In Oregon, it was based upon road size, a road that carried a certain amount of traffic was required to include basic ped/bike facilities upon re-surfacing It would have been good to have similar requirements in SF. Also the Bike Plan, until it was privatized by the SFBC was going to develop safety standards for all streets and an inspection system to find dangerous conditions. Numerous public comments called for such work but by then it had been removed from the planning process and was "outside the scope of work" aka ignored.

The organized advocates of the City, all of which belong essentially to the same group, often wonder a loud about things they have done to themselves, such as the Bike Plan lawsuit, etc. I would suggest having another rally, releasing another press release and passing more symbolic, unenforceable legislation as it seems to have been very productive in the past.

If you do manage to get yourselves together to try and do something standardized an actual ordinance would be best. Such an ordinance could be based upon the assertion that as encouraged foreseeable roadways user bicyclists/pedestrians have a right to move in reasonable safety. You could even justify such an ordinance with the various legal authority that supports it. But you can't do that if you have been busy working to keep such information out of the public dialogue.

Linking the ordinance to road re-surfacing and to the intersections with the most ped/bike crashes would also seem to make sense. However there is no way to effectively present such ideas as the public place to do so was taken away and turned into a disaster (the bike plan) and your organizations have no interest in systematically addressing the issues they face.

So hopefully you will get the 30% and next time the issue comes up you can fight the same battle all over again. Keep up the good work. Soon you may even get portions of your 1997 Bike Network.

The other projects, the ones that conflict with auto capacity maybe you will even get those ? As you know the TA has been hard working for many years in the also specifically private all consultant/agency/funded advocate purgatory that you started when you took CEQA issues out of the Bike Plan.

They even have apparently come up with a viable replacement to LOS. But will it go anywhere even though specifically authorized by the Supervisors, hmm hopefully....

But maybe not because the City is busy ignoring the will of the Supervisors and ignoring want the people want. And they are able to continue to do this because your organizations work against people actually speaking. The all administrative/agency speech of your organizations parallels the all agency speech of street design. That's why these overarching problems continue...because you are the problem. Your lack of legislative thought and tendency towards privatizing speech makes these problems unecessarily continue.

But soon 45 projects initially planned in 1997 may actually be finally realized and a bunch of roads that need bike lanes and aren't on the network will be re-surfaced in their all their 1950's killer glory. And another bike to work day will come...

Debt and the over reliance on it is what got us into this financial mess that is destroying the real economy, and we should resist the temptation to "charge it" and transition to pay as you go model.

To float debt to pay for streetscape is a fool's errand, only palatable to politicians with a shelf life shorter than that of the bond repayment period.

If bonds are floated for 20 years, and streetscape repairs last for 10 years maximum (if done well which is a whole other story) then we will find ourselves in the last half of the bond repayment period with crumbling streets and heavy debt as the bank for the buck had long since been depreciated, remembering how nice our streets were for those ten years ten years ago.

Indeed, if new, more complicated capital systems replace existing generic streets, then they will add even more burden on maintenance, an ongoing burden which we obviously cannot meet without going deeper into hock. As government grows, so does the clamor for more development to pay for it all (which it won't) and with it goes the unique character of San Francisco.

Instead of focusing on the goodies to be reaped from this bond, as temporary as they might be, we should focus on an economic sustainability plan for our capital systems, especially the predictable well known ones like streets where systems failure means degrading Muni service and dangerous conditions for cyclists.

-marc