The Berkeley Scanner published a Guest Essay by Libby Lee- Egan and Marc Hedlund in March 2025 titled “New survey supports a strong Berkeley Bike Plan”. The article was riddled with falsehoods, inaccuracies, and overstatements not supported by the actual survey. Unfortunately, the op-ed is still being used by proponents in the biking community—continuing to mislead the public and to justify the cycle tracks on Hopkins Street that will be voted on at the Berkeley City Council meeting on July 28.

We have not yet been successful getting a rebuttal to the original op-ed published, and the editor of the Berkeley Scanner has stated that she does not think that she “should be publishing op-eds about this new plan before a news story that lays out the facts objectively”. We have chosen to reproduce it here.

Opinions vs. facts: time to correct misleading information

Among the egregious falsehoods, one has become a mantra among the Walk Bike Berkeley crowd and city council members who are following their lead:

“Another 27% of Berkeley residents would bike if the city made its bike infrastructure safer”.

This conclusion from the survey is nonsense. What the survey really found was that 27% said they “do not currently bike in and around the city of Berkeley, but would like to”. The assumption that everyone who would “like to” bike in Berkeley does not do so only because the bike infrastructure is unsafe is ludicrous. Respondents did not answer that they would begin cycling if protected bike infrastructure were installed, nor do they identify “safety” as the only reason they are not active cyclers.

• “To feel safer, residents want (1) off-street paths (91%), (2) concrete-protected bike lanes (86%) and (3) parking-protected bike lanes (74%)”.

• “Posts or paint are not enough”.

As we see again and again, the article overstates the results. The survey was not a “vote” for or against particular types of bike lanes. It determined the “comfort” level that respondents felt with various bike lane options. This comfort level was turned into the unfounded statement that “residents want” those particular kinds of bike lanes. Feeling comfortable in a hypothetical setting is not the same as endorsing construction of a particular bike lane on a particular street after learning about all the other consequences involved.

Although 74% of the respondents (which included people who never learned how to ride a bicycle) were comfortable with parking protected bike lanes, the survey showed almost as many (69%) were comfortable with vertical posts placed between the bicycle lane and cars, and a clear majority (58%) were comfortable with the “paint” provided by conventional bike lanes so long as cars were travelling at 25 mph.

The article converts a relative preference into a categorical rejection. To turn these small differences in percentages into the call to arms “Posts or paint are not enough” demonstrates just how irrational and ideologically driven the supporters of the Hopkins bicycle tracks are.

The survey, apparently deliberately, did not determine whether residents would feel comfortable riding on a quiet, low stress street without much traffic, rather than on a street with traffic zipping by at 10 mph over the speed limit, even if they were protected by a 6” high concrete strip. The low-stress “Ada bypass”, dismissed by Walk Bike Berkeley and never addressed by the city council is just such a solution.

“73% of Berkeley residents support expanding bike infrastructure”.

There is little argument that bike infrastructure should be expanded and improved, just like motherhood and apple pie. That could mean repairing existing lanes, improving bicycle boulevards, creating safer intersections, building off-street paths or adding protected lanes where appropriate. But the article begins with the Hopkins Street dispute about protected bike lanes and then uses the citywide support for “bicycle infrastructure” to characterize opponents of that project as a small minority. Respondents were not asked to evaluate the actual Hopkins design, the effects on traffic, parking, refuse collection, access for tradespeople, contractors, and caregivers, or its effects on businesses and emergency response, much less to consider any alternative designs. A person can support expanded bicycle infrastructure citywide while opposing a specific project. The article erases that distinction in order to portray all project critics as members of the same anti-bike minority.

“A small but very noisy group of people has said over and over that safety for bicyclists is not important because bicyclists are a tiny, marginal minority”.

This unattributed statement is both inflammatory and wrong, as well as ironic. The original bike plan for Hopkins Street consisted of a two-way protected cycle track on the south side of the street. For more than 3-years, SaveHopkins tried to safeguard Walk Bike Berkeley from their own foolishness by calling out how unsafe the design was for everyone, especially cyclists. Finally, the city must have figured it out on their own—the latest design is for one-way cycle tracks on both sides of the street. While this is definitely “safer” than the two-way design, it is still inherently unsafe for a cycle track to cross so many residential driveways, nor does it solve the numerous other problems that are created. Go to SaveHopkins.org for more details.

The anti-safety accusations in the op-ed are not supported by anything in the survey. By concluding “Anti- safety, anti-bike-lane advocates are a small marginal group who want to protect their own self-interest at the expense of vulnerable street users”, the bike lobby is following a well-tread but disreputable path—shutting down discussion by making accusations that are so outrageous, that they hope the readers will feel justified in dismissing any criticism about legitimate issues.

And finally, the op-ed misleads by what it leaves out as well as by what it explicitly says. In the survey list of potential concerns about cycling in Berkeley, only 31% chose “Lack of safe bike lanes or other cycling infrastructure” as a top concern. Just below the 33% who chose “Drivers who don’t follow the rules of the road”, and just above the 30% who chose “Poor road quality or maintenance”. This inconvenient finding, clearly not the overwhelming concern about cycling infrastructure that they try so hard to portray in their opinion piece, shows how ideologically driven, rather than fact based, the op-ed is.

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