Streetsblog San Francisco

BART released results Friday from its survey of riders’ attitudes toward the pilot program that lifted the rush-hour ban on bikes each Friday in August. Although BART and media reports have called the findings “split” and “varied,” the responses in some key areas look promising.

The vast majority of the more than 7,500 respondents felt that lifting the ban had little or no impact on their commute. As BART board member Robert Raburn put it to the Chronicle: “Many of the passengers just shrugged it off and said, ‘What’s the difference?’”

Here are the survey highlights, as summed up in a statement from BART:

Findings tending to support eliminating the blackouts included:

• 90% of respondents aware of the pilot who rode during the commute reported they did not personally experience any problems related to it. (Of the 10% who did experience problems, the most commonly cited problems were bikes blocking aisles, doorways and seats; bikes entering crowded trains; and bikes running into or brushing up against people.)
• When asked if lifting the blackout would impact their likelihood to ride BART, 25% said they would be more likely to ride. (10% would be less likely to ride and 66% would be equally as likely to ride.) “Interestingly, almost half the respondents skipped this question, which could mean that they were not sure of the answer (unable to anticipate if they would change their behavior or simply thought allowing bikes would have no impact on their likelihood to ride BART)” the survey states.

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The California State Assembly passed a bill yesterday that would require motorists to provide three feet of space when passing bicyclists. SB 1464, which passed with a 50-16 vote, is expected to be signed by Governor Jerry Brown in September following a “largely procedural” approval by the State Senate, which already passed the bill in May, according to the California Bicycle Coalition.

Thousands of supporters wrote their Assembly members in recent weeks to urge a “yes” vote in a campaign spearheaded by TransForm and the CBC. The bill, according to the CBC, has “none of the organized opposition that fought SB 910,” the 3-foot passing bill that was vetoed by Brown last year. At the time, Brown said he was responding complaints from the California Highway Patrol and the American Automobile Association over a provision that would have required drivers to slow down to 15 MPH to pass if providing three feet was unfeasible. Instead, SB 1464 would require drivers in that situation to “slow down to a speed that is reasonable and prudent given traffic and roadway conditions and only pass when it’s safe to do so.”

The debate in the Assembly yesterday offered a glimpse of certain legislators’ views on cycling.

“This is a common sense approach to safety for bicyclists,” said Assembly Member Steven Bradford, a Democrat who represents the 51st District in Los Angeles. “Where it is unsafe to move over three feet, drivers have the discretion of just slowing down and passing a bicyclist.”

Three Assembly members spoke in opposition to the bill, all Republicans. Assembly Member Diane Harkey, representing the 73rd District in Orange County, eschewed the responsibilities of drivers to watch out for vulnerable street users and said more of the onus should be placed on bicyclists.

The bill, said Harkey, “Allows for lawsuits on motorists who are trying to do the right thing, but for some reason or another, a cyclist comes up behind, maybe in a blind corner, and the cyclist thinks he has the right-of-way and maybe is going full speed ahead, and knows that he’s got the law on his side, however, he may not have the poundage on his side.”

“Just because you have the right-of-way, doesn’t mean that you will survive or live,” added Harkey. “The cycling has gotten a little bit out of control. They are not cars.”

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A state bill that would require drivers to give three feet of leeway when passing bicyclists in California is headed to the State Assembly for a vote this Friday.

TransForm and the California Bicycle Coalition are calling on supporters to email their Assembly members and urge them to vote “yes.” If approved by the Assembly, the bill could be signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in September, bringing California in line with 21 other states and the District of Columbia, which have similar laws.

Support for the bill looks strong. The bill sailed through the State Senate in May, and by yesterday afternoon, supporters had sent at least 1,340 letters to their Assembly members, according to the CBC. The real question remaining is whether the bill will be signed by Governor Brown, who vetoed a previous version of the bill last year.

The new bill was modified to address Brown’s complaints about a provision which would have required drivers to slow down to 15 MPH if they are unable to safely provide three feet of room. Instead, the bill would require drivers in that situation to “slow down to a speed that is reasonable and prudent given traffic and roadway conditions and give the bicyclists as much clearance as feasible.”

San Francisco’s first on-street, two-way protected bikeway is nearly complete, featuring bicycle traffic signals and green intersection bike markings. The bikeway, which is separated from motor vehicles by a fence and concrete median, provides a safer connection from Bayview and Hunter’s Point to Third Street and the north-south bike lanes on Illinois Street.

“It’s exciting to see this much-needed improvement in the southeastern part of San Francisco, where there is so much potential for great bicycling,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the SF Bicycle Coalition. “We are hearing from a lot of people that this is making a real difference in improving their bike commutes. We look forward to a lot more improvements in the area, such as Bayshore Boulevard and the eastern half of Cesar Chavez.”

Construction of the bikeway, a project of the Port of SF and the SF Municipal Transportation Agency [PDF], began in March and was originally scheduled to be completed in May, though it’s unclear why it was delayed.  The fence was completed in May, and the striping was finished by July. The bike traffic signal at the Mendell Street intersection was activated last week, though an SFMTA staffer said there’s a delay with activating the signal at the three-way intersection of Cargo Way, Illinois and Amador Streets, at the bikeway’s west end. There, the bikeway splits into separate one-way painted bike lanes that end at Third Street.

The bike traffic signals create a dedicate phase for bike traffic to cross, separate from another signal phase for motor vehicles to turn across the path of the bikeway.

Green-backed sharrows were also installed to guide bicycle riders through the Illinois/Amador intersection, and in the coming weeks green paint will also be added to a waiting area for bicyclists crossing Cargo Way onto northbound Illinois. At the east end of the bikeway, the intersection of Cargo Way and Jennings Street was converted from a two-way stop sign intersection to a four-way stop.

One other notable touch added to the project is the visible wayfinding signage at the bikeway’s west entrance — certainly not a typical feature on bike routes in SF.

Check out more photos after the break.

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We recently wrote about the benefits to bicycle riders that come from temporarily removing car parking at construction sites. But there are other times when construction can do just the opposite, throwing them into harm’s way.

At the very same construction site at 1844 Market Street, where we pointed out that parking removal had improved conditions for bicycle commuters climbing the hill to the Wiggle, crews last Friday set up a dangerous and perplexing labyrinth for evening rush hour bicycle traffic. To make room for what appeared to be a concrete pouring machine, the parking, bicycle, and right-most traffic lanes were closed, leaving no choice but to merge into a lane with car traffic and trolley tracks, or, as most bike commuters chose, to delicately negotiate the extremely narrow space between the trolley tracks and reflective road bumps.

Residents of any major city are used to putting up with inconveniences for construction. But in this all-too-common situation, people were thrown into dangerous conditions with virtually no guidance about how to pass safely aside from a sign reading, “Bikes allowed use of full lane” (even if the lane has tracks, that’s apparently all that’s required by law [PDF]). The sidewalk was also closed, with vague signage asking pedestrians to detour to the other side of the street, leading some to walk in the road.

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With bikes let loose on this morning’s rush hour BART commute, all signs indicate that things went as smoothly — if not better — than usual. Our most recent search on the Twittersphere turns up not a single complaint, and reps from the East Bay and San Francisco Bicycle Coalitions, as well as BART, are reporting generally positive comments.

On a KQED radio forum this morning, East Bay Bike Coalition Executive Director Renee Rivera said one bike-to-BART commuter told her he had more room on his train, since he no longer had to compete with a backup of bike commuters that normally fills the cars up immediately after the end of the blackout period.

“He actually had an easier experience this morning,” she said. “It was less crowded, and it made me realize we’re actually distributing the bikes better throughout the system by allowing them during the commute hours.”

Whether you commute with or without a bike, be sure to let BART know how your trip goes as the pilot runs through four more Fridays.

Check out more photos from this morning on the SF Bike Coalition’s Flickr page, listen to the entire KQED forum here, and check out a video below just posted by BART.

A long-awaited bicycle connection linking Market Street to northbound Polk Street is on the horizon. The two southernmost blocks of Polk, which currently only allow southbound traffic, could get a protected contra-flow bike lane by this time next year.

The project, which would add a northbound bike lane separated by a concrete median [PDF], was part of the 2009 SF Bike Plan but left unapproved by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors — one of 15 such projects. The space for the contra-flow lane would come from a car parking lane and some existing buffer space, and it would extend as a painted bike lane past City Hall to connect to the existing bike lane which begins at McAllister Street.

“This project has been stalled for far too many years, leaving an intimidating gap along a critical north-south bike route,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the SF Bicycle Coalition. “Even as an experienced bicyclist, I feel uncomfortable riding on the streets parallel to this section of Polk Street, but that’s the only legal alternative. The city needs to move with more urgency to build the bikeway on this southern end of Polk Street and stop leaving people biking in the lurch here.”

The delay was apparently due to unresolved technical design negotiations with managers of the adjacent Bill Graham Auditorium and the Archstone Fox Plaza apartment building, each of which has a loading dock entrance which the bike lane would cross. However, an SFMTA report issued in June [PDF] said agency staff planned to present proposed designs to those stakeholders as well as the SF Department of Public Health, located at Polk and Grove Streets (Streetsblog has put in a request to SFMTA for an update on those negotiations). The project’s environmental impact report was approved as part of the Bike Plan, but the final design would still need to be approved at a public hearing and go through the SFMTA Board.

SFMTA planners are also looking at including a left-turn bike box at the intersection of Market, Polk, and Tenth Streets, which would provide a waiting area for bicyclists on eastbound Market to make a two-step turn onto northbound Polk. However, according to this month’s SFMTA report [PDF] to the SF Bicycle Advisory Committee, that addition would be complicated by the ongoing construction of a tower at 1401 Market, which will occupy a traffic lane until January 2014. “[SFMTA] staff is looking at options at the intersection to accommodate the traffic and bike box,” the report says.

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If you follow just about any major media coverage of street etiquette and safety, by now you’ve probably seen a piece vilifying people on bikes for “running” stop signs. But hop on a bike yourself, and you’ll start to see why safely rolling and yielding at stop signs makes sense.

The stop sign law in effect in almost every state has a fundamental flaw: It assumes that bicycles are just like cars, creating the unrealistic expectation that someone on a bike should make a full stop at every stop sign, even when there are plainly no cars or pedestrians nearby.

The problem with this is that it effectively criminalizes the way that people naturally negotiate stop sign intersections on a bike: by slowing, checking for traffic, and being prepared to yield to others. Try the experiment a million times, and you’ll get the same results: everyone, including SF police officers (and probably the lawmakers themselves), will negotiate this way.

The reason behind this is, basically, that operating a 30-pound bicycle is quite different from driving a multi-ton, motorized vehicle. A bicycle doesn’t encase the user in a bulky metal frame that hinders vision. Bicycles can also stop on a dime compared to cars. It’s for these reasons that when driving a car, the care needed to avoid a crash is drastically higher.

To reflect this reality, Idaho amended its stop sign law to allow bicycle riders to treat stop signs as yield signs. This means that while a bicycle rider still can’t blow through stop signs or violate anyone’s right-of-way — which is dangerous and should be enforced — they are allowed to slow down, check for traffic, and proceed legally. The law has clarified expectations between road users, and, as the above video (produced by Spencer Boomhower in support of an effort in Oregon to pass an Idaho-style law) notes, it has a 30-year track record.

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Contrary to what the name implies, bike lanes in San Francisco have cars in them all the time. Presumably, a car left with blinking hazard lights on means the driver is just “running in for a minute,” as if to minimize the impact of endangering people on bicycles.

Maybe, after biking into traffic around one of these blinking cars, you’ve wondered how long the scofflaw driver actually leaves the vehicle there, but you never have time to actually wait and see. Personally, being a (perhaps naïve) optimist when it comes to human decency, I’d expect the car to be gone within a few minutes.

Well, recently I found some free time to do an unplanned, unscientific experiment to see how long a driver would leave his car blocking the bike lane on Folsom at 17th Street.

Of course, no generalizations can be drawn from a single random bike lane blocker. But in this one case, here’s the short answer: The driver left 20 minutes after I arrived, and only when a parking control officer arrived to issue a ticket.

Allow me to start from the beginning. At first, I’d only stopped in front of the car to take some stock photos of people on bikes being forced into motor traffic — always useful to have on hand for a potential Streetsblog story highlighting such issues. However, after about 10 minutes it struck me that the driver had been gone for quite a while (who knows how long he’d been there before I arrived?), so I decided to call the violation in to the SFMTA’s parking and traffic hotline.

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