San Pablo Avenue and the Greenway Beside It Are Finally Moving Together
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
On the morning of July 13, a small crowd gathered on the pedestrian walkway that cuts through the Mayfair housing complex at 11600 San Pablo Avenue. City officials cut a ribbon. Cyclists rolled through a stretch of curb-protected bike lane that had been under construction, in one form or another, for most of the past year. Mayor Gabe Quinto spoke. So did Rebecca Saltzman, the city's Mayor Pro Tem and a former BART director who now co-leads Bike East Bay. Somebody from the Contra Costa Transportation Authority was there too, along with staff from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which helped fund the whole thing.
None of that is unusual for a ribbon-cutting. What's worth noticing is what it means for the half mile of San Pablo Avenue around the El Cerrito del Norte BART station, and for the older, quieter path that runs parallel to it just a few dozen feet away. This summer, two different groups finished two different projects on the same stretch of ground, on two completely different timelines, without much coordination between them. One took the better part of a year and $12.8 million in grant money. The other has been going, tree by tree, for more than twenty years. This fall, for the first time, you can actually feel both of them at once.
The Del Norte Complete Streets Project grew out of the city's 2014 San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan, and it did the unglamorous work that plan promised: about a mile and a half of protected bike lanes along a state highway, new bus boarding islands, upgraded crosswalks, protected intersections, and corner islands designed to force drivers to slow down before they turn. It builds on a 2021 BART upgrade that added fare gates, elevators, and restrooms inside the station. This year's project handled everything outside it.
Saltzman put it simply at the ribbon-cutting.
"Things now feel a whole lot safer."
Bike East Bay's Robert Prinz made a point that matters more than it might sound: unlike the recreational feel of the nearby Ohlone Greenway, a protected lane on a working commercial corridor lets people actually run errands by bike instead of driving them. San Pablo Avenue is a 22-mile arterial that Streetsblog's own reporting has bluntly called a traffic sewer for most of its length. A mile and a half of it working differently is a small fraction of the whole road. It is also the first mile and a half that connects directly to a BART station, several hundred new housing units, and a stretch of small storefronts that have been turning over all year.
The city's own numbers put this in context. According to the city's mid-2026 corridor analysis, the San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan area holds roughly 90 percent of El Cerrito's retail space and more than 60 percent of its office space, with vacancy near 10 percent, a share City Hall itself describes as healthy. About a third of that retail stock is older, lower-rent space, the kind that's cheap enough for an independent operator to take a chance on but often needs real work behind the walls before it can reopen.
That's the space Miles Pizza Slice moved into at 10180 San Pablo Avenue in June, taking over the spot Super Slice vacated on May 31. It's selling slices cut from 24-inch pies and full 18-inch takeout pizzas made with dough that's cold-fermented for 48 hours, which is a longer process than most quick-serve pizza spots bother with. A few blocks north, Mugunghwa has had time to become an anchor rather than a novelty, the kind of place where groups stop on their way to or from Club Mallard on the Albany border, tables crowded with shared banchan.
More is coming. Qimmah Coffee pulled a building permit in March for a space at 11610 San Pablo Avenue, with construction estimated at six to nine months, which puts a realistic opening sometime before the end of this year. Sa Wad Dee Thai is under construction a few doors down at 11670. A Nepalese restaurant has applied for a permit at Mayfair itself. None of these are open yet, so treat them as what they are: storefronts in progress, not finished destinations. But three separate food operators choosing the same half mile in the same year, right as the sidewalk in front of them gets rebuilt, is not a coincidence anyone in city planning would call small.
A few blocks south, El Cerrito Natural Grocery and its adjoining venue, The Annex, spent July running a full calendar: live sets from Marina Lavalle and Pedro Rosales on the 8th, Modupue on the 15th, and a Kivelstadt Cellars wine tasting on the 23rd. In June, the city's Summer Kickoff Festival took over Hana Gardens next to Mayfair with vendors including Pickles N' Smoke, Emiliano's Tacos, Moto Hill Preserves, Requisite Matcha, and Rookie Ceramics. None of this is new construction. It's proof that the corridor already has enough foot traffic to support programming, which is a different and in some ways more durable signal than another storefront opening.
Run parallel to all of this, usually within sight of the elevated BART tracks, and you're on the Ohlone Greenway, a 2.7-mile stretch through El Cerrito that connects into a longer path running between Berkeley and Richmond. It looks like it was always meant to be there. It wasn't.
In the early 1990s, El Cerrito's two-mile stretch of the Greenway had exactly one tree, and even that one eventually got cut down. Everything green along that corridor since then, the shade, the community garden beds between Gilman and Peralta that have now been tended by the same volunteers for more than twenty years, exists because people decided to plant it and kept showing up to maintain it. That's a longer, slower project than any city grant cycle, and it has mostly happened without a ribbon-cutting of its own.
This November, it gets one. The El Cerrito Historical Society is hosting a free walk called Greening the Greenway on Sunday, November 15, starting at 10 a.m. at Fairmount Avenue, across from the El Cerrito Plaza BART station. Steve Price, the volunteer who organized much of that tree-planting effort, and Steve Batchelder, the city's consulting arborist during the years the work actually got done, will lead the walk and talk through what's behind specific blocks, including the stretch locals call the Dinosaur Forest. The route is flat, covers two miles, and ends exactly where the new protected bike lanes begin: at the Del Norte BART station.
That routing is the part worth sitting with. A city crew spent a year and $12.8 million rebuilding the street side of this corridor. A handful of volunteers spent two decades rebuilding the path side of it, one tree and one garden bed at a time. Until this year, those were two different stories that happened to run next to each other. This fall, a resident can walk or bike the finished protected lane past Mayfair, stop at Miles Pizza Slice or Mugunghwa, check whether Qimmah Coffee has opened its doors yet, and then in November join a two-mile walk on the Greenway that ends at the exact spot the new bike lane starts.
If you want a version of that loop before winter sets in, it looks something like this:
None of this requires anyone to be shopping for a house. It requires being the kind of person who already lives here and wants a reason to leave the block on a Saturday. That reason showed up this year in two forms that don't usually get mentioned in the same sentence: a construction crew with a grant budget, and a group of neighbors who've been quietly building something else the whole time.
If you ever do want to talk about what any of this means for a specific address in El Cerrito, or anywhere else in the inner East Bay, the team at Salt & Pine Real Estate is always happy to talk shop, no pressure and no obligation. And if you're simply curious what your own home might be worth in a corridor that's changing this much this fast, getting your home value is a good place to start.
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