The Think Bike rendering for Polk Street envisions curbside green bikeways with bus-bulbs and other improvements for Muni riders.

The delegation of Dutch experts who were in San Francisco this week for a series of Think Bike workshops with city officials, bike advocates, transportation planners and others honed in on three critical corridors: Market Street between 5th and 9th, Polk Street between Broadway and Union streets, and The Wiggle.

What resulted from the day-long workshops, survey rides and discussions was a series of recommendations based on feedback from the Dutch experts and workshop participants. The ideas were presented at the final session Tuesday night, which was hosted by SFMTA Transportation Director Ed Reiskin and ended with a speech from Supervisor David Chiu.

On Market Street, the vision was a green carpet of “continuous, safe, attractive” bike lanes that separate cyclists and motor vehicles while reducing the speed and volume of private autos. The recommendations could be incorporated into the Better Market Street planning process, said Kit Hodge, the deputy director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

The SFBC has been pushing for a continuous ribbon of bikeways on Market for awhile now. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed Chiu’s resolution calling on the SFMTA to implement more immediate pilot projects on Market Street to make it car-free ahead of a 2015 makeover.

The suggestion for Polk Street was curbside protected bike lanes, bus bulbs and other enhancements that “improves the pedestrian experience and enhances transit access.” Polk Street, a major north-south connection for cyclists, is in dire need of improved bike facilities. The ideas could be implemented in 2013 as part of a planned repaving.

Along The Wiggle, on Scott Street, the focus was on converting a few blocks into a “slow shared street,” with a planted traffic circle at the Page Street intersection. This would deter the cut-through traffic on Scott. There would also be sidewalk plantings for more greenery.

“With the Wiggle, I think it’s a very exciting vision that draws on the community conversations that have been happening for awhile in those neighborhoods and has a lot more emphasis on greenery and neighborhood traffic calming,” said Hodge.

The Think Bike workshops are also happening in other cities across the U.S., including Los Angeles. Damien at Streetsblog L.A. notes that one Dutch official was pretty excited about San Francisco’s revolutionary parklets program.

“What’s heartening about these ideas is nothing is crazy new. It’s definitely fresh thinking, and it was wonderful that people from different worlds could collaborate so well together, but I think it’s also a testament that a lot of neighborhood and community groups have been proposing a lot of these ideas for awhile,” said Hodge. “To see them put on paper in an even more elegant way was fun to watch.”

Download the Tuesday night presentations here: Market [pdf], Polk [pdf] and The Wiggle [pdf]. And if you didn’t catch Leah Shahum’s Streetsblog essay reflecting on her sabbatical in the Netherlands, and how a “Dutch Touch” can help San Francisco bicycle to greatness, by all means do. It’s a great piece.

Green bike lanes are not yet an officially approved traffic control device in California. Photo: Bryan Goebel

For decades, a little known Caltrans advisory committee dominated by highway and automobile interests has been setting the design standards for signs, signals and pavement markings for California’s urban streets. If a city wants a green bike lane, it has to be approved by the California Traffic Control Devices Committee (CTCDC), which also develops the state’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD).

The problem, say advocates and city transportation planners, is the committee, which only meets three times a year, doesn’t include representation from all road users, and requires such an arduous process to do something innovative that many cities don’t even bother. It’s chaired by a manager of the Automobile Club of Southern California (AAA).

“Essentially what you have are no road user groups participating in decisions about traffic control devices that are meant to control the behavior of all road users,” said Jim Brown, the communications director for the California Bicycle Coalition (CBC).

An agency can get around the state process by getting approval for an experiment from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), which sets federal standards, but it still has to get CTCDC backing to make a treatment permanent. Green bike lanes that have been installed in cities like San Francisco and Long Beach are considered trials, and have not gotten the state’s official blessing.

“We need to open up this idea of a state highway function dictating the design standards and the traffic control devices for urban streets,” said Timothy Papandreou, the deputy director of transportation planning for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). “There are unique differences on urban streets.”

A bill working its way through the Legislature and being pushed by the California Bicycle Coalition would require the CTCDC to consult with groups representing “bicyclists, children, persons with disabilities, motorists, movers of commercial goods, pedestrians, users of public transportation, and seniors.”

It’s the beginning of a process that the CBC hopes will lead to the state adopting bike standards similar to the recent bikeway guidelines adopted by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), which incorporated best practices from all over the world. Caltrans is currently working on updating the state’s MUTCD and has adopted a complete streets policy.

“If we could get California to adopt these guidelines as a standard, then cities could try some of the facilities that are reflected in that guide with the protection that comes from doing something that has been endorsed,” said Brown. “It’s the lack of endorsement that makes communities reluctant to give things a shot.”

Liability is also one of the main concerns that prevents cities from moving forward with innovative street treatments, said Ryan Snyder, a Los Angeles-based transportation consultant and longtime bicycle advocate. He feels it is sometimes overblown, though.

“The first thing lawyers for the plaintiffs always ask is ‘did you follow established standards and guidelines’? If you don’t, the chance of a city losing a lawsuit is pretty high,” said Snyder. At the same time, it’s good to experiment, gather data and be cautious before establishing a standard because “there have been a lot of mistakes made in road design,” he added.

The SFMTA’s Papandreou worries that if the California standards aren’t changed soon, San Francisco will have trouble meeting its goal of making 20 percent of all trips by bicycle by 2020. That’s because obtaining state and federal funding for innovative treatments such as green bike lanes can be difficult if the treatment is not a recognized state standard.

“In all of our understanding of what gets people to ride their bicycles it’s really about design, and the design on the street. Funding aside, I’m not sure how we’re going to meet the 20/20 goals unless we put out more innovative designs,” he said. “It’s what creates that ridership and allows people to ride their bicycles.”

Photos: Bryan Goebel

Working in 80 degree weather, smiling SFMTA crews installed two green bike boxes in both directions of Market Street at Van Ness Avenue today, the latest pieces of innovative infrastructure to grace the city’s main thoroughfare, which continues to become a much friendlier street for people who bike, walk and take transit.

In addition to providing bicyclists an opportunity to queue up in front of waiting autos, the bike boxes are designed to prevent bike riders from entering the crosswalks on Market Street. Recent surveys have shown that in addition to growing numbers of bicyclists, pedestrian volumes have also risen on Market Street, thanks to a number of improvements the SFMTA began implementing in 2009.

It took SFMTA crews nearly 5 hours to install the two bike boxes on eastbound and westbound Market at Van Ness Avenue today. The preformed themoplastic is designed so that “both skid resistance and retroreflectivity are maximized,” according to the manufacturer,” Flint Trading Inc of Thomasville, North Carolina.

In addition to the green bike boxes, the SFMTA is expected to fill in the gaps on Market Street between Octavia Boulevard and 8th Street before Bike to Work Day May 12. Crews will color in the remaining standard bike lanes with green paint, and add soft-hit posts on some sections. In addition, the sharrows across Market at Van Ness will be enhanced. A combination of green pavement and white sharrows will guide bike riders through the intersection.

A fifth green bike box will be installed sometime this week or next on westbound Market Street at Gough, but it will likely be done in the early morning hours because daytime work would affect somel Muni lines. See more photos after the break and on my Flickr page.

Because drivers are allowed to turn right here, the bike box will not extend to the curb. The dashed bike lane leading up to the intersection will eventually become a green dashed bike lane.

I didn't see very many bicyclists using the new green bike boxes, but that behavior is likely to change as they get more accustomed to them. The bike boxes are also meant to help keep bike riders out of the crosswalk. The dashed bike lane here will also become a green dashed bike lane.

Today's sunny weather meant shortened drying times, which allowed crews to work faster on this bike box.

In Portland, the green bike lanes are connected to the bike box. The SFMTA says because right turns are allowed onto Van Ness, that can't be done for the bike boxes installed today. However, a similar configuration may be done on other green bike boxes on Market Street. We're trying to get some clarification from the SFMTA. Photo: itdp

Photo: Joshua Hart

As one of the certified bicycle safety instructors working with San Francisco’s Bike Ed program, the most important safety concept we try to get across to our students is that cyclists should never ride closer than 4 feet from any parked car. The reason is that getting ‘doored’ is the single most common cause of injury by motor vehicle users to people riding bikes in San Francisco.

People have been injured and even killed by riding in what is ostensibly a ‘safe’ space. Suddenly a door opens in front of them and they either have to swerve into motor traffic or hit the door itself.

Inevitably a student asks us, “But what about the bike lanes I see all over the city? A lot of them are totally within the ‘door zone.’ Where am I supposed to ride if the bike lane isn’t even safe?”

It’s a good question. Many of the city’s bike lanes have been built so that there is no clearance whatsoever between an open door and a passing cyclist. In the worst case scenario, a person with an older American car (Cadillacs have the longest doors) parks lazily, 2-3 feet from the curb. When they open their door, it can block the entire bike lane.

You might ask, isn’t it the responsibility of the driver to look over the shoulder before opening their door? And you would be right. CVC code 22517 requires that a vehicle occupant check for traffic before opening a door. Yet in the real world, people open their doors without checking all the time. And a person on a bicycle cannot reasonably be expected to look into every car to check whether there is someone inside. Under state law, cyclists have the right to ride where it is safe, which courts have affirmed is outside the dangerous door zone (CVC 21202).

Photo: Joshua Hart

So why are we designing bicycle facilities that are dangerous to use?  According to Caltrans chapter 1000 design manual [pdf], a bike lane adjacent to on-street parking must be at least 1.5m (just under 5 feet) wide. The minimum parking lane width is 7 feet (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency standards require 8 feet). Essentially that means if you are going to follow widely recommended safety practice and ride out of the door zone, but still in the bike lane, you have about one foot left to maneuver.

Photo: Bryan Goebel

On San Francisco’s Fell St, the city’s designated east to west bicycle route, despite the new green paint, if you want to ride a bike safely, you are put in the unsafe position of staying within a one foot strip between the door zone and the motor traffic zooming by to the right.

Even if you are Kate Moss on a bicycle, you need more than one foot of width to safely maneuver. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) recommends that cyclists are given at least 4 feet of width (preferably 5 feet) to ride safely. Even if you are an expert at riding your bicycle in exactly a straight line, the likelihood is that you will veer into the door zone, or into the traffic lane at some point along your 3 block running of the gauntlet. If you follow official bicycle safety guidance, you should technically take the next lane over. But drivers see an empty bike lane and a “car lane” blocked by a cyclist in front of them and you have a perfect recipe for road rage.

So what is the solution? First off, bicycle design standards need to be changed to require cross hatch markings that extend 4 feet from a parked car so that even novice cyclists realize this a “no riding” area. If there is insufficient width on the street for a buffer and a bike lane, then a parking or travel lane needs to be removed. If providing for the safety and dignity of all road users is politically infeasible, then the bike lane itself needs to be removed and replaced with sharrows indicating that cyclists should take the travel lane.

It is no longer acceptable to lure people onto bicycles with a network of bicycle lanes that look inviting, but in reality can cause injury or death when used as directed. Our bicycle infrastructure design and our bicycle safety curricula should complement, not contradict, one other.

Image: AASHTO

A bicyclist waits to turn left onto Fell from Scott, where SFPD officers have been ticketing cyclists for running the red light. Photos: Bryan Goebel.

The fact that the intersection hasn't been updated to accommodate the dramatic rise in bicyclists, the most vulnerable users of the road along with pedestrians, apparently doesn't matter to the San Francisco Police Department. According to reports from Streetsblog readers, the SFPD has upped its enforcement along The Wiggle, where increasing numbers of bicyclists are getting ticketed not only for running the red light on Scott, but for rolling through stop signs.

"I've lived here my whole life and I never expected to get a ticket on my bike," said Nate Miller, who was slapped with a ticket one evening last month as he was commuting from his job in the Mission District to his home in the Inner Richmond. "He (the officer) was standing in the bike lane (on Fell) so as soon as you hit it he stopped you and you had to pull over."

Miller said he recognized the officer as being one of about a dozen cops who were on hand recently at an Arco station protest. "He could only ticket so many people at a time so he grabbed one and wrote us a ticket and then three minutes after he was done he'd get another person, and he was just doing this rapid fire."

At the same time, Miller witnessed drivers violating the bike lane, something the officer didn't seem to care about. After arguing with the cop and watching two other bicyclists get ticketed, Miller returned to Scott Street where he began warning other bicyclists. He later encountered a bicyclist with a sound system, and both of them began announcing that everyone pedaling up to the light should stop on the red because there was a cop around the corner. Only one bicyclist decided not to heed the warning, and that person was the only other bicyclist who received a ticket that evening, according to Miller.

"When I was stopping folks and warning them, a lot of people were like, hey, thanks, my friend got a ticket the other day or I got a ticket last week. The guy who had a sound system who was out with me said that in the past week had he had gotten a ticket for running a stop sign on a different part of The Wiggle."

A bicyclist receives a ticket near Steiner and Duboce on The Wiggle.

Targeted Enforcement

From a ticketing standpoint, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has encouraged the SFPD to follow the Bike Plan, and conduct targeted enforcement for both drivers and bicyclists at intersections that have the strongest history of injuries and crashes. The SFPD has not pointed to any such statistics at Fell/Scott, although it leads to a well-known conflict area for bicyclists alongside the troublesome Arco station, where the SFMTA has recently made changes in an effort to reduce conflicts with drivers.

"We're very interested to know whether there is a real injury history at that intersection. We don't want to see anybody turning against red lights, but we do want to make sure that the police are bringing their efforts to those locations that are known to be dangerous, and we haven't had the police really show us that that area actually has a real record of injuries and crashes," said SFBC Program Director Andy Thornley.

While denying that any kind of a sting focused on bicyclists is underway on The Wiggle, Sgt. Troy Dangerfield, a spokesperson for SFPD repeated what the department has often said: the vehicle code should be applied equally to both drivers and bicyclists, even though crashes involving drivers take a far greater toll.

"If you're asking whether the police department thinks that targeted enforcement should be done in areas where there are a lot of crashes, I think we can agree to that. There's no disagreement," said Dangerfield. "But it has to go across the board for everyone."

Dangerfield said the officers who've been out stopping bicyclists on The Wiggle could be responding to complaints from residents.

"It may be, and this is speculation, that people are calling and saying hey, all these bicyclists are running the stop sign here and bicyclists are saying there's no traffic so we can run it, and I know bicyclists feel that way on lights, or stop signs. There's no traffic in either direction so why should we wait, you know? I can't necessarily disagree with that if they make sure everything is clear and it's safe, but again, there are rules and laws and that's what those traffic enforcement signs are there for."

A bicyclist and good citizen warns other bicyclists that police have been ticketing for running the red light.

An Engineering Solution

The SFMTA has begun talking about an engineering solution at the intersection, according to Mike Sallabery, a transportation engineer at the agency.

"We're going to consider some possibilities for giving cyclists protected left turns from Scott onto Fell Street," said Sallabery. "When you’re riding along Scott Street I think the timing could be really optimized for cyclists. So when you get to Scott Street you could potentially have a left-turn arrow waiting for you so you don’t have to slow down."

To start, the SFMTA is going to begin collecting data as early as next week to count the current volume of cars and bicycles at Fell and Scott. 

"We at the MTA are looking at a variety of improvements along The Wiggle because we recognize that it's an important crosstown route," said Sallabery. "A lot of cyclists get funneled into that corridor because of the terrain."

There have also been rumors that the SFMTA is going to paint the left-turn bike lane green. A few weeks ago SFMTA interns were spotted by Streetsblog doing counts on how many drivers were crossing into the bike lane on Scott.

Now that the bike injunction is no longer a tired excuse, the SFMTA should be emboldened to make changes at Fell/Scott to give bicyclists the priority they deserve.

Orange Public Bike in Golden Gate Park. Photo: Public Bikes

Public Bikes, founded by designer Rob Forbes, has positioned itself as a manufacturer of bicycles that are more practical and durable than the carbon-fiber rockets used solely for recreational riding and more stylish and functional than beach cruisers. The target rider, according to the company, is the everyday urbanite who might be inspired to ride a bicycle for most trips if it met their city mobility needs and had a stylish flair. 

"I think a lot of biking culture has been built around that idea that bikes are first for recreation and they get the most visibility in the media from performance athletes," said Forbes. "If you go to a bike store and look at large manufacturers and you look at what's next, it's always lighter materials, from steel frame to carbon, you just always follow this path to lighter, lighter, lighter."

Forbes argued that the growing number of city dwellers who use bicycles as a primary mode of transport need their bicycles to fill a more useful role and come from a wholly new taxonomy than recreational rides. Forbes recounted several stories about the difficulty of finding well-made bicycles that aren't meant solely for speed, including one about a friend of his from Marin, "a pretty athletic guy," who went to a bike shop and was about to spend $1800 on a new road bike, when he asked the shop manager to put a kickstand on it.

"The guy looked at him like, 'you loser,'" said Forbes, and refused to put a kickstand on the bike. His friend walked out without buying anything.

Public Bikes founder Rob Forbes and a chartreuse Diamond bike. Photo: Matthew Roth

The bicycles are marketed as unisex, though they come in two styles, the sloped top-tube Mixtes ("particularly appealing to riders who may wear a skirt or dress to work or for casual wear in the city," according to company spokesperson Dan Nguyen-Tan) and the traditional double triangle Diamonds. All bikes are made from lightweight steel and come in small, medium, or large, with a single-speed or three-speed and eight-speed internal hub transmissions. There will be four colors in the first run: Chartreuse Green, Powder Blue, Cream White, and Orange and the bikes will retail for $650-$1200, depending on the features.

While the bicycles were fabricated in Taiwan, Nguyen-Tan said the company was a proud San Francisco native and he hoped the city's unique bicycle culture would embrace them. Public Bikes will also hold a launch event in New York City in mid-May.

Nguyen-Tan said Public Bikes would stand out from competing bicycles like the Specialized Globe series because of the quality of the design and the bicycle's aesthetic, which is clearly drawn from the styling of European city bikes from the 1950s-1970s. Nearly fifty vintage bikes hang from the walls of the Public Bikes office for inspiration, including a beautiful silver Mercier MecaDural from the early 1950s.

"We think these bikes will feel good when you ride in a city, because they function well but also they look good," said Nguyen-Tan.

The company will also sell apparel, like these Vittoria 1976 clipless pedal shoes. Photo: Matthew Roth

Cream White Mixte with red panniers. Photo: Public Bikes.

Cycling chic in Copenhagen, and this is a cold day in December!

I caught Mikael Colville-Andersen's inspiring talk on urban cycling from the Copenhagen context at San Francisco's SPUR on the last Friday of October. I suggested we could do an interview when I came to Copenhagen in December and he graciously agreed, stepping outside into the drizzling snow at a December 10 awards ceremony he was hosting. (The title of this post is a quote from him when he was on stage at the ceremony, and is a new tag line on his blog too.) They were handing out prizes for the best new designs for the next generation of Copenhagen's bikeshare program. He is well known for his blogging at Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycling Chic. The photos throughout were taken by me in Copenhagen during the last couple of weeks there.

Chris Carlsson: What was your experience in San Francisco? Did you have a good time there?

Mikael Colville-Andersen: I had a brilliant time. I just blogged a film with three of my friends, about Critical Mass.

C: Did you get in to the Halloween Critical Mass?

M: Oh yeah, all the way!

C: I saw you wrote some vaguely critical comments about Critical Mass in general.

M: I have done… it’s just that marketing thing. You’re not selling it if you’re pissing people off. Riding around… I didn’t see any bad behavior. There were so many people at that Critical Mass that it was more tame?

Bike parking takes up incredible amounts of space throughout Copenhagen. This is adjacent to the back of the main train station. Note the two cyclists passing on the separate bikeway. Such sidepaths are ubiquitous in Copenhagen.

This great bike counter is on the Norrebro Bridge, and is the most heavily bicycled street in the world, according to Colville-Andersen. The day before I passed it around 9 pm and there had been 12,126 cyclists that day, and as the bottom number shows, over 2.1 million since June 2009!

On her way in to demonstrate on December 12, this mom and her kids were briefly impeded by the motorcycle cops.

Another busy bicycling intersection, the bridge to Christianshavn. More cycling chic too!

C: In terms of the politics of bicycling, I love your presentation, it’s just great... this notion of subcultures and bicycles: you’re kind of on a rampage about that, it seems, to try to mainstream bicycling. What’s the turning point? Because Copenhagen didn’t have a bike culture all along right? There’s a point where, it happened maybe when you were quite young, suddenly a municipal administration decided to put in the infrastructure?

M: It was there before. You see archive footage, archive photos. We’ve always had masses of people, far more in the 1940s and 50s. And then it started dying off, we started killing it off by expanding roads and taking away separated infrastructure, which we used to have back 100 years ago. So we had to reinvent it. That’s when I was young (I’m 41) in the 1970s with the oil crisis. We had a popular uprising, people in the City Hall square, 20,000 cyclists. These were just regular people on bikes, saying we want better security on the streets, we want separate infrastructure again. And that’s where it all sort of started again. We were killing it off and we  resuscitated it. That’s the angle here.

In the city museum there's a nice small exhibit of cycling past and present, with photo sets like this one, showing 1940s and the present.

A bike bloc organized a DIY shop at the Candy Factory in northern Copenhagen, readying themselves for the big Dec. 16 effort to breach the COP15 perimeter.

The yard at the Candy Factory.

Winter Cycling Chic.

M: You’ll buy it, anyone would buy it. Even if you’ll never look like the most elegant fashionista here in Copenhagen on a bike, it’s still an inspiration. I can just wear my clothes. Open my closet, it’s filled with cycling clothes. It’s definitely happening in North America, in the big cities: New York, Washington, I’ve got loads of photos of regular people. Helmetless as well. The sight of helmetless cyclists is a good sign too no?  Forget about the helmet issue, it’s a sign that you’re doing something right. People are feeling safe, safe enough to make their own decision. You see that and you’re on your way. There’s not that many helmets in San Francisco is there?...

C: No, I’m a big anti-helmet guy in San Francisco. People ride up to me and tell me to get a helmet, or yell out of their car “get a helmet!” This whole mentality is born of this basic idea that you as an individual have to be a good consumer and buy a product to solve the social problem of bad engineering. That’s fucked up! Who thought of that? Because no Americans think critically about the commodification of life. I will never wear a helmet so I can always have this argument.

M: I’m also very stubborn about this.

C: You don’t really need one here. There’s such a lot of courtesy. I haven’t seen any bike-on-bike crashes here. In SF now we have the problem of us long-term wreckless riders whizzing through intersections and having near misses with each other! I’ve had about 5 really close near-misses in the recent past.

M: I’ve been staring at this thing we call bike culture for the past 3 years every single day and I’ve seen 3 or 4 accidents total. There was a bike messenger on the busiest bicycling street in the western world. I didn’t’ see it, I had my back turned. He went over the hood, landed on his shoulder and up again, really aggressive, and the lady was on her way out of the car to check if he was ok, but WHOA she stayed in her car because here he was coming at her with all this aggression and adrenaline. Obviously, he’d just been hit by a car! What happens in the meantime is that 3 or 4 cyclists had rolled up to the stoplight, and one of the girls says to the messenger “you ran the red light!” and another girl said “I saw it too!” and they were defending the motorist. The messenger just shrunk, and the lady was so relieved in the car, and they pulled off and exchanged details. She’s at fault since she’s in a car, but there’s no way you’d have that in your country, where cyclists would be defending the motorist… In three years I saw a few people falling off their bikes on to their bums… you never see bike-to-bike crashes, we don’t go fast enough for that shit.

C: How is it that they sent you as a diplomat? Did you pitch them to hire you?

M: No, they pitched me because of my blogs. Because of the global interest in our bicycle culture, and the City of Copenhagen is a cycling capital. This is all spawned because of my blogs. The whole global fashion bicycle movement is because I took a picture one day and put it on the fucking internet! It’s wild. And Copenhagenize advocacy and a lot of opinions on it and well they came to me.

A Christiania bike crosses in the blue cycling lane.

C: I was so happy when I found your voice of reason here in Denmark. The bike culture here benefits from these things that are reasonable within the context of living in a culture that’s fundamentally Social Democratic. There’s this notion of public goods and public space, and taking care of each other, and kind of being knit together in a slightly tighter way. You’ve seen how we are in the U.S.: We’re completely atomized from each other. Everything is dog-eat-dog, I’m in it for myself, get out of my way, it’s my road, I’m not paying taxes for anything. I think the bike culture has embedded in it the possibility of a more convivial, sharing culture at the heart of it. But you can’t even make that argument overtly in the U.S. without running into weird political problems.

And now, thanks to Elizabeth Press and our sister site Streetfilms.org, a lovely video featuring Mikael Colville-Andersen!

As we reported last month, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA) released an innovative new application for mobile devices that allows users to track their bicycle commuting patterns with a GPS-enabled iPhone or iPod and share those trips with the agency responsible for improving bicycle networks around the city.

Now CycleTracks is compatible on the Android platform, including the Verizon Droid and several models from Sprint and T-Mobile, which means every major mobile carrier has phones that can run the application.

"The iPhone app has been a great success so far," said Billy Charlton, Deputy Director for Technology Services at the TA, in an email. "We now have more than 1,500 bike trips logged by almost 400 users. That's great, especially since it's been raining a lot the past couple weeks."

Charleton said the TA hadn't run thorough analysis yet of the data, but confirmed that they would like more diverse users.

"I can already tell that we need more women using it, and more infrequent cyclists too," said Charleton. "Those may be hard to find but we're doing what we can."

So now that all you Android users can help, get out there and log some trips, dear readers, and pass this along to your friends!

This Oma-fiets (or, Grandma-bicycle, in Dutch) sits for sale at the Market Street storefront of "My Dutch Bike" while a typical "American" bike is pedaled by outside. Photo by Frank Chan.

Seeing an opportunity, Nasirian teamed up with Dutch husband Oscar Mulder to open up a new business to peddle Dutch pedals: My Dutch Bike on Market Street just east of Second Street. Their shop sells a few high-end Dutch city bikes, as well as the bakfiets, the Dutch answer to cargo bikes. Their sales are good enough to keep them in business, she says, although most of their business is online, and they will be moving soon to another location.

My Dutch Bike is just one manifestation of a veritable frenzy of marketing to the fastest-growing segment in the bicycle market: everyday, utilitarian bicycles. It sparks some interesting questions: What can we do to encourage the trend? What will the quintessential American, or San Franciscan, city bike look like?

In every country where bicycles are commonplace transportation, almost every single bike comes equipped with lights, fenders, a rack, and chainguard. In Germany, those items, plus a bell and a kickstand, are mandatory on any bike not sold as a stripped-down "sports bike."

David Baker's "Old Dutch" has all these elements, and the typical Dutch bike geometry - large (28") diameter wheels, very upright posture - that makes them especially elegant for urban transportation. "I have 12 bikes, but this is the one I pick when I go on most trips," Baker says. "It turns the act of riding into this very pleasant and restful ritual." Riding it feels like you're on a "great ship of state."

The fact that his bike is heavy and geared to a slow one-speed is part of the charm to him. He rides for exercise, so a highly efficient bike defeats that purpose. And the large wheels, while being heavier, have less rolling resistance, handle our rough pavement better, and provide more momentum. It helps he does not have to carry his bike up the stairs.

"If our city were serious about promoting bicycle culture, and meeting the MTA's goal of cutting car use in half by 2030 while doubling bicycling and walking, we have to find a way to subsidize new "city bike" purchases."

This is one of the reasons that Gary Fisher thinks that an American "city bike" has to be lightweight. Talking to me from the European bicycle dealers' show in Germany, Fisher explained that most bikes there stay on the ground floor. Also key, he said, is that people there dawdle around on safe bike paths. "In the United States you have to share the street with traffic and it feels safer to keep up a higher speed. In Germany, you just go your own pace."

Industry leaders are always looking for the next electric bikes or the next "mountain bike boom" and many are betting on city bikes for those purposes. Marin's Joe Breeze makes nothing but city bikes these days, and all the big companies have a line of upright bikes with commuting accessories.

Some think that electric bikes are the route to mainstream acceptance of city bicycling in the United States. In Europe, Fisher says, electric bikes "are the absolute rage," accounting for 30 percent of sales by value. Business people love them because their extra cost brings extra profit. From the user's perspective, the bike looks and feels like a regular bike; the lithium ion batteries kick in power only when needed to climb a hill or increase speed. These are not motorcycles; the rider still has to pedal. At an average cost approaching $1,300 each, however, electric-assist bicycles are not the people's bike.

As our bicycle culture develops, will we too get a quintessential American, or San Franciscan city bike, in the same way that the cultures of the Netherlands, Denmark and China, all have bikes so typical of their respective countries?

That's doubtful. Like this city and nation, our city bikes will be probably be diverse.

It does seem important, though, that we usher in the era of the city bike. Nobody has to carefully think through what kind of lights, trunk, and fenders go best with their automobile when they buy it! Nobody has to tuck in their pant legs or adopt an aggressive, athletic posture when they step in their car or walk to the bus. The same has to be true for bicycling if the movement to put the bicycle at the center of urban transportation systems can expect to be successful.

A woman rides a city bike in Amsterdam. Flickr photo: Amsterdamize

Also, let's be honest, they won't be cheap. An adequate bicycle with all the "city bike" accessories will cost at least $500; a good one costs more. That's less than a car, sure, but it's more than a year's worth of transit passes and a prohibitive expense for vast numbers of people.

Here's the answer to sparking that new market in city bikes: government subsidy.

If our city were serious about promoting bicycle culture, and meeting the MTA's goal of cutting car use in half by 2030 while doubling bicycling and walking, we have to find a way to subsidize new "city bike" purchases. We already subsidize transit passes at a cost of several million dollars a year. A one-year program to match the transit subsidy with a bike subsidy - let's say that's $2 million - could provide $250 coupons for the first 8,000 residents to qualify. Measures could be built in to the program to ensure the bikes actually remain in the possession of the intended coupon recipient and not sold for a profit, but even if there's "fraud," the program will promote city bikes and urban bicycling.

Such a program, which we could dub "Cash for Cycling Eco Stimulus," would work better at the national level, of course. Even a tiny program, say, using the $123 million not claimed from the $3 billion "cash for clunkers" auto purchase subsidy program, could provide $200 coupons for 615,000 people, close to the 700,000 who claimed some cash for their "clunker." Even that absurdly small program would be a huge boost to the American bicycle industry, whose sales hover around 13.4 million units annually today.

While San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) Director Ed Reiskin has quietly pushed behind-the-scenes to accelerate Pavement to Parks plazas, the recently announced Market Street trial changes, and other visible projects that reclaim street space for green space and people, some advocates are concerned with how well his agency is coordinating around an arcane, but important process: DPW's five-year repaving plan.

Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich said that at a meeting last month about capital planning he attended at the SFCTA, only four people gave feedback and he was the only one that addressed the problem with inter-agency coordination around the repaving schedule. He believes the city needs to do more to successfully build complete streets under the Complete Streets ordinance and the Better Streets Plan.

In your five-year planning, you have the Complete Streets ordinance, which says if you're doing major street rehab and it's on a transit street, a bike street or a ped street, you ought to have the complimentary project, you ought to build it out as a complete street. Unfortunately they're not dealing with the Complete Streets Ordinance in the way that they ought to, which is coordinating the bike, ped and transit improvements at the same time as they do the repaving.

MTA spokesperson Judson True defended his agency's record, saying that "there is constant coordination looking at the paving schedules. Not just at DPT, but Muni as well." True pointed to Cesar Chavez, Divisadero, and now Market Street as positive examples.

DPW's Ed Reiskin conceded that the advocates' concerns are relevant, and that historically the city has not done enough to coordinate regular repaving with Complete Streets projects.

"I don't think we've [coordinated] as systematically as we should. In the past it has happened ad hoc," said Reiskin, though he has made it a fundamental priority to change the process within his agency to meet the obligation under the ordinance. "What I'm trying to do is institutionalize it. Any time we go do a street, we want to evaluate the potential to fix it, not just repave it. We're training all of our street design folks and making sure they are well versed in the Better Streets Plan design standards."

In reference to the Better Streets Plan, Reiskin said a director's level inter-agency body was convened to prepare for the expected adoption of the plan later this year or early next year.

"What we're talking about is advanced capital planning to leverage our dollars to get the most bang for the buck," he said. "We want to identify the best candidate [streets] based on citywide criteria and use an integrated planning and design process to capture all the needs early on."

In addition to tasking staff of each agency with coordinating long-term capital planning from the beginning, Reiskin said they have asked the Controller's Office to develop solutions to streamline delivery of those capital plans. He expected those results from the Controller imminently, at which point the agency directors would integrate them.

"For the projects that are already in the pipeline, we're doing everything to make sure that we're working together -- we're checking with the pedestrian and bike teams at the MTA."

Flickr photo: thornley

Anyone who has pedaled down Fell knows this gas station has been a troublesome spot for bicyclists for some time now. We don't know yet what kind of impact it's having on drivers, but feel free to share your impressions in the comments section if you've pedaled by recently.

MTA spokesperson Judson True said the agency has been planning to put in similar markings. Although crews plan on grinding out the fresh unofficial markings "soon," he said they intend on replacing them with essentially the same thing, except the signs that read "keep clear" will have the word order switched, with some additional signage warning drivers to stay out of the bike lane.

"We’ll see if those signs and markings work and if not more extensive measures, such as parking changes, may need to be explored," he said.

If the MTA were to remove parking, it would be on that portion of Fell Street, where a tow-away zone would be created. True said MTA staffers have been in discussions for some time now with the owner of the gas station to consider options. 

See the old bike lane and the antlered cyclist after the jump.

A normal afternoon in the Fell Street bike lane. Photo by Bryan Goebel.

Flickr photo: thornley

Photo: Don Maxwell/Flickr

Shaken but apparently not badly hurt, the rider, a young woman in a light blouse and wearing a helmet, stood up to be greeted by the streetcar conductor, who offered not sympathy but angry hectoring. Didn’t she know that cyclists were not supposed to cycle in the streetcar lane?

Standing by and watching all this while preparing to board the streetcar in Seattle, I could only shake my head in sadness. We have such a hard time doing mass transit right in this country, particularly outside New York City. Seattle's shiny new streetcar “system” was essentially brand new, but its flaws were already readily apparent.

Let’s start with the tracks. Isn’t there some system possible that does not leave what looked like a three or four inch gap between the track and the street it is imbedded in? I’m sure loyal Streetblog readers will supply me with the make and model of something. I remember seeing that old footage from Barcelona that showed all those cyclists swerving this way and that in front of the streetcar, with apparently no fear of getting caught in the track gap. Can’t we do that today? It certainly doesn’t make sense to exclude cyclists from a whole lane of a street, one that could actually double as a bike lane if built correctly.

Then there are the other problems.

The streetcar line itself is only a little more than a mile long. (The website says the line is 2.6 miles, but I think they are counting both directions.) And it’s pretty expensive -- two dollars for what can be a very short ride. I boarded for what turned out to be only half a mile or so, in part because I’m still on a cane from my scooter accident. Otherwise I would have walked. No sooner had I boarded and paid my two dollars than we were there. I felt cheated. Minimal payment (or even no fare) would be better, which of course would require better government funding.

I feel guilty complaining about something that obviously took a lot of effort. The streetcars themselves are quite nice. I’m sure the organization is trying to do things well.

The central problem, as an official with a California transit agency recently told me, is that American cities and states tend to pursue transit in a fragmented and uncoordinated fashion. Different agencies representing different cities or states build different lines that often connect to each other badly, if at all. Imagine if highways were built as incoherently as rail systems. Somehow, the federal, state and local highway agencies manage to work with each other at least enough to have their projects connect.

Seattle has battled and warred over its transit systems. The city often supports transit in general but not in the particulars. Voters have approved a monorail system several times, only to see the transit establishment and political establishment help kill it. The city is nearing completion of an extensive light rail system, but it is one of the most expensive in the world. Downtown has this enormous bus tunnel -- the product of one compromise between various interests. And now there’s the tiny new streetcar system, which, to be fair, may expand and become much more comprehensive. You have to start somewhere. Maybe they will figure out a way to make it more compatible with biking, which certainly should be the friend and not the enemy.

Yum.

Mmmm, brazing.

White fell into his business after his own bike frame cracked in 1999. The frame builder, Timothy Paterek, offered a weeklong course on building for $1,250. White saved for a year to enroll and later spent five months making his first solo frame for his wife, then friends, then strangers who had seen or heard of his work via the spidery Portland cycling network. Taking off a month from his courier route to make bikes in 2001, White never carried another message.

But then it makes a claim that strikes me as dubious:

Bike couriers in Portland and San Francisco, when describing something as cool, now routinely say, "That's sooo Vanilla."

Can anyone help me out?  Have you ever heard that phrase or used that phrase?  Am I really that out of touch and old already?

Some of the other delectable offerings from NAHBS are local manufacturers, including Broakland Bicycles in Oakland, Inglis and Retrotec in Napa, Sycip in Santa Rosa, Caletti in Santa Cruz, and Hunter and RR Velo in Watsonville.

Another local hand-made builder, Calfee Design, has been getting lots of love for its bamboo frames, including articles in Time and Newsweek. 

I know a lot of these bikes are super pricey, but I generally think that trends that make cycling sexy are good trends.  As the old adage goes, "If you buy quality, you only cry once."

Forget the Batmobile, I want a Vanilla!