Protected bike lanes and protected intersections are finally coming to El Cerrito, on San Pablo Avenue and Cutting Blvd leading to El Cerrito del Norte BART Station, with construction expected to start in 2023. Bike East Bay has met numerous times over the past year with city staff, transit agency representatives and a team of consultants, to improve the bikeway designs, which are not perfect, but will make a huge safety improvement. The project is based off of El Cerrito’s San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan, which we worked on back in 2014.
New protected intersections are planned for San Pablo Avenue at Cutting Blvd and at Hill Street. Cutting Blvd gets protected bike lanes from I-80 to Ohlone Greenway, and most blocks of San Pablo Avenue get protected bike lanes. We discussed at length with staff a southbound segment of San Pablo Avenue south of Hill Street getting regular bike lanes (due to on-street parking concerns) and a northbound segment above Knott, which gets no bike lanes, but closely parallels the Ohlone Greenway. Eastshore Blvd also gets protected bike lanes. We spent quite a lot of time discussing a combined bus/bike lane on eastbound Cutting Blvd leading into the BART Station, and have come up with an interim design that should work, and a mid-term design that keeps an eastbound protected bike lane the entire way. Two other projects are in development to extend these safety improvements. One, San Pablo Avenue in the midtown area of El Cerrito is planned for protected bike lanes, and new bikeway designs are in the works for Potrero Avenue, both of which currently lack funding.
