The Ohlone Greenway is not a transportation panacea

By Steve Price

The Ohlone Greenway is a remarkable success as an interurban route for multiple nonautomobile uses. But there is only so much that it can do. As Robin Mitchell recently observed:

“[The Ohlone Greenway] is not really designed for the many different uses that it currently has. I spent about 10 minutes on a weekday morning last week keeping track of everybody on the path. There were walkers, runners, walkers with baby strollers, runners with baby strollers, dog walkers, bicyclists with kids on the back, bicyclists trying to go as fast as possible, one person using a walker, another using a cane.”

If our streets were safer, that would relieve the greenway from being all things to all people.

The most telling moment at the June 25 Richmond Street Complete Streets Project Open House at the El Cerrito City Hall was when an opponent of the bike lanes on Richmond Street said that bicycle riders should just use the Ohlone Greenway. The packed room then erupted in applause from the opponents, which were many.

Would the room have shown the same enthusiasm for bicycle riders staying on the greenway, if also motorists were told to stick to San Pablo Avenue? Certainly San Pablo Avenue is an excellent avenue allowing for faster travel and connecting many cities with lots of useful destinations. What else could a motorist want? Why use any other street? No motorist would think this suggestion is sane. There is obviously a double standard at work here.

For 30 years I lived one block to the west of Richmond Street on Elm Street. If I wanted to bicycle to the swim center, Cerrito Vista Park, the tennis courts, or the Community Center (which for years before the city hall was built was where community meetings happened), I had to bicycle on Richmond Street. The Ohlone Greenway is not a route to the swim center!

This notion that a single avenue of travel—the Ohlone Greenway—should satisfy all of a bicycle rider’s travel needs reveals a gross lack of understanding of the point of transportation by bicycle. Bicycle riders need to go to many local destinations that exist in many different places via a network of safe routes. Richmond Street should be a key travel route in a multimodal network, cars and bicycles included. Motorists would not tolerate being constrained to one travel avenue. Expecting bicycle riders to stay on one route makes no sense.