‘Flow trail’ proposal for Berkeley hills highlights challenges of building new paths for Bay Area hikers, bikers

Chase White and Theo Lemkin are reduced to a blur while zipping through the Berkeley hills atop their mountain bikes.

Whether riding for the Berkeley High School mountain bike team — believed to be the first of its kind nationally — or just a personal outing, the 17- and 16-year-olds, respectively, join hundreds of others that navigate trails in Wildcat Canyon, Tilden and other areas of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD).

There’s one problem: they’re cramped for space.

Bikes are technically only allowed on 18% of the narrow, unpaved trails in those parks — sharing 30 miles of multi-use trails and less than two miles of single-track routes wide enough for just one person with dozens of hikers, dog walkers and equestrians along the way.

“There’s a lot of people walking their dogs who are scared of bikes and other people who just don’t enjoy having someone rush by them at 25 miles an hour,” White said. “We often need to slow down or even walk to avoid people and not scare the other trail users.”

The EBRPD is trying to help ease this strain, which is being felt across the Bay Area.

Park staff are currently exploring a proposed “flow trail” in central Wildcat Canyon just for bikers. This single-track, downhill trail would zig-zag through banked turns, modest mounds and occasional jumps along the natural contours of the hill to maintain a bike’s speed with little, if any, pedaling.

The idea was first suggested by the Northern California chapter of the National Interscholastic Cycling Association, which approached the park district in December 2020.

In addition to support from mountain bike teams in Berkeley, El Cerrito, Albany, and Richmond, endorsement letters have been inked by organizers like RICH CITY Rides and the Bicycle Trails Council of the East Bay.

Within one week in December 2021, more than 1,500 people had signed a petition urging EBRPD to begin a detailed study for the flow trail.

Trails for hiking, horseback riding and mountain biking each have inherently different needs and design parameters to be safe, fun and accessible. And less than 15 miles of new trails have been built in the EBRPD system in the past 25 years.

“While it can be a positive interaction if people are in a good mood and say hi to each other, there’s definitely a lot of potential to have an accident and injury,” Lemkin said of sharing space. “Having a single-use trail (for mountain bikers) would be able to avoid that entirely.”

Nick Hoeper-Tomich, head coach of BHS’s mountain bike team, said he’s seen a massive explosion of people in the parks in recent years, fostered in part by the pandemic.

When visitors with different needs are all forced to share the majority of the space, he said everyone loses.

“You can do everything you can to sort of mitigate friction with other trail users — using bells, calling out and just being respectful — but there are inherently just interactions that are challenging to navigate,” Hoeper-Tomich said. “Just knowing that there’s not going to be a horse around the next corner really helps us feel a little bit more relaxed and fully embrace what we’re doing.”

Next steps for the flow trail proposal include layout and design development — including analyzing the project under the California Environmental Quality Act — which will be discussed at public meetings throughout this fall. No project costs have been finalized, and EBRPD staff estimate construction wouldn’t start until at least 2025.

“Mountain biking is the fastest growing user group in the East Bay Regional Park system, driven mostly by the youth getting into it,” Hoeper-Tomich said.

But forging new bike trails is not as simple as just picking a spot on a map.

The EBRPD has already spent years researching 18.2 acres within Wildcat Canyon — running along the roughly 0.8 mile proposed trail corridor — to ensure that any development would have minimal impacts to the surrounding environment and find the best location for land grading.

Sean Dougan, EBRPD’s trails program manager, said this work requires fielding community pushback, securing permits, and analyzing cultural and environmental resources.

There are three key questions the EBRPD tackles while studying the topography of the existing trail network: Would a new trail avoid impacts to sensitive natural resources? Will the design be prone to destruction, erosion or burdensome maintenance? How will people enjoy and stay on the trail?

For the proposed flow trail, no trees or shrubs would be removed, but there may be some disruption to nearby wildlife, such as bumble bees, California red-legged frogs and Alameda whipsnake, according to a 150-page biological resource assessment that Nomad Ecology prepared for EBRPD. That work featured wetland delineation, a special-status plant survey and vegetation mapping, which all concluded that no rare plants or sensitive communities are within the study area.

“We first need to just get an idea for whether this is even a project we’re going to pursue right now,” Dougan said. “But the community can bring ideas to the park and staff can pursue those ideas, as we should as public servants.”

Other ambitious (and sometimes decades-long projects) are still being developed around the Bay Area, including the ongoing 500-mile San Francisco Bay Trail, which will (eventually) connect all nine counties and 47 cities in the region.

San Jose has worked since 2002 to map out a 100-mile “interconnected network” of trails citywide, and four trails have been designated as part of the National Recreational Trail System. A bike path across the Bay Bridge that connects West Oakland to downtown San Francisco is slated to be completed by 2030 — more than a decade after the project first began.

A pilot project in Briones Regional Park near Martinez is also tinkering with rules about who can use certain trails, including sanctioning some “bootleg” routes, while the national Rails-to-Trails Conservancy nonprofit has its eyes set on connecting more than 2,600 miles in the Bay Area alone.

Yet, while opposition to the flow trail has started brewing among local environmentalist groups, pushback has also started targeting the way EBRPD is handling trail proposals.

Norman LaForce, chair of the Sierra Club’s East Bay Public Lands Committee, and Jim Hanson, a member of the Conservation Committee of the East Bay Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, penned a letter in April decrying the process.

An attorney for the Sustainability, Park, Recycling, and Wildlife Legal Defense Fund requested that the district scrap the flow trail until the entire park system can be better studied as a whole.

“A planning process that considers all park resources is necessary to provide locations for mountain biking that will ensure protection of habitat and provide for the safety of hikers and equestrians,” the letter said.

But as Hoeper-Tomich, the BHS coach, struggles to keep his team on trails in the first place, he chalks up community criticism to a looming feeling of environmental elitism in the Bay Area.

“It’s kind of depressing — a bit of the Berkeley grump mentality,” Hoeper-Tomich said. “I just feel like there’s just perpetual headwinds for any sort of project or betterment of public services, but perfection is the enemy of progress.”