OAKLAND — Anyone exiting Oakland’s 19th Street BART station over the past year may have found themselves in a kind of chaos nestled in the city’s Uptown: torn-up roads, fenced-off sidewalks and hardly a person in sight.
The three-block stretch of nearby 20th Street has looked that way because the city — ironically — wants to transform the business corridor into a walkable, greenery-laden pathway to Lake Merritt, a prized East Bay natural attraction.
When finished, the Urban Greenway project will establish protected bicycle lanes and a wider paved pedestrian path, solving the common “last-mile” problem that makes it difficult in many cities to travel from point A to point B without needing a vehicle.
But the construction site just outside Oakland’s busiest BART station has blown past an April deadline after shovels went into the ground last summer. City officials now promise it will be finished sometime in the fall.
Officials said the delay is due to a contractor discovering — upon breaking ground — shallow utility lines along the road, as well as “unfavorable subsurface conditions and inclement weather.”
The finished renovation would be the kind of development urbanists crave. Oakland was among the top 30 cities nationwide in its share of people riding bikes to work, per U.S. Census survey data collected in 2022. And the city has sought to attract more visitors to Lake Merritt, with the 20th Street exit from the 19th Street BART Station an intuitive access point.
The total project cost is $6.4 million, with money drawn from grants and Measure KK, a voter-approved bond for road projects. But for more than a year, the planned “greenway” has looked like virtually the opposite: a construction hellscape mirroring the dysfunctions that Oakland’s critics are quick to attribute to City Hall.
A bicyclist rides through the intersection of 20th Street, also known as Thomas L. Berkley Way, and Webster Street on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. Work is being done to create pedestrian and bicycle paths from the 19th Street BART Station to Lake Merritt. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)“It is incumbent on the city not just to speed up the construction process but to inform people what the goal is,” said Warren Logan, a cyclist who ran unsuccessfully for City Council last year, “while also recognizing that there’s no magic wand that takes us from the current to the future state overnight.”
At various times this past year, one of the sidewalks on 20th Street — also known as Thomas L. Berkley Way — between Broadway and Harrison Street was closed entirely, while the roadway was reduced to mounds of dirt and chunks of cement.
The drawn-out construction period has extended to similar projects in close proximity, including one at nearby Grand Avenue and Harrison Street intended to “reimagine” the vehicle-heavy roadway as a “safer, calmer street, and a more fitting gateway” to Lake Merritt. The renovation will remove a driving lane and install a new bicycle pathway.
Road safety is a pressing issue across Oakland, including in the areas around Uptown and the lake, where neighborhoods are densely packed with residents and lauded for their walkability.
In February, a notable UC Berkeley professor, Michael Burawoy, was killed in an SUV hit-and-run inside a crosswalk at Grand Avenue and Park View Terrace, a tragic blow to both the sociology community and to local advocates for safer streets.
“The good news is that, in the long run, it’ll be a lot better once they finish the work,” said Kevin Dalley, an avid cyclist who attended a public vigil for Burawoy.
“But as a cyclist,” added Dalley, who sits on the board of Transport Oakland, a community advocacy group, “it’s tough to figure out which bicycle lanes are completely closed, or which ones are protected.”
Road construction along 20th Street, also known as Thomas L. Berkley Way, on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. Work is being done to create pedestrian and bicycle paths from the 19th Street BART Station to Lake Merritt. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)City officials are not ignoring the issue. The projects on 20th Street and at Grand and Harrison are among a half-dozen separate ongoing construction efforts in Oakland that are all intended to build concrete islands that separate bicycle lanes from the roadway.
Similar barriers were installed elsewhere in the city’s Uptown last year, on Telegraph Avenue between 20th and 29th streets. Five additional projects to protect bike lanes have not broken ground yet.
The 19th Street BART Station itself received an extended refurbishing that wrapped up in 2023. It is one of the most frequented stations in the entire Bay Area network, with 104,000 rider exits recorded last year — more than at any other BART stop in Oakland, per the transit agency’s data.
The area outside the exit on 20th Street has been effectively a no-go zone, however, leaving the offices, banks and storefronts lining the three-block stretch from the station to the lake to deal with frequently closed sidewalks and endless construction.
“Business has been slow,” said Steven He, an Oakland native who works the counter at Poke Parlor, a store effectively trapped behind the construction zone. “DoorDash (delivery drivers) have a hard time trying to find parking. It hasn’t been easy.”
The city did not specify when in the fall the construction may be completed, with officials noting the project was delayed again last summer — after construction had begun in earnest — because additional utility lines were discovered.
Robert Prinz, an advocacy director at the regional nonprofit Bike East Bay, said he also noticed an old railroad track dug up at the site, leading him to confirm with a project manager that it had been left over from the early 20th-century era of streetcars in Oakland
“There’s a lot of stuff in the downtown area where previous traffic engineers didn’t take good notes on where they left everything,” Prinz said. “You find surprises when you start digging.”
Logan, the ex-council candidate, is now a director of partnerships at Northlake, a development project seeking to establish a kind of business improvement district in the city’s Uptown.
The initiative is led by Isaac Abid, a managing partner at the Lakeside Group, an Oakland-based real-estate firm, and a major donor in local political races.
Northlake’s focus at the moment is closer to the bars and restaurants at 27th Street and Broadway — but the collective’s overall mission is clear: Oakland city streets should be vibrant, walkable and not dominated by cars.
“It’s important to get the folks at businesses out there at 19th and 20th streets … back into the office,” Logan said. “We want to encourage participation in civic life, 24/7.”
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at [email protected].
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