Alameda CTC opens bidding on the San Pablo Avenue parallel bike route

The Alameda County Transportation Commission is taking construction bids for the San Pablo Avenue Parallel Bike Improvement Project, a network of bike routes on side streets running alongside San Pablo Avenue through Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville and Oakland. Bids close with a virtual opening on Monday, Sept. 21.

The design is deliberately not on San Pablo Avenue itself. The commission says the parallel-street approach came out of the San Pablo Avenue corridor planning process, which ran from 2017 to 2020 and weighed technical constraints and community input before settling on an alternative to bike lanes on the avenue.

What a contractor would build is a long list of street changes rather than a single stretch of pavement: traffic circles, traffic diverters, speed humps and tables, curb extensions, median modifications, intersection daylighting with red curb, new curb, gutter and curb ramps, drainage work, pavement repair and rehabilitation, striping, roadside signage, intersection safety lighting, a pedestrian hybrid beacon, rectangular rapid-flashing beacons and landscaping.

Those are the pieces neighbors tend to notice first. Traffic circles and diverters change how cars move through residential intersections; daylighting removes parking near corners so drivers and people on bikes can see each other.

The solicitation is numbered I27-0013. An in-person pre-bid meeting is set for Monday, Aug. 31, at 2 p.m. at the commission offices, 1111 Broadway, Suite 800, in Oakland. The bid opening follows on Monday, Sept. 21, at 2 p.m. over Zoom, with advance registration required.

Bids must go through the Bid Express platform, and the commission is telling vendors that have not used it to register before the solicitation closes. Solicitation documents are posted on the commission's contracting opportunities page.

The commission has not announced a construction start date, a schedule for individual streets, or an engineer's estimate for the work. Those details would normally follow once a contract is awarded.