Streetsblog San Francisco

“If the increase continues, the time is not very distant when not to own and ride a bicycle will be a confession that one is not able-bodied, is exceptionally awkward, or is hopelessly belated.”
—“The Bicycle Festival,” July 13, 1895 New York Times

The bicycle came to San Francisco during the last quarter of the 19th century. Like other places, it first developed based on wooden wheels, similar to those that were bearing stagecoaches and being drawn by horses. Horse-drawn streetcars were the predominant mode of transit in the 1870s, peaking in the 1880s, at a time when the individual horse was also still a major source of personal transportation.

And then came the velocipede, an odd device that attracted some early adopters of the era. Here’s Emperor Norton, a fellow who was adept at self-marketing long before Facebook made it a basic survival skill!

The boneshakers were aptly named, running over heavily rutted streets on solid wooden wheels, eventually improved by coating the in solid rubber. The bicycle was not a transit option at that early stage, but a novelty, and a device that attracted the adventurous few who were ready to break with the limits of human powered locomotion. In “The Winged Heel” column in the San Francisco Chronicle of January 25, 1879, the writer fully grasps the possibilities:

“The bicycle ranks among those gifts of science to man, by which he is enabled to supplement his own puny powers with the exhaustic forces around him. He sits in the saddle, and all nature is but a four-footed beast to do his bidding. Why should he go a foot, while he can ride a mustang of steel, who knows his rider and never needs a lasso?.. The exhilaration of bicycling must be felt to be appreciated. With the wind singing in your ears, and the mind as well as body in a higher plane, there is an ecstasy of triumph over inertia, gravitation, and the other lazy ties that bind us. You are traveling! Not being traveled.”

(I have to admit a great appreciation for that last aphorism, echoing through time a later motto of Processed World magazine that I helped produce in the 1980s: Are you doing the processing? Or are you being processed?)

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The wonderful filmmakers at California is a Place have done another short about bicycles in the Bay Area, this one focused on Godspeed Courier in San Francisco. As they did in Scrapertown, filmmakers Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari have captured a small vignette of a distinctive addition to bicycling in California with a beautiful eye. Check it out on their website for better watching.

Justin Ancheta Performs at the 2010 Bicycle Music Festival Parade from John Hamilton on Vimeo.

Hundreds of people turned out over the weekend for the largest 100 percent bicycle-powered music festival in the world. This year's Bicycle Music Festival began with a day venue in Golden Gate Park, and ended with an evening of performances at Pavement to Park's Showplace Triangle. One of the big highlights was the LiveOnBike parade that wound its way through the streets of San Francisco featuring live bands. It was the first time the mobile concert ride had received an official parade permit from the city.

In the above video, Streetfilms' John Hamilton captures a great reggae tune from Justin Ancheta, who plays guitar and sings while maintaining a careful balancing act as he's pedaled around on a bicycle trailer/stage, with a human-powered band alongside.  Also, don't miss the performance by the Derailleurs at Showplace (below). Congratulations to organizer Paul Freedman, aka Fossil Fool of Rock the Bike (who you see in the video on his towering creation, El Arbol), and all his crew for making it such a success!

Visiting the ghostly motor city these days is an eye-opening and surprisingly inspiring experience. The city has fallen from more than 2 million residents a generation ago to around 800,000 today. A great deal of the land area where homes and factories once filled the blocks are now expansive vacant lots, masquerading as greenways in this wet June, filled with grasses and wildflowers. Some of these vacant lots have been converted into urban farms, but the larger majority is simply empty, reverting to some version of nature. Wild pheasants skitter across the vacant lots while songbirds, from bright red cardinals to brilliant yellow finches, fill the trees and bushes with their cheerful sounds.

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Editor's note: This is the first in a series of dispatches from Copenhagen and Amsterdam from Leah Shahum, the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition who is on sabbatical in Europe. 

More than 1,000 bicycling leaders from nearly 60 countries are gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark to oooh and aaah, share and compare, and, above all else, challenge ourselves to step it up back home.

For a dozen of us from the Bay Area, the Velo-City Global Conference is a chance to experience the much-praised Copenhagen bicycling environment and to bring home ideas and inspiration at a time when our own region could be on the cusp of awakening to the benefits of great bicycling cities.

"In the Bay Area, people are starting to realize that this is the future, in terms of our development. And cycling is an integral part of that," says Corinne Winter, Executive Director of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition.

In presentations from biking advocates from Europe, North America, South America, and Asia, it is clear that cities are now considered the most vital frontier for increasing and improving bicycling, particularly as more people move to urban areas.

"Cycling is the most obvious way to encourage more mobility no matter which corner of the earth you come from," says Bo Asmus Kjeldgaard, Copenhagen's Mayor of the Technical and Environmental Administration, who spoke to the eager crowd. "Copenhagen is just a drop in the ocean…but the power of our example is not to be missed. Cities need to look beyond their national borders and raise the bar worldwide."

Copenhagen clearly takes its role seriously as a pioneering bicycling city and wants to serve as a model for the rest of us. The numbers are impressive: 37 percent of Copenhageners ride bicycles to work and school, though the city's leadership is not satisfied with this and aims to increase that to 50 percent by 2015. More than 350 kilometers of physically separated bikeways grace the city's streets, and plans are underway to expand the already-impressive bicycling network with more dedicated bike space and improved intersections.

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(Editor's note: This story originally appeared on the SFBC's blog)

Natalie Galatzer has been up working since 11:30 pm yesterday. By the time you read this, the petite, curly-haired, 26 year-old will have ridden her bike from her home in the Mission to her kitchen in the Marina, baked more than 70 pies, jumped back on her bike and delivered around the city. If you’re lucky, you may be eating one of her sweet or savory pies for lunch today.

Galatzer is one of San Francisco’s “entrepedalers,” a growing group of individuals who have made careers out of distributing food — and sometimes cooking it — from their bikes. 

When I met Galatzer last week I made the mistake of driving to meet her. I was 30 minutes late after struggling with a carshare which happened to be hidden down an alley behind a locked gate. Wearing her headphones and looking impeccably clean for someone who just baked dozens of pies from scratch, she met me out front.

“When do the parking meters turn on around here?” I asked, fumbling with coins. 

“I have no idea,” she replies with a laugh. “I’ve never driven here.”

Galatzer, like her fellow entrepedalers, has been getting lots of attention lately. The Bold Italic and Daily Candy have both written about her (significantly increasing her sales). Interest in San Francisco’s “street food via bicycle” scene is becoming more popular as passionate foodies in search of creative outlets, extra income, or a full time job take to the streets. Many of them don’t own cars. All of them love their bikes.

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San Jose kicked off its first ViaVelo Saturday with the opening of seven blocks of San Fernando Street downtown to bicycle riders, skaters, and pedestrians who enjoyed five hours of car-free space. Several hundred people showed up, many of them families and the burgeoning young fixed-gear crowd, riding bikes and socializing on a brilliant spring day.

San Jose joins San Francisco and San Mateo county (whose Streets Alive was mostly rained out last month) in hosting the increasingly popular events, which are modeled on the enormous ciclovia in Bogota, Colombia. San Francisco has held three of the nine Sunday Streets of 2010 and Oakland will premiere its first Oaklavia on June 27th.

Organizers of ViaVelo were upbeat about the turnout and the day's events, suggesting that if there is enough positive public feedback, the city would like to make the events a tradition next year.

"It's nice not having to worry about cars, to see families with their kids out, to see families happy and having fun, rather than worrying about how to cross the street or if it's safe to ride a bike," said John Brazil, Bike Coordinator for the San Jose Department of Transportation. "I know that all the organizers and many of the sponsors would like to see this continue, so hopefully the community will tell their elected officials they like it and it's a priority."

As one of the primary community partners involved in organizing ViaVelo, the San Jose Bike Party led various feeder rides to and from the event. Several rides from downtown went to points of interest along San Jose's extensive trail system.

"I love the fact that San Jose is becoming a bike city and putting so much focus on it," said Ian Emmons, a Bike Party organizer attending ViaVelo with his son. "I think we've got a ways to go before we catch up with Portland and 7 miles of closed streets, but we're working on it."

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Let's just say right away that Critical Mass is a bike party, and the San Jose Bike Party has a lot more similarities to Critical Mass than differences. A half-dozen San Francisco and Berkeley Critical Mass veterans took a field trip to join the San Jose Bike Party on Friday night as it cruised through the heart of Silicon Valley. We piled onto a "Baby Bullet" Caltrain that got us into downtown Sunnyvale well before the 8 p.m. starting time. (Along the way we pondered how many cyclists it takes to make a Critical Mass and concluded that it takes enough to break into different factions that don't like each other!)

After leaving the train, we soon came upon a couple with a big couch on a bike trailer, their two dogs occupying the seats of honor, and a sound system ready to pump some tunes from within. As we approached the gathering point, not really sure how to distinguish one intersection from another along the sprawling avenues of the South Bay, we were excited to see feeder rides streaming in from all directions, numbering anywhere from a dozen to nearly 100. Riders gathering in a big parking lot, hanging with friends, energy and anticipation rising.

By the time we got rolling there were over 1,000 riders, and possibly twice that many. Unlike San Francisco, there weren't too many white hipsters in this ride. Most of the crowd was Latino and Asian youth on all manner of bikes from beaters to chrome low-riders, and a smaller number of "properly" garbed older white cyclists in yellow reflective clothing with helmets -- classic bike nerds, in other words.

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San Francisco today was named the sixth best city in the nation for cycling by editors of Bicycling Magazine, the best ranking of any city in California. Bicycling editors chose San Francisco in part because of the huge growth in cycling over the past two years and despite the injunction that has prevented the city from substantially improving its bicycle infrastructure.

"San Francisco has one of the most vibrant bike cultures in the nation and in spite of the injunction ridership is way up," said Bicycling Editor-in-Chief Loren Mooney.

Mooney said she has been following the progress of the injunction and has been excited by the recent improvements to the city's streets, such as the protected bicycle lane on Market Street. According to Mooney, San Francisco ranked as high as it did because of the city's bicycle culture and community and because of the hard work of the bicycle advocates in the face of adversity.

Two years ago, when Bicycling did its last ranking, the magazine segregated cities by size; San Francisco received an Honorable Mention behind Portland, Denver, and Seattle in the category of cities sized 500,000 to 1,000,000,

"Not only is San Francisco strong now, it will be great to see where they are in two years on our next list," said Mooney.

Mayor Gavin Newsom's spokesperson Brian Purchia said they were pleased to be the highest rated city in Calfornia. "With street improvements under way and working closely with the cycling community, our ranking is sure to rise."

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum was thrilled with the news. "Despite some unexpected roadblocks in the past few years, we are still experiencing unprecedented growth in the numbers of people choosing bicycling for transportation," said Shahum. "Today 53 percent more people are riding compared to just three years ago."

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In Guadalajara last September I met dozens of cycling activists from around Mexico, and one remarkable woman from Quito, Ecuador, Heleana Zambonino. While riding in a big Critical Mass in Guadalajara, she told me about the cycling scene in Quito, and her organization CiclóPolis. Her story left me inspired and a bit embarrassed. They’ve accomplished a great deal more in a half dozen years in Quito than we have in 20 years in San Francisco!

Chris Carlsson: You work for CiclóPolis, yes? Can you describe the organization, its history, its mission, and your role in it?

Todas en Bici logo.

Heleana Zambonino: By the time I attended the 2nd Annual Mexican Cycling Congress in Guadalajara I was working as Project Coordinator at the gender inclusion program “Todas en Bici” (TeB) supported by ICE (Interface for Cycling Expertise – The Netherlands) and as bike instructor for children and ladies. The aim of TeB project was to include women traditionally marginalized from access to bikes as a means of transportation. Also TeB builds a network of biking women who have tea and chat about their doubts when biking, also building self-confidence and awareness about the gender exclusion and harassment we women have to endure day by day while walking, biking, or using public transportation. (Unfortunately I was too busy as a grad student, so I sadly quit working for CiclóPolis.) CiclóPolis is about 7 years old; they work as a bridge between local government and residents taking back public spaces for family amusement from unhealthy traffic jams which grow geometrically each month in the city. They manage several bicycle advocacy projects as well the organization of the CicloPaseo de Quito, which is a conquest of citizens over automobile visual, environmental and spatial contamination.

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