Streetsblog San Francisco

Space for parking up to 2,000 bicycles was provided at Maker Faire this year. Photos: Andrew Boone

The runaway success of Maker Faire, the annual San Mateo festival that celebrates do-it-yourself technology and crafts, has led organizers to get creative in encouraging attendees to come without a car and avert a traffic mess.

One of the ever-popular fire sculptures on display at Maker Faire.

Since Maker Faire’s debuted in 2006, organizers have developed a model program for managing traffic demand for the growing number of attendees — estimated at more than 120,000 this year — who flock to the two-day event to see the eccentric and occasionally practical inventions of 1,000 “makers.”

At this year’s event, held last weekend at the San Mateo County Event Center, the valet bicycle parking lot “had 735 bikes at 1 p.m., and about 1,000 bikes at 3:30 p.m., which was about the peak,” said bike parking organizer Gladwyn de Souza.

“It’s also part of the attendee experience. We want people to have a good time, so we want to provide them with choices that don’t involve driving,” said Katie Kunde, Maker Faire’s senior sales manager.

Maker Faire’s website provides comprehensive details on how to get to and from the event by transit, bicycle, walking, car-share, driving, paratransit, and even combinations of those modes.

Maker Faire also coordinates with local bicycle clubs to organize group bike rides to the event on Saturday from San Francisco and San Jose, and gives riders free copies of Momentum, an urban cycling magazine along with a free “I Rode My Bike to Maker Faire 2013″ patch. Read more…

The BART Board of Directors last night voted to lift bike blackout periods for another five-month trial starting in July. At the end of November, the board will once again consider changing the policy permanently.

Photo: SFBC

The trial was approved with a 6-3 vote, with directors Tom Radulovich, Robert Raburn, and James Fang voting against it, instead favoring a permanent removal of the bans.

“What I keep hearing from staff is we’re there, we’re ready to do this,” said Radulovich. “So let’s do it tonight.”

Despite the board’s hesitance to fully commit, bike advocates lauded the move toward a change in policy, which BART surveys show is supported by 76 percent of riders. According to KQED, “an overwhelming 95 percent of the roughly 400 people who sent letters or emails prior to the meeting urged that the ban be lifted.”

“Today’s BART decision is a momentous occasion,” said SF Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum in a statement. “For years people on both sides of the Bay have had to contort their lives simply because they needed to take a bike on BART but couldn’t during commute times. We commend BART for taking the smart steps toward opening up regional travel by bike.”

BART board member Joel Keller of Brentwood, who said he initiated the board’s 1997 vote to remove the permit requirement for bikes brought aboard trains, was confident the policy would be successful but still favored limiting it to a trial period to err on the side of caution. “I’m prepared to support this on November 30, assuming that the facts don’t change,” he said, “and there’s no reason for me to believe the facts will change.”

See more coverage of the two-hour hearing from the SF Chronicle and KTVU.

Elly Blue’s latest publication, “Bikes in Space,” is a feminist sci-fi zine about her favorite mode of transportation. “I realized that because I work for myself, I can do anything I want,” she says by way of explanation. The amazing truth is that she makes a living writing whatever strikes her fancy about the intersection between bicycling and feminism.

Elly Blue is currently on tour, feeding people a delicious vegan meal and talking about how biking will save the economy. What could be better? Photo: Momentum

Elly is such a fixture of the Portland biking (and blogging) scene that I always figured that she moved there specifically to be part of it. Actually, she moved there for college and didn’t really start riding much until her senior year (at the age of 27 — she started late). In 2004, when President George W. Bush got re-elected, her friends all started threatening to move to Canada and she said, “Not me! I’m going to stay right here and be a bike activist.” She hadn’t really meant to say that, but then she realized it made sense. That drunken pledge has become her life’s work.

Aside from her quarterly zines, Blue published her first book, “Everyday Bicycling,” in December, 2012 and is eagerly awaiting the release of her second book, “Bikenomics: How Bicycling Will Save the Economy.” We caught up at her Dinner & Bikes event in DC this week, part of a month-long, 27-city tour through the Northeast and Midwest.

Tanya Snyder: This is the third year you’re doing this tour. What’s the mission of the tour; what are you hoping to accomplish aside from having an awesome trip?

Elly Blue: Aside from having an awesome trip, the goal of the Dinner & Bikes tour is to feed people a really inspiring meal and bring together people in the community who are passionate about bicycling, often in very different ways from each other, often who don’t know each other. I want to create an atmosphere where people can learn and talk and meet each other and feel inspired and feel like they have the power to make big changes and pursue whatever their vision is for bikes.

TS: You said this is the first time tour has come to the east coast. Have you sampled our bike infrastructure and bike culture?

There’s suddenly this culture rising up around women and cycling that’s bringing something new and fresh and not even engaging in old, stale debates like whether we should have bike lanes or not.

EB: We don’t get to sample bike culture as much as we’d like to, in part we don’t have bikes and in part we’re on the move all day, every day. But I’m from the east coast. I’m from New Haven. We were just back there a few days ago; we did an event there.

I started riding a bike in New Haven when I was 20, and for a couple of years I rode pretty much everywhere I went, and I rode on the sidewalk. I remember having really funny encounters with police where I’d say, “Am I doing something wrong?” and they were like, “We don’t care.”

Then, once, I rode with Critical Mass. They happened to be riding on my commute path. There were nine of us, and it was a completely transformative experience. Being able to ride in the street and feel safe meant so much to me, because it hadn’t even occurred to me to do that. And then it didn’t really occur to me to do that again until I moved to Portland.

Read more…

A recent survey of Washington’s Capital Bikeshare members found that the average annual subscriber drove 198 fewer miles per year. That added up to about 4.4 million fewer miles of driving annually in the DC region. Members also saved an average of $800 a year per person.

Bike-share encourages people to buy their own bikes, a Capital Bikeshare survey found. Image: Washington Post

At about the same time the survey was released, the Washington Post ran a story about the successes and limitations of CaBi, and David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington posted some observations in response. He points out that the benefits of bike-share are not limited to the trips people make using the system –it also leads people to ride their own bikes more frequently:

I personally started biking a lot more often around DC once Capital Bikeshare launched, since it provided an easy way to take a spontaneous or one-way trip and not have to feel forced to then bike home. In later years, while I’ve kept my membership (it’s still cheap and useful on occasion), I hardly use it. Instead, I use my own bike.

I’m not the only one. Chris Eatough, Arlington’s bicycle program manager, says that according to a survey of Capital Bikeshare users last year, “82% of respondents reported increased use [of their personal bikes] since joining Capital Bikeshare, and 70% said that Capital Bikeshare was an important reason.”

Bikeshare serves as an introduction to bicycling for many people. That’s why it’s a shame that Simon Pak, who manages The Bike Rack at 14th and Q, had more critical words for bikeshare riders. “Since Capital Bikeshare started, any incident [I've witnessed] in bike-to-bike collisions have been with Capital Bikeshare riders. They’re the most inexperienced riders emulating more experienced riders,” he told Ravindrath.

Read more…

• BART Board Votes to Lift Bike Bans for Five-Month Trial Period (SFGate, CBS, KTVU)
• Muni Transit Director Explains, Apologizes for Two N-Judah Shutdowns Within 24 Hours (SFMTA)
• Central Subway Contract Winner Known to Exceed Costs on Construction Projects (SF Examiner)
• How TransForm Strives to Improve Lives Through Promoting Sustainable Transportation (GJEL)
• Noe Valley Residents Have Raised $500,000 for 24th Street Parking Lot-to-Park (SF Chronicle)
• Berkeley Experimenting With Demand-Based Parking Pricing (Berkeleyside)
• Caltrans Engineers Explain $10 Million Fix for Faulty Bay Bridge Bolts (KTVU, CBS)
• “Flightcar” Startup Allows SFO Travelers to Rent Out Their Cars While Away (CBS)
• Concord Considers Reducing Speed Limit from 45 to 40 MPH on Deadly Treat Boulevard (KTVU)
• Driver Under the Influence of Drugs Crashes Into Concord Home (CoCo Times)
• Driver Killed in Marin Car Crash on Monday Identified as Abraham Avalos, 23, of Petaluma (Marin IJ)

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Supervisor Scott Wiener (the tall one) with the San Francisco delegation at a BRT station platform in Mexico City last week. Photo: SFCTA

More than a dozen city officials and advocates traveled to Mexico City last week to experience firsthand the ease of getting around a city with robust bus rapid transit and bike-share system.

The SF delegation, invited and paid for by organizers at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, included Supervisors John Avalos, Scott Wiener, and Eric Mar, as well as reps from the offices of Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisors David Chiu and Malia Cohen, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, the SF County Transportation Authority, the Planning Commission, the SF Bicycle Coalition, the SF Transit Riders Union, and SPUR. (Streetsblog New York reporter Noah Kazis made the trip last year — check out the dispatches from his visit here, here, and here.)

Mexico City received ITDP’s Sustainable Transport Award this year, and its Metrobus received the organization’s silver rating for BRT systems. It would have been ranked gold, except that crossing between the center transit lanes and the sidewalk was “frightening,” said Michael Schwartz, the SFCTA’s project manager for Van Ness BRT.

The lack of pedestrian safety improvements, said Schwartz, is one mistake San Francisco won’t make with its BRT corridors. “The experience on the Metrobus was amazing — you move quickly, efficiently, and reliably,” he said. However, after getting off the bus, “even though you have a walk signal, sometimes there’d still be cars crossing. You were definitely on guard all the time.”

Metrobus is a network of four corridors that carries 850,000 people per day — about as many as the entire Muni system. “They’ve become so popular, a lot of the choice transit riders — people getting out of their cars — choose Metrobus over the metro,” said Schwartz.

Granted, there are 21 million people in Mexico’s Federal District metropolitan area, compared to San Francisco’s population of 800,000, and 7 million in the Bay Area. On the busiest Metrobus line, which carries 450,000 riders per day, buses arrive every 45 seconds on average. While Muni’s longest articulated buses stretch about 18 meters, a portion of the Metrobus fleet — the double-articulated buses — are 25 meters long.

SF delegates roundly praised the features that make Metrobus so efficient, like physically separated transit lanes, off-board fare machines, and elevated station platforms.

Read more…

Have you given to Streetsblog’s spring pledge drive yet? If not, may we suggest that this is the week to do so. In addition to supporting livable streets journalism and putting yourself in the running to win a Dahon folding bike, you could take home a sweet collection of books and zines courtesy of eminent bike-ologist Elly Blue.

If you make a habit of reading Streetsblog and you value the work we do to make the case for transforming our streets, please make a tax-deductible donation so we can keep on doing it.

We’ll send one donor who gives by midnight Friday this Elly Blue library, including Bikenomics, Taking the Lane, and the brand new Bikes in Space: A Feminist Science Fiction Anthology (sample story: “in Elizabeth Buchanan’s classic pulp tale of postapocalyptic Appalachia, a gripping bicycle-truck chase gives a young woman a surprising new hope”).

If you value the work we’ve done to counteract all the misinformation about the redesign of Polk Street and other projects to improve walking, biking, and transit in San Francisco, show your support by making a generous donation to Streetsblog. Judging by the situation in New York, the approaching launch of Bay Area Bike-Share may mean there’ll be lots more work in store for us in the fact-checking department.

A Recology garbage truck driver ran over and killed a man on a bike at 16th Street and South Van Ness Avenue this morning at about 6:45 a.m., according to the SF Chronicle:

Photo: Ellen Huet/SF Chronicle

A witness said the truck, which was paralleling the male bicyclist on eastbound 16th, tried to make a right turn onto southbound South Van Ness and collided with the rider.

The garbage-truck driver continued a short distance South Van Ness after the crash, said the witness, 29-year-old Jorge Marquez of San Bruno, but stopped after people on the street yelled and alerted to him what had happened. He drove the truck around the block and parked back near the crash site, Marquez said.

The bike was dragged for one block. It was found mangled on the corner of 17th Street and South Van Ness.

The driver was cooperating with investigators, police said. They said drugs or alcohol were not suspected factors in the crash.

Of course, most of those who tweeted about the story – including Ellen Huet, the Chronicle reporter – didn’t call for safer streets, or ask why the truck wasn’t equipped with convex safety mirrors, or talk about the extra care that truck drivers must take to not run people over when making right turns (the driver may have violated CVC 22100, which requires drivers to make right turns “as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway”). Instead, the attention centered on the report’s mention that “it does not appear that the bicyclist was wearing a helmet.”

But as Mark Dreger noted in his response to Huet, ”A helmet is not going to protect you from being run over by a garbage truck. Separated bike lanes, maybe.”

Downtown Ventura, California. Photo: Sargent Town Planning

Earlier this week, Smart Growth America released an important study that illustrates how walkable development results in huge savings and significantly better returns for municipalities compared to car-centric development.

The analysis of 17 case studies found that walkable, mixed-use development produces 10 times more local tax revenue per acre than sprawl. In addition, SGA found that smart growth reduces infrastructure costs by more than a third, on average, and cuts operating costs like police and trash service by almost 10 percent.

William Fulton, vice president of Smart Growth America and former mayor of Ventura, California. Image: SGA

Streetsblog got in touch with the study’s lead author, William Fulton, Smart Growth America’s vice president for policy development and implementation and the former mayor of Ventura, California, to further discuss the implications for local communities.

Here’s what he had to say.

Angie Schmitt: What is the takeaway for communities that are maybe a little more suburban in nature at this point?

William Fulton: Smart growth is not beneficial just for big, urban cities. A community of any size — even communities that are mostly suburban in nature — can benefit fiscally from smart growth. Smart growth patterns even in small and mid-sized cities can have a tremendous influence on the budget. For example, the study from Champaign, Illinois, we cite in our report suggested that a smart growth approach to future expansion in that mid-sized Illinois city could turn a $19 million deficit into a $33 million surplus.

Even taxpayers who live in single-family homes stand to benefit from smart growth. If their communities approve conventional suburban development that generates a deficit, they will be faced with pressure for increased taxes. Smart growth can alleviate that pressure so that even people who live in single-family homes will be able to keep their taxes low.

Read more…

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx’s Senate hearing was, by all accounts, the one “oasis of calm” on an otherwise stormy Capitol Hill yesterday. There were no sharp exchanges, no tense moments, not even any particularly tough questions. Two weeks from today, we’ll probably be calling him “Mister Secretary.”

Foxx enjoyed smooth sailing through his confirmation hearing yesterday in the Senate and is expected to be confirmed at the beginning of June.

Cabinet nominees often spend all their time on the witness stand at these hearings dodging questions, saying they’ll “look into that and get back to you.” But Foxx gave some real answers. He was well-informed and confident, and when senators asked him how he would handle thorny issues like funding constraints and modal silos, Foxx reassured them that he had ably handled the same issues as mayor.

TIGER. Foxx spoke with authority about TIGER, having managed TIGER grants in Charlotte that he felt did a lot of good. The city got $18 million in 2011 for additional power substations and extended platforms at three stations on its expanded light rail Blue Line. Foxx said that constraints of formula funding had hindered them from building the platforms right the first time, and it was a testament to TIGER’s flexibility and multimodalism that it was able to step in and fill that gap.

Funding. Senators seemed determined to try to scare Foxx by reminding him of the funding emergency confronting the department, but he remained sanguine. He didn’t show his hand about what solutions he had in mind — and it’s Congress’s decision anyway — but he indicated that they’ll have to “think outside the box,” as his predecessor, Ray LaHood, liked to say. To his credit, Foxx did not follow Obama’s line and promise to pay for transportation with war savings.

He also had a very reasonable response to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) who asked him to make sure that the sequester and any future spending cuts be implemented with a minimal amount of pain to consumers, targeting only “waste, fraud and abuse.” Foxx refused to take the bait. He said that, certainly, they would seek to minimize pain, but there would be some. If lawmakers are going to continue to cut programs, they can’t fool themselves into thinking that there won’t be consequences.

Tolling. Foxx indicated he would continue the current policy of allowing tolling only on new federally-funded roads to pay for their construction — not on existing roads to pay for their maintenance. He said tolling “has a place” but “we’re not going to toll our way to prosperity.” Maybe not, but it sure could help. Allowing state DOT’s to toll existing interstates — something many agencies want to do — could result in wringing more efficiency out of the transportation network without building expensive new infrastructure.

Read more…