The Berkeley City Council voted Tuesday to confirm Jamie Parks — the man who built 45 miles of protected bike lanes in San Francisco and invented its Quick Build program — as the city's new public works director, a $270,000-a-year post that puts a proven safe-streets operator in charge of Berkeley's most politically contested infrastructure agenda.

Parks, currently assistant director of the Oakland Department of Transportation, starts Aug. 17. He inherits a department that has cycled through two directors since late 2023, a freshly approved five-year plan to repave more than 60 miles of roads, and a slate of traffic safety projects funded by a parcel tax Berkeley voters approved in 2024 — an agenda bike advocates are cheering and one that will test whether Berkeley's street politics have matured enough to let an experienced builder actually build.

Parks's résumé is specific: at San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency he ran the Livable Streets Division, overseeing construction of 45 miles of new protected bike lanes and creating the city's Quick Build program — a strategy of deploying paint, flexible posts and prefabricated materials to install safety infrastructure in weeks rather than years. He later moved to the Oakland Department of Transportation as assistant director, overseeing road maintenance and parking enforcement.

Deputy City Manager David White, recommending the hire in a report to the council, wrote that Parks "emerged as the top candidate due to his strong record in municipal operations, capital program delivery, organizational improvement, and transportation safety initiatives," according to Berkeleyside.

Walk Bike Berkeley, the city's leading bike and pedestrian advocacy group, flagged the appointment in a newsletter Wednesday, calling Parks a "safe streets leader." Ben Gerhardstein, a Walk Bike Berkeley leader who testified at Tuesday's meeting, told the council: "Jamie has the background that the city needs right now to really advance our work to make our streets safe, accessible and smooth for all."

Parks is stepping into a department that has been leaderless at the top since March, when former director Terrance Davis departed — himself the successor to a director who resigned in November 2023. Deputy Director Wahid Amiri ran the department in the interim. Councilmember Shoshana O'Keefe praised Amiri at Tuesday's meeting: "He stepped into a huge position and really did a great job. It's an incredibly important position and he really nailed it," she said, per Berkeleyside.

The pressures on Parks are concrete. The council last week approved a street repair plan calling for work on more than 60 miles of roads over five years — a significant increase over prior pace. On top of that, voter-approved parcel tax money from 2024 is sitting ready for traffic safety projects: new bike infrastructure, pedestrian improvements, and the kind of road redesigns that reliably generate opposition from drivers and parking advocates who see shrinking curb space as a loss.

Berkeley has been here before. Protected bike lanes and road diets have historically proved, in Berkeleyside's phrasing, "politically thorny" in the city — as they have in Oakland, San Francisco and most urban cores where Parks has worked. His Quick Build experience is a direct answer to that friction: build incrementally, adjust, and deny opponents the years-long runway they typically need to kill a project. Whether Berkeley's politics allow that approach at scale is the open question his tenure will answer.