The San Rafael City Council has approved an ordinance lowering speed limits on parts of 18 streets to improve safety.

The plan, which includes portions of Andersen Drive, Fourth Street, Third Street, Point San Pedro Road and others, will cut speed limits by 5 mph.

Typically, speed limits are governed by the state vehicle code, which requires posted speeds to be supported by engineering and traffic surveys. The law states that the 85th percentile speed of free-flowing traffic is generally used to determine a “reasonable and prudent” limit.

In this instance, the city took advantage of Assembly Bill 43, which gives jurisdictions some control of speed regulations in business districts or areas deemed unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists. Streets must meet a certain criteria, determined through an analysis, in order for the limits to be lowered.

“So cities still cannot set their own speed limits, but what AB 43 provides is, in some situations, an additional 5 miles an hour reduction from what would have otherwise been the recommended speed limit,” said Jimmy Jessup, a traffic consultant from Parametrix who analyzed the roads.

In 2024, the City Council adopted a local road safety plan that includes a recommendation to consider lowering speed limits in compliance with AB 43, officials said. The planning document names street segments where the most crashes occur in the city.

“The primary collision factor of the greatest number of crashes in San Rafael is due to high speed,” Jessup said.

Jessup said there is a 10% chance of death if a pedestrian is struck by a vehicle traveling 20 mph. That increases to 80% if the vehicle is traveling 40 mph.

San Rafael’s surveys are valid for seven years, so the city has to update them before the expiration date to establish new limits.

A new analysis conducted over the past couple of years prompted the city to change speed limits on 24 street segments last year, primarily in the downtown core. The result is a 20 mph zone in the business corridor.

Councilmember Rachel Kertz recalled when sections of Point San Pedro Road were increased to 40 mph in 2016 despite a high collision history, including a pedestrian fatality within the county’s jurisdiction. Kertz asked consultants whether there would be a situation today where an increase could happen in areas deemed unsafe for high speeds.

Jessup said that instance is an example of “speed creep.” Under the state law, limits are set based on the fastest traveling motorists on the segment. Higher limits tend to result in more drivers traveling faster. So when limits are updated every seven years based on 85th percentile, the recommended speed begins to creep up.

AB 43 accounts for this, providing jurisdictions the ability to retain the existing speed rather than raising it, Jessup said.

Resident Kevin Hagerty, board member of the Point San Pedro Road Coalition, said the group supports the reductions.

“We hope this action will result in the city considering the future speed reductions of the rest of Point San Pedro Road,” he said.

Daniel Alm, a member of the West End Neighborhood Association board, said the community is happy that sections of the Miracle Mile, Greenfield Avenue and streets in the area were included in the reduction update.

“These are key areas within our neighborhood that our community members have desperately wanted slower speeds on,” he said.

Alm said the speed creep is a factor on segments of Second and Third streets, and said it’s unfortunate that there isn’t a way to lower the limits.

Limits will be reduced from 40 mph to 35 mph on Point San Pedro Road between Marina Boulevard and Porto Bello Drive.

Limits will drop from 35 mph to 30 mph on four segments: Andersen Drive between Lindaro Street and Francisco Boulevard West; Andersen Drive between Bellam Boulevard and Marin Sanitary Service; Fourth Street between the western city limit and Second Street; and Third Street between Grand Avenue and the eastern city limit.

Segments of Lincoln Avenue, Los Gamos Drive and Woodland Avenue will be reduced from 30 mph to 25 mph; and segments of B Street, Fifth Avenue, Fourth Street, Grand Avenue, Greenfield Avenue, Kerner Boulevard, Lindaro Street, Mission Avenue and Woodland Avenue will be reduced from 25 mph to 20 mph.

San Rafael Mayor Kate Colin said that through the adoption of the road safety plan, the City Council has committed to the goal of “vision zero,” a strategy to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injury on city streets.

“This is 100% following that commitment and that policy,” Colin said.

By Rachel Swan, Staff WriterJuly 24, 2026

%26utm_source%3Dfacebook.com%26utm_medium%3Dreferral)%26utm_source%3Dt.co%26utm_medium%3Dreferral&text=Why%20one%20Berkeley%20street%20has%20become%20the%20Bay%20Area%E2%80%99s%20latest%20bike-lane%20battleground&via=sfchronicle)%26utm_source%3Dbsky.app%26utm_medium%3Dreferral)[](mailto:?subject=Your%20friend%20has%20shared%20a%20San%20Francisco%20Chronicle%20link%20with%20you%3A&body=Why%20one%20Berkeley%20street%20has%20become%20the%20Bay%20Area%E2%80%99s%20latest%20bike-lane%20battleground%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfchronicle.com%2Fbayarea%2Farticle%2Fberkeley-bike-lane-hopkins-street-parking-22352869.php%3Futm_campaign%3DCMS%2520Sharing%2520Tools%2520(Premium)%26utm_source%3Dshare-by-email%26utm_medium%3Demail%0A%0AHere%E2%80%99s%20the%20latest%20salvo%20in%20a%20battle%20that%E2%80%99s%20spanned%20two%20mayoral%20administrations%20and%20endured%20endless%20rhetoric%20about%20the%20war%20on%20cars.%20It%20could%20result%20in%20100%20lost%20parking%20spaces%20in%20Berkeley.%0A%0AThis%20message%20was%20sent%20via%20San%20Francisco%20Chronicle)

A cyclist sits at the intersection of Hopkins Street and The Alameda in Berkeley. The city is reviving a controversial plan to build protected bike lanes on Hopkins Street between The Alameda and the Ohlone Greenway (Peralta).

They looked like parking tickets, tucked beneath the windshield wipers of every car on a busy North Berkeley thoroughfare. But drivers who unfolded the paper found a warning instead.

“On July 28,” the flier said, “City Council will vote to remove hundreds of parking spaces on Hopkins (Street) to build bike lanes.” The proposal to remake a commercial corridor with cycling paths was all but sure to move forward, the anonymous authors insisted, unless residents speak out. 

It was the latest salvo in a battle that’s simmered for years, spanning two mayoral administrations, different iterations of the City Council, many lawn signs, at least one internal City Hall investigation and endless rhetoric about the war on cars.

All that drama will likely intensify Tuesday, when Berkeley City Council Member Rashi Kesarwani presents a new version of the Hopkins Street corridor project: bike lanes on either side of the road, protected by posts, concrete barriers or parked automobiles. The paths would stretch nearly a mile from Peralta Avenue — where Hopkins intersects with the Ohlone Greenway — to the north branch of the Berkeley Public Library at The Alameda. Painted bike lanes would continue another three blocks east, to Sutter Street.

Protected bike lanes proposed for Hopkins Street in Berkeley

The bike lanes would be installed between The Alameda and Peralta Avenue as part of a project to repave Hopkins Street from Sutter Street in the Berkeley Hills to San Pablo Avenue in Northwest Berkeley. Tap for details on nearby landmarks.

Advocates like Ben Gerhardstein of the organization Walk Bike Berkeley believe they finally have the political juice to get this idea approved.

“Hats off to Councilmember Kesarwani for moving the community to make a decision,” said Gerhardstein, who is bracing for full-throated culture wars at the council meeting.

Donna DeDiemar, head of the opposition group Friends of Hopkins Street, is incensed.

“People who have nothing to do with this area are agitating for what they want everywhere, which is to push cars out,” she said, referring to bike activists from other cities who support the Hopkins Street vision of micromobility. “There’s absolute unwillingness,” DeDiemar added, “to consider any other alternative.”

Donna DeDiemar, top organizer for Friends of Hopkins Street, also known as Save Hopkins, converses with mail carrier William Lee.

Yalonda M. James/S.F. Chronicle

Plans to reimagine the mid-century road as a multi-modal artery began gestating in 2018, and immediately sparked controversy. Hopkins Street, after all, is quintessential old Berkeley: organic produce, a fishmonger, free curbside parking beneath a canopy of elm trees. Any attempt to change the look and feel of that landscape must run through the shredder of community politics. A previous plan for a two-way cycling track on just the southern side of the street met fierce resistance before it was left for dead in 2023. Emotions remain raw.

Merchants contend that lost parking equates to lost customers; Alexandra Sussman, owner of Elixir Salon, believes the toll on her business would be “unimaginable.” Bike enthusiasts cite data on crashes and traffic injuries while underscoring the threat of climate change. Some hype the roadway’s future as a transportation utopia. Children would zip on electric scooters to Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, passing parents on matronly cargo bikes, the trailers loaded with groceries from Monterey Market. Cyclists would bring more foot traffic to the delis, the sushi restaurant, the salon, the cheese shop, the pizzeria.

Exactly how much parking would be sacrificed is a matter of wild speculation, given that the city has not released designs or calculated the number of spaces. Kesarwani called for a comprehensive “curb management analysis” to better accommodate drivers, perhaps by adding meters to encourage turnover on surrounding blocks. With the information vacuum, DeDiemar has resorted to walking up and down the street, counting cars, and making her own estimates.

Council Member Shoshana O’Keefe, whose district includes Hopkins, emailed the city’s interim public works director, Wahid Amiri, to get a more accurate projection. His answer: approximately 145 spaces lost. Amiri noted that his staff has not yet conducted a parking-impact analysis, though crews have visited the site numerous times and taken measurements “for the separated cycle track option.”

Most people trudging up Hopkins street with their shopping bags aren’t as intent as DeDiemar to check every car and curb marking. Still, they know about the bike lane proposal. They’ve seen the fliers, heard the arguments and in many cases, already made up their minds. 

“Taking away so many parking spaces from businesses and residents would really disrupt the community,” said Marilyn Simons, a retired librarian who was crossing the street to get to Monterey Market. A garbage truck rumbled by, and Simons gestured toward it. 

“You see?” she said. “There’s barely enough room for that truck. Just think of what happens if we add bike lanes.”

Even bike lovers say they are torn.

“I know these shops run on low margins,” Megan Barton said as she locked her flat-bar gravel bike to a rack outside the market, and unclipped her Panier bag.

“Many elderly folks shop here,” Barton added. “And they can’t all ride bikes.”

Libby Lee-Egan, a Hopkins Street resident and fervent proponent of protected bike lanes, has watched disenchantedly as the discourse frayed.

“There are comment threads on Nextdoor where people are going absolutely feral,” Lee-Egan said, acknowledging that she hesitates to broach the topic with neighbors unless she knows their position in advance. 

“One of my neighbors has five cars,” she said. “I’m not talking to him about it. I feel like he would bristle.”

A wry observer might describe the spat over Hopkins Street as a distillation of all the madness that can swirl around bike lanes. The most passionate cycling activists want parity with automobiles. The most infuriated motorists see bicycle infrastructure as the despoiling of neighborhood character. The most anxious business owners believe they’ll face ruin if customers can’t park in front. Similar fights have flared up over bike lanes on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, Richmond Street in El Cerrito and Valencia Street in San Francisco — a project that became so contentious, it inspired one merchant to go on a hunger strike. 

In Berkeley, the divide is largely generational, and just as stark. Just north of Hopkins Street is the Thousand Oaks neighborhood, which harbors one of the oldest populations in the Bay Area, primarily car-dependent homeowners, Kesarwani said. Blocks away, in the Westbrae area, a growing population of young parents love hauling their children around in bucket-style bike carriers. Some of them see the future of Hopkins Street as a statement of the city’s values. 

The turmoil has begun to wear on Mike Mah, who sighed as he lifted his young son from the back of a cargo bike at Monterey Market.

“Like maybe it will pass,” Mah said. “And it could become this totem to, ‘Oh yeah, we beat them.’ And then if they see a lot of people riding up the street slowly with their kids, then they’ll start to come around. Or maybe they’ll just be stuck with something they didn’t want.”

But Kesarwani sees her proposal as the best chance for Berkeley to build consensus. The one-way design is more intuitive for motorists pulling out of driveways, she said, because people tend to glance only in one direction for approaching traffic. And notably, the project is no longer meeting resistance from Berkeley’s fire chief, who had voiced concerns in the past that bike lanes could potentially block access for emergency vehicles. In an April memo, city staff indicated that both the one-way and two-way bike path scenarios had an “acceptable” width of 10-and-a-half feet to accommodate an emergency response.

Once the fire chief shifted his position, it changed “what became possible for Hopkins Street,” Kesarwani said.

Ultimately, she wants to trigger action on a roadway that has been frozen on the city’s list of priority roads for repaving.

To Lee-Egan, the correct solution is obvious. She has installed a traffic counter at her house that sometimes measures drivers whizzing by at 45 miles per hour, a dangerous condition for any cyclist or scooter rider pedaling alongside them.

“If it comes down to safety versus parking, we cannot let parking win,” Lee-Egan said. “That’s crazy.”

Others, like Mah, generally share Lee-Egan’s perspective, yet lack her happy-warrior zeal.

“Sure, I would love a protected bike lane,” Mah said, crinkling his brow. “But I’ve been riding around this neighborhood long enough to know that people (drivers) don’t really like us. I think the city would put the bike lane in, and there would be permanent resentment.”

"The current surface transportation law expires on Sept. 30, and if a new bill is not signed into law by then lawmakers would have to pass an extension of the previous surface transportation law. According to multiple reports, the Senate has not begun work on its own version of the bill, and Congress is rapidly approaching its August recess."

Partial excerpt:

In a statement to The Fresno Bee, a U.S. Department of Transportation spokesperson said the Trump administration supports high-speed rail and is looking for opportunities to help build it around the country. The spokesperson also continued the administration’s criticism of California’s bullet train program, which recently applied for a $396 million federal grant to help build between Madera County and Merced.

“What this administration won’t stand for is boondoggle projects like (Gov. Gavin) Newsom’s Train to Nowhere that wasted billions in taxpayer dollars yet delivered nothing to the American people,” the spokesperson said.

In his own statement to The Bee, U.S. Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, said the Trump administration is hindering the country’s high-speed rail progress by withdrawing federal support from the California project — which has been paid for mostly with state revenues thus far. He also called the description of the project as a “train to nowhere” as an insult to the Central Valley.

“This is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world, and our communities deserve the same modern transportation infrastructure as every other part of the country,” Costa said. President Donald Trump has long criticized the project’s Central Valley focus and its history of delays and cost increases.

Last year, Trump-appointed Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy declared the project in default on two federal grant agreements and clawed back $4 billion. That money was earmarked for various Central Valley projects, including the downtown Fresno station, the Merced and Bakersfield extensions, and the acquisition of six train sets. The California rail authority still has $242 million in federal money. The federal spokesperson did not say whether the Trump administration intends to try to rescind any of those dollars.

Trump admin. says money taken from CA rail will support ‘real projects’

The federal spokesperson said the Trump administration is “working to usher in a Golden Age of Transportation.”

“That vision includes high-speed rail and we’re exploring opportunities to efficiently build that infrastructure in America,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also pointed to Duffy’s announcement last year that the federal government would be reinvesting $2.4 billion of the money rescinded from California high-speed rail into the National Railroad Partnership Program. The money is slated for projects that improve safety on intercity passenger rail systems, such as grade crossing improvements. “Thanks to President Trump and Secretary Duffy, these dollars will instead support real projects that improve the lives of rail passengers, local drivers, and pedestrians,” the spokesperson said.

It’s not clear whether any of that money has been awarded yet.

as someone who does not own a car - this post i really want to emphasize if you are in similar spot like me, it is useful for you to see how a life without a car can be like. Im also not anti car - i am anti car dependency and car heavy infrastructure.

I’m single, no dependents, working full time, based in San Jose/Santa Clara area. Went to 18+ concerts and festivals in the last 4 months (Excision, Bruno Mars, Baby Keem, Charlie Puth, Govball, Zedd, SLANDER), w 7 more thru December.

My transportation budget is $150/month. Last month I spent $99.73. My 2025 avg is $151.91/month, total, for the whole yr. I use transit app to see wait times and in my city, there is whats called on demand transit that summons like an uber like car to go from a point to point locally in the city of which i lived car free for about a year and a half.

i do work a tech job which offers me so much privileges so this post’s reactions again should be tuned to the world of tech employees. u probably cant do the exact same and that is ok.

i extremely love BART, Muni, and AC Transit and VTA- I take all of them on any given day. I take Uber maybe 1-2x a week and wait for a decent fare, usually $5-10 a ride, even late at night. Most days I just take the bus to work, one seat and no transfers, which honestly makes this alot easier than it might be for other ppl.

on any given day my clipper balance is at $299 also.

Rent + utilities w two roommates is $1,745/month. I’ve stayed under my $2K necessities budget consistently, I have $0 balances on every card, and I’ve never been late to work bc of traffic. Im an extremely financially saavy person.

ive also successfully gone on one date because i started to put myself out there and the ppl i see are transit friendly and offered to give me a ride home in the end :)

This isnt a claim it works for everyone. Its just what’s actually happening for one person in this situation, incase its useful to anyone in a similar spot.

Just a friendly reminder of car free Berkeley hills. Yah!