Streetsblog San Francisco

Bike traffic is already booming on Market Street, the city's main civic thoroughfare and most direct route to many major destinations. Does anybody really think ignoring this natural traffic pattern is a good idea? Photo: Mark Dreger, San Franciscoize/Flickr

Updated at 9 p.m. with street configuration diagram at bottom.

Two public meetings on Better Market Street will be held on July 17 and 20, and a webinar will be held on July 18.

The idea of building protected bike lanes on downtown Mission Street instead of Market Street, as proposed by the Department of Public Works and the SFMTA, doesn’t seem to have many adherents aside from the planners who proposed it.

The agencies framed the proposal as a simpler engineering task than protected bike lanes on Market — where the vast majority of people already ride, and are expected to continue to ride. But the idea was roundly criticized by advocates and city officials yesterday at the latest Board of Supervisors hearing on the Better Market Street project.

Although SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin said the option is worth studying, he also said he “shares many of the concerns” about trying to divert bicycle traffic off the city’s main thoroughfare.

“If it’s not going to be a world-class bicycle facility that will be a better choice and naturally attract cyclists to Mission Street, and many bicyclists still end up on Market Street, then it won’t have achieved its goal of trying to de-conflict transit and cycling,” said Reiskin.

Paul Valdez, a bicycle commuter who spoke against the Mission option — as did every other speaker who commented on it — called it “absurd.”

“Scratch that option. Please re-focus your energies, time, and resources” on improving Market Street, he said.

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Photo: Aaron Bialick

Every time a Muni train breaks down or a bus is stuck in car traffic, San Francisco pays big time.

City staffers are beginning to tally up the economic toll of Muni delays, and presented [PDF] some alarming figures at a hearing yesterday called by Supervisor Scott Wiener.

In April, riders were delayed a cumulative 86,000 hours, or, as SF Weekly calculated, 19 years and eight months. That amounts to an economic loss of $4.2 million, or $50 million per year, according to the City Controller’s Office. And that’s a conservative estimate — it doesn’t account for delays outside of rush hours or the loss of potential customers who might otherwise use Muni to shop if the system were more reliable, a Controller’s Office staffer said.

“The system’s struggles have real-life consequences for our city,” said Wiener. “When service is unreliable, people are delayed and frustrated in getting where they’re going, leading to negative economic impacts and reduced quality of life.”

Last week, the N-Judah — Muni’s busiest line — shut down twice in two days due to damaged overhead wire equipment, leaving trains sitting on the street for most of a 24-hour period. Such meltdowns not only have internal costs for Muni, like overtime labor to run shuttle buses as a substitute for train service and the cost of repairing equipment. They also cost commuters time, and repeated delays lead them to consider other ways of getting around — or to question whether to make a trip at all.

“The bottom line,” said SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin, “is the transportation system matters to people when they’re choosing where to live, where they work, what modes of travel they’re going to use, and how they’re going to allocate their household budget between housing and transportation.”

With Muni being deprived of funding for decades — a situation that’s only getting worse — the system’s outlook is grim. Here are the stats, as reported by Muni and summed up by SF Weekly, since July:

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It looks like Supervisor Eric Mar is ready to make some noise about the need to fund the SFMTA’s vision for a major expansion of bike-friendly streets — which Mayor Ed Lee hasn’t prioritized at all since the agency released its Draft Bicycle Strategy earlier this year.

Supervisor Mar speaking at last week's Bike to Work Day rally. Photo: Aaron Bialick

At yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Mar issued a request to the City Budget and Legislative Analyst and the Controller’s Office for a report on potential opportunities to increase the abysmal amount of funding currently devoted to bicycle infrastructure — 0.46 percent of the city’s capital budget.

“It’s time that the city walks the walk when it comes to funding bike improvements,” said Mar. “Less than a half of one percent is not acceptable.”

While pro-bike talk from elected officials abounded at last week’s Bike to Work Day rally, Mar noted that ”there were no commitments to step up and deliver the funding that our fledgling bicycle network needs.”

In February, when Mar asked Mayor Ed Lee how he planned to help fund the SFMTA’s Bicycle Strategy – a vision for making bicycling a mainstream mode of transportation – the mayor made it clear that he has no plans to back up his pro-bike rhetoric with a commitment to implementation.

With the SFMTA set to approve its next two-year budget a year from now, “Now is the time where we can start planning and working proactively to make these plans a reality,” said Mar.

Mar pointed to SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin’s remarks at last October’s NACTO Conference in New York, reported by Streetsblog, when Reiskin stated that “the most cost effective investment we can make in moving people in our city is in bicycle infrastructure.”

The efficacy of bicycle infrastructure is already evident in neighborhoods like the Inner Richmond, which Mar represents, where bicycle commuting increased by 167 percent from 2000 to 2010. During that time, bike lanes were installed on Arguello Boulevard and Cabrillo Street. Mar also pushed for the recent implementation of the Fell and Oak protected bike lanes, which now provide a safer commuting route for District 1 residents. “I think the improvements to bike lanes, making them safer for families, has had a real impact in the Richmond,” said Mar.

“We know that improving the bicycle network in San Francisco leads to healthier communities, less car congestion, less pressure on Muni lines already at capacity, healthier commuters, and many other economic benefits,” he added.

Elected officials and thousands of commuters took to two wheels for the 19th annual Bike to Work Day, welcomed by the new protected bike lane on Oak Street and the city’s first bicycle counter on Market Street. As in the past few years, the mayor and city supervisors gathered on the steps of City Hall to give speeches cheering bicycling, with some calling for the implementation of more bike lanes.

Supervisor David Chiu neglected to mention Polk Street in his Bike to Work Day speech. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The event saw record-breaking bike traffic counts, according to manual counts by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, which found that bikes accounted for 76 percent of eastbound vehicle traffic on Market at Van Ness Avenue between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. — a three percent increase in bike traffic over last year, and a nearly 30 percent increase since 2009.

By 9 a.m., the new digital bike counter on eastbound Market between Ninth and Tenth Streets displayed a total of 1,300 bicycle commuters. (That may be an underestimate, as riders who didn’t run over sensors in the bike lane appeared to not be counted.)

While city leaders had a few recent improvements to point to, important issues went unaddressed. At the podium, Mayor Ed Lee made no mention of the SFMTA’s Bicycle Strategy, which he has so far refused to fund.

Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors’ supposed bike champion, David Chiu, said nothing about Polk Street – the vital bicycling corridor on which the rally was held, where the SFMTA has ruled out plans for protected bike lanes on all but six blocks. His omission didn’t seem to sit well with several rally attendees, who, after Chiu’s speech, shouted “Polk Street!”

Mayor Ed Lee made no mention of the need to increase funding for bicycle infrastructure on the 19th annual Bike to Work Day. Meanwhile, Morgan Fitzgibbons (out of the frame) holds a sign in the back reading, "19th Annual Photo Op & Empty Promises Day.” Photo: Aaron Bialick

After the rally, when Chiu was asked if he planned to take a stand for protected bike lanes on Polk, he declined to do so, instead characterizing himself as a mediator between street safety advocates and parking-obsessed merchants. “I think there has not been enough dialogue between the various sides of this perspective,” he said. “On the one hand, we’ve had significant safety issues for pedestrians and cyclists on a thoroughfare that is used every single day by thousands of folks. On the other hand, the plight of our small businesses is very, very real.”

“I do hope we will have more protected bikeways around the city,” he said. “The question is if that should be for all of Polk Street.”

Chiu, along with Supervisors Scott Wiener and David Campos — who represent San Francisco on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission – did call for an increase in the city’s abysmal level of investment in bicycling, currently 0.46 percent of the capital budget.

“We’ve got to get real here,” said Wiener. “If we don’t put our money where our mouth is and start investing in bike infrastructure, in Muni, it’s not going to happen as fast as we need it to happen. I want to move fast, and I want us to invest and transform our city into a city where we can get around in all sorts of different ways, including biking.”

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Mark Farrell and Malia Cohen emerged as the most vocal proponents of free car parking on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors at a hearing on parking meters last week. Farrell called the hearing in February based on an admittedly “unfounded” suspicion that the SF Municipal Transportation Agency was planning to install parking meters in District 2, which he represents.

Supervisors Mark Farrell and Malia Cohen: Misguided champions for free parking.

Despite the traffic dysfunction caused by free parking, which leads motorists to cruise fruitlessly in search of an open space, Cohen made her anti-parking meter stance clear at the introduction of the hearing. “I’m looking forward to, possibly, [SFMTA Director] Ed Reiskin saying, ‘I quit, you won, we’re not going to be doing parking meters,’” she said, eliciting applause from an audience composed mostly of the city’s usual stable of free parking activists.

Electeds like Farrell and Cohen still see parking as an entitlement for drivers, and tend to resist any effort to encroach on that entitlement. Based on what they said at the hearing, they believe the amount of driving is fixed, and that the demand for car parking is a natural force that must be accommodated, not managed to achieve goals like traffic reduction, transit efficiency, and street safety. They say they won’t tolerate parking reform unless Muni is first improved to their standards. (Oddly, we never seem to hear these folks actually push for more Muni funding, or call for safer streets for walking and biking.)

Meanwhile, the SFMTA’s SFPark program has enjoyed broad political support where it has replaced existing parking meters with smart meters. Those meters adjust prices to demand throughout the day to keep about one parking space open on every block and provide multiple payment options. Prices have dropped about as often as they’ve been raised, so SFPark has actually saved motorists money and reduced citations.

While supervisors and the mayor have gotten behind SFPark as a symbol of San Francisco’s innovation, that’s not the case when it comes to converting free parking spaces to SFPark meters — even in neighborhoods like the northeast Mission, where drivers circle around endlessly for spots on weekday mornings.

At the hearing, Farrell and Cohen waved the flag for the camp that insists San Franciscans shouldn’t pay for car storage. ”What do you do first: Do you make public transportation so attractive that people will voluntarily choose to abandon their cars, or leave them at home, and take public transportation?” said Farrell. “Or do you make it so challenging and frustrating to drive a car, with increased parking rates and what have you, that people are — this is extreme, but — coerced out of their cars? I think I hear from a lot of folks that it’s the latter, not the former.”

The problem with that assertion is that free parking is itself a subsidy that leads more people to drive, creating a traffic-clogged street environment that degrades transit service and makes bicycling unpleasant. That only further coerces people into cars. So while it’s clear that Muni, walking, and biking conditions do need to be improved, continuing to give away in-demand parking spaces for free only perpetuates the vicious cycle.

“We have a charter mandate to” manage parking, said Reiskin. “It would be irresponsible of us to do otherwise.”

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Supervisor Scott Wiener is sounding the alarm that Muni, already the slowest transit system in the country, will only get worse over the next ten years unless officials at City Hall take the initiative to devote more resources to the city’s decrepit transit vehicles and infrastructure.

Photo: _Davo_/Flickr

Under the the latest iteration of the city’s ten-year Capital Plan, a draft of which was approved by the Board of Supervisors last week, Muni will only see more of the breakdowns and crowding that have plagued the system due to decades of underfunding, said Wiener.

While the $330 million currently set aside in the plan for Muni is an increase over the city’s historic spending levels of “basically zero,” Wiener lamented the fact that it comes nowhere near filling the system’s backlog of repairs and equipment replacements, which the SFMTA estimates would require $510 million every year within the ten-year period.

“I think it’s important for all of us to understand that that is not even close to what we need even to improve service levels today, let alone with a growing population and a ten-year older system,” Wiener said at a recent meeting of the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee.

As the SF Examiner has reported, even if voters approve two proposed revenue measures in November 2014, the Capital Plan would include a combined $790 million over the next ten years for transportation and street infrastructure — nowhere near the $3.1 billion backlog, $2.2 billion of which the SFMTA says is for Muni:

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Supervisor Scott Wiener wants to reform the current CEQA appeals process, which puts projects like the bike and pedestrian safety measures on Fell and Oak Streets at risk of unnecessary delay. Photo: Aaron Bialick

In November, a handful of opponents filed a CEQA appeal against the Fell and Oak Street bike and pedestrian improvements after construction on the project had already begun. Fortunately, the Board of Supervisors dismissed their claims that the project required a full environmental impact report under the California Environmental Quality Act, and the appeal didn’t delay work on the project. But that’s not always the case with projects that improve street safety.

Pedestrian and bicycle advocates hope that legislation making its way through the Board of Supervisors will curb such late — and costly — CEQA appeals. Supervisor Scott Wiener, who authored the legislation, said it wouldn’t make any changes to CEQA itself, which is a state law. Rather, it would establish local deadlines to appeal development and street projects that are declared exempt from CEQA’s onerous EIR requirements. Such deadlines were mandated by the state legislature over a decade ago, and San Francisco is the only California city which has yet to comply with that mandate.

Supervisor Scott Wiener. Photo: Scott Wiener's Office via SF Examiner

“When an appeal of a categorical exemption or negative declaration comes into the Board of Supervisors, we don’t really know if it’s even timely. The rules are that unclear,” said Wiener. “The Planning Department doesn’t know, the clerk of the Board of Supervisors doesn’t know, the people who filed the appeal often don’t know,” leading the City Attorney to determine the answer, which can take up to two weeks, he said.

The confusing appeal process has often been used as a tool to slow or stop projects that have already undergone extensive vetting via community meetings, analysis, and city approvals. The SF Bike Plan was held up for four years after a lawsuit was filed by Rob Anderson, forcing the city to do an extensive re-analysis that lead to no changes to the original plan. Even for relatively small projects like the protected bike lanes and pedestrian bulb-outs on Fell and Oak, the appeals process has added “unnecessary difficulty in making progress on our city’s stated goals,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the SF Bicycle Coalition. “Our organization has unfortunately seen a lot of the bumps in the road.”

“It takes far too long to make improvements that save people’s lives,” said Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe, who pointed out that the organization actually filed a CEQA appeal in 2009 against the EIR for the planned CityPlace Mall (since re-named Market Street Place) which led to the sponsor agreeing to pay fees towards bike and pedestrian safety improvements. “Walk SF supports [Wiener's] legislation because we believe we still can use this process to make necessary appeals, but we’re also very concerned about how the current process slows down critical improvements for pedestrian safety,” she said.

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