,46544,46545,12043,44618,15332,143,145,144,2452,3273,23794,3278],"class_list":["post-81527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-ac-transit","tag-alameda-county-transportation-commission","tag-albany","tag-berkeley","tag-bike-east-bay","tag-bus-rapid-transit","tag-emeryville","tag-international-boulevard","tag-oakdot","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-oakland-police","tag-oaklands-dangerous-roadways","tag-san-pablo-avenue","tag-traffic-safety"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/crash-at-54th-between-buses-and-cars.jpg\")
An AC Transit bus and two cars collided in March 2024 at the intersection of International Boulevard and 54th Avenue after one of the cars was speeding. Credit: Jose Fermoso\/The Oaklandside Credit: Oakland Fire Department<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/parallel-bike-corrodors-on-the-san-pabloe-avenue-project--1600x915.png\")
Another ACTC slide of the San Pablo Avenue project shows how the corridor will be redesigned as it moves through Oakland and into Emeryville, Berkeley, and Albany. Credit: ACTC<\/p>\n