Getting In, Out, and About

The Berkeley Hills are a group of neighborhoods in eastern Berkeley with steep topography and diverse populations. They experience higher fire risk than the rest of the City, and have a number of roads and passages that are relatively dangerous to pedestrians. We researched how emergency services and city planners can create safe, navigable streets.

Fire and roadway injury are already dangers for people in the Berkeley Hills. As the City considers upzoning single-family residential districts impeded emergency response, hindered evacuation, and traffic violence have the potential to compound existing risks. To address these challenges, we recommend a range of policy and infrastructure adjustments (under Recommendations) based on professional interviews, scholarly research, and case studies in similar cities.

Read the full report (at page bottom) for more information.

Our analysis focused on City's designated hillside overlay zone (HOZ), which includes neighborhoods clustered in the hills along Berkeley’s eastern boundary: The Berkeley Hills, Cragmont, La Loma Park, Panoramic Hill, Southside, and Claremont. Due to steep topography, windy and narrow streets, and high fire risk, these areas face unique public safety and transportation challenges.

39,000 Berkeley residents live within or near the hillside overlay zone, and population density varies widely within this area. The north and south sides of UC Berkeley’s campus are both located within the HOZ and have the highest population densities in the City. Reflecting the City’s zoning codes, most other HOZ neighborhoods have the lowest category of population density.

Housing units within the study area are majority owner-occupied (64.9%), compared to the City’s average where less than half of units are owner-occupied (44.9%). Similar to the geographical distribution of median household income, the neighborhoods located to the north and south sides of UC Berkeley have low owner-occupancy (19%), whereas the Berkeley Hills, Cragmont, La Loma Park, and Claremont neighborhoods have high owner-occupancy (73.9%).

Households within the hillside overlay zone are relatively high earning ($150,830) compared to those living outside of the hillside overlay ($103,690). The following map shows the variation in MHI throughout the study area. The Berkeley Hills, Cragmont, La Loma Park, and Claremont neighborhoods have the highest average MHI ($217,015). The north and south sides of UC Berkeley’s campus have the lowest average MHIs in the hillside overlay zone ($58,945).

Households in the HOZ also report owning more cars on average than the rest of the City. A third of residents in the HOZ either drive alone (29.4%) or carpool (4.7%) as their primary means of transportation to work. Nearly one third (30.8%) of workers in the HOZ report working from home.

Residents of the hillside overlay zone are primarily served by six AC Transit bus lines. These connect to Downtown Berkeley BART, Rockridge BART, downtown Oakland, and the Salesforce Transit Center in San Francisco. There are 218 transit stops served within the HOZ. The majority of residents living in the HOZ are within a five minute walk of an AC transit stop, however, infrequent buses and few route options limit the usefulness of transit to many residents.

Designated bike facilities are less abundant in the hillside overlay zone than elsewhere in Berkeley. Within the study area there are existing bike facilities on Spruce Street (Class III Bike Route), Virginia Street (Class IIIB Bicycle Boulevard), and Tunnel Road (Class II Bike Lane). Only three of the City’s 36 Bay Wheels bikeshare stations are located within the hillside overlay zone. These stations are concentrated along the western boundary of the study area close to the downtown core. Bikeshare and non-electric bikes are therefore more difficult for HOZ residents and likely used less frequently than in other parts of Berkeley.

Housing units in the hillside overlay zone are especially susceptible to fire hazards. Structures in this area tend to be older, built from more flammable materials, and sit nearer to flammable forest canopy than in other parts of the city. The High Fire Hazard Severity Zone Map highlights the areas at greatest risk from wildfire. Further complicating this situation is that the streets in this area are among the steepest in the City.

Street slope affects both street safety and emergency response. Steep streets may change sight lines for drivers, be harder for emergency vehicles to navigate, and affect vehicles' ability to slow down and stop. Steepness is an important consideration for planning evacuation routes, emergency corridors, and daily-use street infrastructure.

In evacuation scenarios, many residents rely on their own cars for transportation. The project area’s arterial roadways such as Arlington Avenue, Marin Avenue, Grizzly Peak Boulevard, La Loma Avenue, and Tunnel Road are able to hold higher volumes of car traffic than smaller, local streets. These arterials will likely see increased car traffic in the event of an evacuation. For residents of the hillside overlay zone without access to a car, the City has designated pedestrian evacuation routes. Planning to distribute the outflow of people across more than one mode helps avoid gridlock and equitably helps safe egress.

Between 2018 to 2022, the study area experienced 24 pedestrian- and 59 bike-related collisions where a car collided with a person walking or biking. Of the 82 total collisions, one person died and 17 collisions resulted in severe injuries.

The findings in this report are increasingly important as the City of Berkeley considers upzoning single-family residential areas to allow the construction of denser multi-unit housing. Proponents of zoning code change note that denser housing is more affordable and will help address the City’s gap in middle-housing options. Opponents fear that increased density in the hillside overlay zone will exacerbate the challenges already faced by Berkeley’s most fire-prone neighborhoods. To address these concerns, the City is conducting an evacuation study that models upzoning scenarios throughout Berkeley. The report is expected to be published in early 2025. Yellow areas on Figure 12 show the single-family residential districts with potential to be rezoned in the future.

Berkeley employs 22 full-time Parking Enforcement Officers but due to staffing and funding constraints, the City does not have adequate resources to enforce parking laws in the Berkeley Hills. Instead, the Police Department offers voluntary overtime to its officers to enforce parking laws in the hillside overlay zone during Red Flag events. The Berkeley Disaster and Fire Safety Commission writes that “a consistent lack of enforcement sends the message that parking restrictions in the Hills are not important, but in truth these restrictions are crucial for life-safety in these neighborhoods.”

If implementing more permanent no parking zones is not feasible, Berkeley should implement a program similar to the Los Angeles No Parking on Red Flag Days. The Fire Department should assess the streets in Fire Zone 2 and 3 and determine street sections where prohibiting parking during Red Flag Days would assist with ingress and egress if a fire event occurred. This program should be paired with intensive community outreach to educate the public about why the program is being implemented and how to find out when a Red Flag Day has been called.

The City of Berkeley has an existing Residential Preferential Parking (RPP) program which covers neighborhoods surrounding the University of California, Berkeley and downtown. We propose an amended version of the current RPP program to be extended to the study area to discourage legal on-street parking and encourage the use of off-street parking. This program would restrict each household to purchase one on-street vehicle parking permit which would allow them to park in legal parking areas. All other vehicles, including visitors and those owned by residents, would be limited to parking on the curb for a two-hour limit. We do not make any recommendation regarding the cost of the parking permit, but it should be expensive enough to encourage people to make use of private off-street parking instead. Extensive community outreach should be conducted to educate residents about the program and its underlying public safety purpose.

To encourage Berkeley Hills residents to park off-street, the City of Berkeley should partner with Uber and/or Lyft to provide subsidized rides to residents who do not purchase an RPP pass. Subsidized trips would have to begin or end at the resident’s home in the Berkeley Hills and should be encouraged to be used as a connector to BART or other transit options. The subsidy should be larger than the cost of the RPP pass to provide residents a large enough incentive not to purchase a pass. Ideally, this program would encourage those Berkeley Hills residents who cannot park their vehicle off-street and do not use their vehicle often to sell their vehicle and use the subsidized TNC trips instead. This program could improve the mobility of sub-populations in the Berkeley Hills which have difficulty getting around such as the elderly and people with disabilities.

To increase people’s mobility in the Berkeley Hills, the City of Berkeley should work with AC Transit to expand bus coverage. Increasing the frequency of Bus 65 and 67, as well as expanding the routes to cover more streets in the Berkeley Hills would help make taking the bus more convenient. This in turn may, over time, reduce the number of cars per household and reduce the number of cars parked on the street. Additionally, the City of Berkeley should explore offering microtransit rides for Berkeley Hills residents to supplement traditional bus service.

As cities continue to study and prioritize road user safety, Fire Departments are drawn into issues traditionally in the purview of Transportation Departments. To foster interdepartmental cooperation between the Fire and Transportation Departments, early career fire and transportation staff should learn about each other’s operational needs and duties to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the department’s work. A simple way to nurture mutual understanding is to periodically organize “ride alongs” where transportation staff can join a fire department for a day on the job and vice versa. While this could be quite an expensive program as a firefighter on a “ride along” would need to be backfilled by another firefighter on overtime, the value it could bring to fostering interdepartmental cooperation could justify such a program.

Wheel base and water carrying capacity both affect the mobility of fire apparatuses. In recent years Berkeley has purchased a fire apparatus with a narrower wheelbase for use in the study area. Having a diverse fleet can help ensure that vehicles are appropriately sized for the emergency and area that they serve. Therefore, we recommend that more of the City's large fire trucks be replaced with smaller models at end-of-life.

Red curbs should be added to roads with widths less than 26-feet and where residents have access to off-street parking. By limiting red curbing to narrow roads where residents have an alternative place to park, it may reduce the amount of opposition. Blue curbs should be painted in conjunction with red curbs to allow mobility-limited residents to park.

The study area hosts an extensive network of pedestrian pathways which were built during the early 1900s to provide shortcuts through the long blocks to reach street car lines. These steep, narrow paths vary in quality from those with concrete steps and railings to overgrown dirt paths and are maintained by the Berkeley Path Wanderers, a volunteer organization. City staff have identified these paths as a crucial evacuation route for pedestrians out of the Berkeley Hills. In addition to current routine maintenance, pedestrian infrastructure such as crosswalks and pedestrian flashing lights should be installed where paths intersect major arterials.

If the City wishes to expand the use of traffic calming measures, it should assess the study area and place traffic calming infrastructure at high conflict points. Spruce Street, which is a designated Class III bike route with “sharrows,” has been the site of numerous serious and fatal bike collisions. Because of its designation as a bike route and the high incidence of bike crashes, Spruce Street should be prioritized for traffic interventions.

The City should start by focusing traffic calming interventions on a small number of high need, high benefit areas. Successful implementation in a handful of carefully selected locations lightens the resource burden on the City, and can improve public trust in the efficacy of traffic calming infrastructure. Site selection should consider the effects of infrastructure on emergency response in the area.

Should the City decide to allow increased density in the Berkeley Hills, it should conduct periodic traffic studies to understand the effects of increased traffic. By better understanding changing vehicle and road user dynamics, the City will be able to assess the efficacy of its interventions and recognize new opportunity sites.

The Berkeley Hills is a heterogeneous region of people with diverse lifestyles, mobility needs, and priorities. Wildfire looms large in residents’ collective memory, while street trauma presents a daily threat to public safety. Risk distribution in the Berkeley Hills differs street-by-street and block-by-block. A safe city requires pedestrian-safe streets, reliable evacuation routes, and navigable emergency corridors. Emergency services and transportation planners can address these risks using the strategic policy and infrastructure adjustments outlined in this report. Past opposition to change by residents underscores the importance of interdepartmental collaboration and the ability to convincingly communicate risk management strategies to the public. Aligning the goals of emergency responders and transportation planners reveals opportunities for collaboration, equitable risk mitigation, and improved quality of life in the Berkeley Hills.