How American Cities Are Making the Transition to Protected Bike Lanes
Eastern Cesar Chavez Street. Photo: SFBC/Flickr
Of all her trips pedaling around during her San Francisco visit, one of Martha Roskowski’s most harrowing was the stretch between the SFMTA building at Market Street and Van Ness Avenue to a venue at Folsom and Second Streets, where she was slated to speak about making cities more bike-friendly. “It was my little moment of, ‘Oh my god I’m late,’ and ‘I’m going to die,’” she said.
Downtown San Francisco is “still a pretty scary place to ride a bike,” said Roskowski. “I mean, if you have local knowledge, and if you’ve got the map, and you know exactly where to cut through, you can navigate this city. But we really need to do better in our cities. We can do better.”
Martha Roskowski. Photo: Jonathan Maus/Bike Portland
Roskowski is the director of the Bikes Belong Foundation’s Green Lane Project, an effort to facilitate partnerships between six American cities implementing protected bike lanes. The project’s goal, she says, is to give these cities a boost by sharing best planning practices and research on the benefits of protected bike lanes. In short, the idea is to help “good” bicycling cities become “great,” she said.
At a forum last night hosted by the SF Bicycle Coalition, Roskowski shared her thoughts on San Francisco’s progress compared with the five other Green Lane cities: Austin, Memphis, Portland, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Praising the SFMTA’s recently-released Draft Bicycle Strategy, she noted San Francisco’s grand vision, which is hampered by time-consuming planning processes and a lack of commitment to fund bicycling.
“I think of all of our cities, you guys have the potential to really change the course of this city,” said Roskowski. “If you’re willing to stand up and say, ‘Yes we will do it.’ It will take some money — in the grand scheme of money, it is not astronomical amounts. If you look at the Bicycle Strategy, and you look at what the investment would take to get to the Amsterdam/Copenhagen level, it’s a drop in the bucket of the ‘great big spending’ of the city. It’s really a question of priorities, and we the people drive the priorities of our communities.”
That sentiment was echoed by SFMTA board member Joél Ramos at the forum. During his study trip to Copenhagen last year, funded by Bikes Belong, Ramos described the striking sight of an elderly couple bicycling arm-in-arm in a protected bikeway on a major thoroughfare. ”We can completely change the paradigm of the cycling experience with these cycle tracks,” he said.
