Bobby LeeThe City of Emeryville revealed its vision for a redesigned Powell Street at a community open house held at the Police Station last Wednesday. Almost two dozen community members attended to learn about the streetscape project and share feedback on the design options.
The Powell Street Project, spanning from Frontage Road to the Emeryville Marina, aims to improve safety, mobility, and accessibility for pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, and drivers along this important waterfront corridor. MIG, the city’s design contractor from West Berkeley, presented a plan focused on six goals: safety and comfort, multimodal transportation, equitable access, recreation, placemaking, and habitat creation.
Proposed upgrades include:
- A protected two-way bikeway on the south side of Powell Street
- Improved crosswalks with shorter crossing distances and median cut-outs for pedestrians
- Increased trees and landscaping
- Reconfigured street parking, with all existing parallel parking on the south side removed and relocated to the north side in an angled layout – without a loss in the overall number of parking spaces available
- Lowered speed limits and narrower vehicle lanes throughout the corridor
- Better connections to the Bay Trail and nearby parks
The project divides Powell Street into five sections: Gateway, Watergate, Port View, Marina, and Park Streetscapes, each receiving unique treatments. For example, the ‘gateway’ segment between Frontage and Access Roads will feature a shared, widened bike and pedestrian path on the south side, along with narrower vehicle lanes, while maintaining the same total number of lanes.
The ‘Watergate’ segment will undergo significant updates, featuring a two-way protected bikeway with flexible delineators and a widened sidewalk on the south side of Powell Street with parking removed, and diagonal angled-in parking on the north side. Additional features include flashing pedestrian crossing beacons, refuge islands for safer crossing, and bioretention areas for stormwater management.
The City of Emeryville says it aims to retain many curbs and medians by using restriping, signage, and landscaping upgrades to reduce costs.
The project followed over five months of outreach efforts, with more than 520 residents participating through surveys, city-wide tabling events, and stakeholder meetings – including one exclusively with Watergate Condominium residents. Survey responses highlighted priorities such as safer crossings, slower traffic, expanded bike and pedestrian pathways, and additional amenities like benches, restrooms, and landscaping.
While MIG and city staff stressed that this is an early concept that was reviewed by the city’s Transportation and Sustainability Committee, community opinions were mixed. Support for pedestrian safety improvements was widespread; however, residents from the Watergate community raised concerns about outreach, bikeway operation, parking clustered near housing, emissions, and soil stability.
One Watergate Community resident, Fran Quittel, said that the presentation did not address many of her concerns, particularly about emergency, waste management, police, fire and commercial traffic, and key issues of traffic flow, pedestrian and vehicle safety. She is concerned that the project’s anticipated installation might happen before significant sewer lateral work and ongoing soil issues are resolved. She also says the plan doesn’t take advantage of easy to achieve pedestrian safety measures which she believes could be done relatively quickly at low cost.
“There was no mention of emergency or commercial traffic on Powell Street at all. Leaving that out was one of several deficiencies in the presentation,” said Quittel. “I’m advocating for what makes sense in our city, both for safety for those who live here and for all who want to visit and enjoy the marina .”
“I do see some innovative ideas, like the two-way bike lane. But I’m not sure it will work without community education,” said Carol, another Watergate resident. Carol also expressed concern for the local bird habitat. “I wish there was more recognition that this is a nature area and a bird fly-over zone. I don’t want Emeryville to put up more lights and trees, disrupting migratory patterns.”
During the presentation, the project team also discussed possible plans for upgraded transit shelters, more transit stops, and expanded transit service, although these are not yet confirmed by current area transit operators. Project staff also shared that they are developing a plan to move the casual carpool pickup area to another location along the corridor.
Moving forward, the project will enter the initial design phase and continue community engagement before finalizing plans, but no specific timeline has been set for design, approval, or construction.
The complete presentation deck shown to attendees of the Open House.
For additional information or questions about the project, email Director of Community Design Karthik Kumar at kkumar@migcom.com.
This plan leaves a lot to be desired and really has nothing to do with what is best for Powell Street short or long term. Moving everything on the south side of the street to the north side will just put unsafe angle parking, emissions and noise on the same side of the street as the people who live here while messing up what is working well – and can be improved – in the area with little cost. I also found this plan confusing, creating traffic problems that are known to be unsafe while the presentation itself had some basic errors that are actually quite surprising.
I agree. They should just remove all the street parking and leave more space for people to walk along the bay in nature without. There’s already multiple parking lots along here.
I was really wondering about this “plan” on Powell Street which is deemed an arterial road – not a residential street so I began studying upgrades which have been done on “major arterial roadways” like this one. Noticing that WITHIN the Watergate Community, ALL residential streets demonstrate angled or perpendicular parking and a lot of the “mitigation” MIG suggests, the west side of Emeryville isn’t at all opposed to this traffic calming kind of thinking. But these “ideas” just don’t appear to be GOOD UPGRADES to Powell Street, the one and only major artery available to serve 2000+ residents with police and fire departments with working driveways, GoRound stops and an established casual carpool location. If MIG suggested moving the police and fire departments. the plan might work, but I don’t think the community is well-served by these suggestions which by the way also include RELOCATING the casual car pool location. So, to be fair, I’ll offer an inexpensive study suggestion of my own. Anyone who wants to try out the MIG plan, just go to the TraderJoe’s parking lot which now has about 10 angled parking spaces against the store and spend 30 minutes there to see what a calamity these angled spaces are in a heavily trafficked area. It seems that ARTERIAL roads like Powell Street with ambulance, emergency vehicle, waste and construction traffic, where angled parking has been implemented, these road LOWER their accident rates by 57% when they implement PARALLEL PARKING, which is what we have now because ANGLED spaces lead to pileups, accidents and a lowered ability for an emergency vehicle to get to where it needs to go. Further the visuals of an open promenade on the south side of the street in order to connect to the Bay Trail . . . perhaps MIG is thinking of dredging the Bay to widen the available land on the south side, which would at least give the south side of the road enough room for the suggestions MIG has offered. Meanwhile, what I hope MIG and Emeryville Public Works will fix the area of Powell Street that floods in the rain and implement better crosswalks and better safety for pedestrians in the median. These are inexpensive and quick to implement. Then just stop there for now. That plan as I saw it measures up to lots of accidents waiting to happen, packing noise, emissions and traffic onto the north – or residential – side of the street and setting up obstacles that can cost lives and time when fire engines, ambulances, delivery, trash and construction trucks need to get to where they’re going.
Where Berkeley has implemented angled parking on Shattuck Avenue, its major downtown roadway that traverses the center of town, they entirely segregate the angled parking so it is entirely OFF the main road and doesn’t impede the flow of traffic. All of the slower vehicular traffic has all the time it needs for good visibility while NOT interfering with the flow of traffic on the main road. This is something to think about.
As a frequent pedestrian, I love the upgrades.
I would love for the lower speed limits and less car centric design would deter more of the “speed through” traffic that’s the most dangerous for our communities. The drivers who view our city as a shortcut to wherever they’re headed aren’t living here, working here, or patronizing our businesses. They just do damage we have to clean up.
The people who have the most issues with this seem to be car commuters. And while their perspectives are valid and part of the conversation, I think the driver’s point of view is already what’s most centered in the status quo. Any change will feel like a compromise they’re losing something in. I believe these updates create some much needed balance.
Are there really a lot of car commuters who use this stretch of Powell St? Where are they coming from and where are they going? I can see it being used by visitors; but commuters? Perhaps a few park there all day and use the casual carpool, but is that really a car commuter?
I think the two way bike lane will be a huge improvement, I have often felt unsafe in the narrow shoulder lane. As for concerns about the bird population, increasing the vegetation seems like a bonus! Angles parking seems like a decent compromise to not lose any parking spots and without the danger to cyclists of cars backing out because of the separated path.