After public comment pushed a Berkeley City Council meeting past midnight, the council voted 7-2 to repave Hopkins Street with protected bike lanes on both sides — ending a fight that had stalled a routine repaving job for eight years and turned a two-mile North Berkeley corridor into a proxy war over the city's climate promises.

Hopkins Street connects San Pablo Avenue to the Berkeley hills, and its cracked pavement has needed resurfacing since at least 2018. But every plan to repave it collided with a proposal to add protected bike lanes — and the parking removal that comes with them. The July 29 vote settles the design question in favor of safety advocates and the city's own Vision Zero targets, while handing a loss to the neighborhood coalition that spent years arguing the lanes would gut a small-business district. What's left is money and a construction timeline the city has yet to name.

Berkeley's City Council voted 7-2 early Wednesday to adopt a repavement plan for Hopkins Street that includes one-way protected bike lanes on each side of the roadway, KQED reported. The decision followed hours of public comment that stretched into a fifth hour and dragged the meeting past midnight — an intensity that even supporters found striking for a project that is, on paper, a repaving job.

"It's honestly a little crazy that this is the amount and intensity of discussion that we need in order to install a protected bike lane," Councilmember Mark Humbert said, according to KQED. "But at the same time, it makes sense, because this is about more than just a bike lane on one street. It's about what kind of a city we want to be."

The safety case rests on a specific record. In 2017, 69-year-old Seon O'Neill was struck and killed at Hopkins and Monterey Avenue by a driver who did not stop, and the city has logged four severe injuries among pedestrians and cyclists along the corridor since, KQED reported. Those numbers track with the goals Berkeley set for itself: the city's Hopkins Corridor Traffic and Placemaking Study, launched from a 2018 council budget referral, commits to "zero pedestrian severe injuries by 2028" and the same target for cyclists and drivers, according to the project's official page.

Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani, whose district includes part of Hopkins, championed the plan. "The proposed safety treatments are not arbitrary," she said, per KQED. "They are directly informed by where people have been killed and severely injured on this street."

The opposition was neither small nor unorganized. Friends of Hopkins, a neighborhood group, turned out hundreds of residents. Donna DeDiemar, a group leader who has lived near Hopkins for 50 years, told KQED the council prioritized cyclists over existing residents. "We knew we had facts and data on our side, and we simply could not overcome ideology," she said. "How do you overcome people who have made a decision because it's trendy to want that?"

For many opponents, the sharpest fear was parking. The plan is expected to remove more than a hundred on-street spaces along a corridor that is home to several dozen businesses, including the Monterey Fish Market and Hopkins Street Bakery. "Hopkins is more than just another commercial corridor. It's actually a destination," said Jacqui Yu, a restaurant manager in the corridor, per KQED. "Removing so much parking without practical alternatives will discourage visitors, hurting the small businesses that have made this area successful in the first place."

That tension is baked into the city's own framework. Berkeley's project vision lists both "manage parking in order to meet the needs of residents and local businesses" and "support local businesses" alongside its safety and climate aims, according to the study page — competing goals the council effectively resolved by ranking safety first.

Supporters framed the vote as a test of whether Berkeley's climate commitments mean anything on the ground. The city pledged in 2021 to reach net-zero carbon emissions, a target that includes tailpipe emissions from private cars. "Meeting our climate goals requires more than just transitioning to cleaner vehicles," Sierra Club member Jacob Dadmun said, per KQED. "It requires creating communities where walking, bicycling, rolling and public transit are safe."

The vote resolves the design fight but not the logistics. KQED reported there is no construction timeline yet — meaning the corridor's potholes, and its politics, will linger a while longer.