You keep reiterating the bike plan will impact traffic and there’s not much disagreement there, and most questions in regards to that are over how bad it really will be, whether it might improve safety by slowing down traffic, influence what mode of travel people will choose once implemented, and whether it’s even a bad thing at all.

Rather than engaging in discussion on those points though, you’ve keep returning to inflammatory language to describe those asking the questions.

Now as party to the litigation, you are no doubt aware that it’s irrelevant to CEQA whether traffic is effected at all. The environmental review only requires the impacts be properly documented and made public, not whether the City may proceed. In fact, the transit first policy exists precisely to discourage driving. Just last year, voters voiced their support again for pro-bike/anti-car policy by voting for Prop A and against Prop H.

So as not to derail this discussion any further, do you actually have any issue with the fact in the report? You yourself have quoted the report in your comments, which would seem to endorse the findings.

This thread is about the Bicycle Plan litigation, to which I am a party. How has my participation “derailed” the discussion? I understand that many of you folks hate it when someone criticizes your religion, but you need to get over that.

“Somewhere, we screwed up. The city should have done the EIR, period. That it didn’t, is a huge oversight, and we wasted an untold amount of time and money with this now.”

The city’s failure to do an EIR on the Plan wasn’t an “oversight”; the city deliberately chose to not follow the law, even though we warned both the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors about the false path they were pursuing more than four years ago. The city knew what it was doing, but it just assumed that no one would challenge them in court.
http://district5diary.blogspot.com/2005/04/district-5-diary-to-supes-dont-do-it.html

(Does that make sense?)

Even if the cars are going slower, aren’t they (in many cases) really just taking more time to get to the same red light they’d otherwise be racing to and sitting at – which can only yield benefits in safety and fuel efficiency?

Whenever I’ve driven in the city, the main thing I’ve noticed is how long I spend sitting at traffic lights and stopping at signs. Because of the frequency of intersections, even though the speedometer may be getting up to, say, 35 at times, the average speed of travel is always much lower. For this reason among others, it is my contention that automobiles are fundamentally impractical for widespread city use (along with extreme increase in danger, air pollution, etc.).

Now, with stop lights/signs being such a significant impediment to traffic flow, how much would a lower top speed actually change the average speed? I consider this to be a major factor in the case for the superiority of bicycles as urban vehicles – though their speed typically averages 10-15 mph without stopping they are often not much slower than cars overall, and with a bike lane cyclists typically catch up with all cars at the light and spend a lot less time waiting at it (except for expressways).

If anyone knows of any relevant studies on how such traffic calming projects have affected auto travel times, please share.

We should get over Rob Anderson. And we should get over ourselves. Somewhere, we screwed up. The city should have done the EIR, period. That it didn’t, is a huge oversight, and we wasted an untold amount of time and money with this now. Politicians love a good photo op (just as non-profits love a good donation-drive op), but truth be told, this is not exactly a “victory for bikes”. This is the end (or almost-end) of a long and totally avoidable delay. Of course, there never was any real high-profile discussion about WHY the EIR wasn’t done, let alone a spanking of those responsible for the “oversight”. Instead, by engaging in these troll fights, we feed the likes of Rob Anderson. The real losers are the bikers on the streets who will never get back the time lost.

In addition to the above, bikes 0 damage to roads as road damage is based rougyly on the fourth power of axle load, so doubling the weight of the vehicle causes road damage to go up 16 times. Pretty much 100% of the cost of road maintenance is attributed to autos, plus the areas that bikers use are the least kept up portions of the road. Another area where cyclists are underserved.

The bike improvements are long overdue.

Here are some spatial figures for you.

Apparently 42 folded Bromptons per typical car parking space.
16 (at least) mixed-bike peleton per car space in the lane.
28 mixed-bike peleton per bus space in the lane.

http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/room-to-breathe-nyc/
http://spacing.ca/wire/2009/08/27/42-folding-bikes-vs-one-car/

Even if only at 25% of maximum potential, that’s more space efficient than a car!

Rob Anderson speaks for a rather small and sad constituency.

Average road lane width is 12′
average bike lane width is 4′

So being conservative and saying 11′ for road lanes & 5′ for bike lanes results in 10,560 mile-feet of roads, and 225 mile-feet for bike lanes, which is 2.13% for bikes. If the MTC numbers are actually for road miles, rather than lane miles as I assumed in my calculation, bike lanes are a much smaller percentage.

That does not include parking for cars.

According to MTA there are 603,000 parking spaces in SF, and 1550 public bike parking spaces, that is 0.25% parking spaces for bikes, and bike parking takes a lot less space than car parking.

Cyclists are underserved, even when using auto favorable numbers. After the improvements are made for cyclists I’m quite confident that the mode share will significantly improve for cyclists, but I didn’t factor that in to my calculations.

A Bike Network is far from inevitable, but when enough people have organized together it becomes harder and harder to keep saying that they do not belong.

Yes, of course I understand that you folks think that bicycles are the most important part of our traffic. On the other hand, according to MTA’s numbers, we have 465,905 registered motor vehicles in SF; 35,400 vehicles drive into the city every workday; 48.2% of city workers drive or carpool to work; 30.8% commute via public transportation; Muni has 686,000 weekday boardings on more than 1,000 vehicles; and—wait for it—2.3% of city residents commute on bikes.

Add it all up, and of course who can deny that it makes great good sense to redesign city streets on behalf of you bicycle hobbyists with a strong political lobby.

also, what can be problematic about ceqa is that it leaves enforcement to “citizen court challenge”. while in theory, all things being equal, this would be a good thing, in practice “citizens” that are able to afford litigation use it to their advantage to halt projects just because they are worried about being slowed down or because they don’t like something while communities that should be able to use CEQA to protect themselves against bad impacts (such as environmental justice concerns) often don’t use it because it is costly, lenghty and time consuming to engage in litigation…

while the intent of the law/ceqa is good, there are always potential problems with practice…no law is free of imperfection, and many laws are abused and misapplied… a quick search for CEQA reform and you’ll see it goes back quite far….

Previously it was a fast moving street with 4 lanes of traffic. They reduced it to one lane in each directin with a Valencia-style center turn lane. The results are that traffic moves slower (which the whole neighborhood views as a good thing) and MUNI has not been negatively affected.

Notice that he thinks the cars are the regular traffic and (I suppose) that everyone else is an irregular weirdo.

Why should those weirdo pedestrians want to slow down traffic just to make it less likely that they will be killed or injured by us regular people who never get out of our cars?

If you look at the MTA statistics, tens of thousands of cyclists are already part of “traffic” in the city. Bikes certainly won’t be “screwed up” by proper cycling infrastructure. Anderson must mean private automobiles, then.

Shall private automobiles necessarily face gridlock only because of new bike lanes (as opposed to all the other things that gridlock cars on a daily basis which Anderson doesn’t mind)? Assuming for the sake of argument that a bike lane will create car congestion, Rob’s fevered Carmaggedon can ONLY come about IF motorists voluntarily choose to idle on the same specific streets–day after day, like idiot robots–rather than simply choosing to drive on nearby streets that don’t have “screwed up traffic.”

Is that a reasonable premise? That our grid system cannot possibly work as intended, because idiot motorists shall never switch away from their current routes even if they become “screwed up?” No. The paucity of private car through-traffic on lower Market is instructive here. Few routes are more direct than Market, but Market is far too slow for most motorists–and traffic counts show they have switched to other, faster roads. Just like one would think they would–if one weren’t Chicken Little, or Rob Anderson.

Sorry, Rob. Your dire predictions just aren’t credible. Motorists don’t sit idle when they have alternatives, and our gridded street system ensures motorists have alternatives. Should proper bike infrastructure slow private cars down enough, it is entirely reasonable to expect motorists will switch to faster routes. It’s not as if every street is getting bike lanes.

I have to also report that while biking down Folsom Street this morning, in two different places I encountered trucks that had double-parked in the vehicle lane and *NOT THE BIKE LANE*. Hence, miraculously, my path was not blocked, and I was not forced to merge into traffic. I thought perhaps I had been mystically transported to some other city where bicycle happiness is the rule. Now if we could just smooth out some of the pavement on Division Street so I don’t crack eggs on the way home . . .