Streetsblog San Francisco

Update: These orange bollards spotted in the parking lanes on JFK near Transverse Drive are a promising sign. 

Construction on the JFK Drive bikeway in Golden Gate Park should begin next week, the SFMTA tells Streetsblog. The agency recently posted street plans [PDF] on the project website, showing how the geometry of the city’s first parking protected bike lane will work.

John F. Kennedy Drive is still without parking-protected bikeways. Photo: davidhanddotnet/Flickr

If construction does begin next week, it will mark tangible progress on a project that was initially supposed to be completed in December 2010. Even now, new delays seem to come each week. Following the initial delay, prompted by revisions to the project scope, implementation had been slated for December 2011. Then it was pushed back again one month.

That delay, an SFMTA planner said, was due to further revisions to the project design and concerns that construction could negatively impact museums during a peak season. An exact construction date didn’t surface until two weeks ago, when SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said the project would start last week. Today, work still has yet to begin, but Rose says it will start next week.

The reasons for the recent delays are unclear, but at a Pedestrian Safety Advisory Committee meeting last month, SFMTA planner Dustin White said staff has had to make last-minute modifications to assuage concerns raised by some disability advocates that the project could hinder wheelchair access to pedestrian pathways. The first phase of construction will involve adding a number of curb ramps, and a number of parking spots will be reserved for disabled placard holders, he said. Construction will also involve drainage improvements. The overall project is expected to take at least several weeks, and according to the latest update from transportation staffers it will be completed in March.

Stay tuned for updates as construction gets underway (or doesn’t). After the jump, see samples of the project drawings.

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San Francisco and four cities in Silicon Valley will launch the region’s first bike-share system this July, implementing a new transportation option that cities around the world have embraced to expand access to bicycling.

A bike-share vendor demonstration at Civic Center in December 2010 (this is not necessarily what the system will look like). Photo: SFBC/Flickr

The system will include 500 bicycles at approximately 50 stations in downtown San Francisco, plus another 500 bikes and 50 stations located near Caltrain stations in Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Jose. The scope is more ambitious than San Francisco’s previous proposal for bike-share, but smaller in scale than the world’s most successful systems.

“A large-scale citywide bike-share will make it easier for locals and visitors alike to see San Francisco by bike, and help our city reach the goal of 20 percent of trips by bike by 2020,” said San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Deputy Director Kit Hodge.

While the SFBC is looking forward to the pilot launch this summer, Hodge said it “also believe[s] that the pilot should be quickly expanded into a robust, big-enough-to-succeed phenomenon that have proven successful in Paris, China and London.”

SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said San Francisco stations will be “centered in SF’s employment- and transit-rich Downtown/SOMA corridor between the Financial District, Market Street and the Transbay and Caltrain terminals with connections at Market Street BART stations and the Ferry Terminal.”

The system will launch “just in time for America’s Cup,” said Rose, as a key component of the “People Plan” announced by Mayor Ed Lee last April. Bike-share will be part of the initiative to encourage the hundreds of thousands of spectators expected to travel to the Embarcadero this summer to get around by foot, transit, and by bike.

The July launch was pushed back a few months from its original spring schedule, but Rose says the SFMTA is “confident that all the work we’ve done over the last year to ensure that the project meets the needs of all of our project partners throughout the region will yield a better result when we deliver the pilot later this year.”

The program is not San Francisco’s first plan for bike-share — a previous plan for a meager pilot of 50 bikes was dropped in late 2009 when Clear Channel backed out of a partnership with the city, after which then-Mayor Gavin Newsom pledged to launch a larger system. Santa Clara County’s VTA was set to launch the region’s first bike-share in 2010, but delayed its own program until it could be integrated into this broader regional system. Agencies are currently selecting a vendor to operate the system.

Stay tuned to Streetsblog for more details as the program develops. For more information, check out the SFMTA’s website, which includes this presentation [PDF].

Map of San Francisco bike share areas. Specific locations are to be determined. Image: SFMTA

Regional locations for bike share stations along the Caltrain line.

Note: The discussion on the Fell and Oak bikeways begins at about 11:05.

Mayor Ed Lee and SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin (a.k.a. “the Eds”) faced questions about the city’s extensive delivery time on the Fell and Oak bikeway project at Google’s recent “Fireside Chat” forum. A questioner asked why the project is coming in 2013 rather than this year (though, as of last week, staff has moved the timeline up a few months to next winter).

Reiskin repeated the SFMTA’s assertion that it’s not a “delay” at all, and claimed that complaints about losing car parking are important enough to prolong safe bicycle access for the public. As for the mayor, he said he would “bring leadership” to the project and mentioned that he’d rode on the route in a caravan of public officials before pointing to progress on the long-awaited JFK Drive Bikeway (which, as of last weekend, still hadn’t started construction despite promises of starting in January).

Technically, the SFMTA is correct that Fell and Oak’s official delivery date was originally set for the fall of 2013 in project funding documents [PDF] approved last summer. But its public relations staff hadn’t openly announced that fact at public meetings or elsewhere, and expectations were still mostly set on this year based on the originally proposed date for a trial in June 2012, which Mayor Lee told Streetsblog a year ago he wanted to implement “quickly.”

When staff told Streetsblog recently that implementation would wait until some time in 2013, it was, by and large, news to most people who’ve been following the project. The main reason for the delay (what else to call it — a “timeline change”?) cited by the SFMTA is its decision to abandon what would have been an efficiently-delivered trial project in order to create a more permanent project that tries to appease pushback from car owners over 80 parking spots (despite the roughly 120 overnight paid spaces opened at an adjacent lot last May).

“We had been talking about trying to pilot something sooner, but we have run into a pretty significant amount of opposition in the directly impacted neighborhood… and we don’t want to steamroll over folks,” said Reiskin. “We’re taking the time to try to find ways in which we can mitigate the parking loss.”

Good public process and outreach are key in turning out the best project possible. But that’s not the same as letting the terms of public safety improvements be dictated by those who want to keep on receiving precious public space to store their private automobiles for free — a status quo bias which has “steamrolled” nearly everything else on the city’s streets for most of the past century.

H/T Streetsblog commenter Mike Sonn for the video.

Bike commuters will continue to face dangerous conditions on Fell Street for at least another year. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Separated bikeways on Fell and Oak Streets won’t come until spring 2013 at the earliest, nearly a year later than originally proposed, the SFMTA told Streetsblog today.

SFMTA planner Dustin White said the delay largely comes from opposition from some car owners to the removal of curbside parking, which is leading staff to create more parking spaces on nearby streets as it plans the bikeways.

“We have started to receive feedback opposing the parking removal, and I anticipate that developing parking mitigations will be one of the most difficult aspects of building community support for the project,” said White. Before presenting a proposed design this spring, staff will be “working on refining intersection design options and seeking mitigations to the proposed parking loss” and fielding input from bicycle, pedestrian, and disability advisory committees, he said.

Although SFMTA Sustainable Streets Division Planner Mike Sallaberry said last June that the project could be fast-tracked as a trial and be on the ground as early as this June, White claimed the project was actually ahead of an original target of fall 2013 officially set in a funding grant document approved by the SF County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) [PDF]. “We don’t think the environmental review process will take as long” as originally envisioned in the SFCTA document, he said.

On top of environmental review, staff must complete detailed design, legislation, and acquire funding for construction before implementation, said White.

The bikeways, which would vastly improve a vital bicycling link on three blocks between the Wiggle route and the Panhandle, would replace up to 80 parking spaces depending on which design alternative is chosen. However, about 120 paid parking spaces were opened to the public last year at the adjacent lot at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the city has a nearly forty-year-old Transit First Policy which generally says safe bicycle access should take precedence over car storage.

Mayor Ed Lee told Streetsblog's Bryan Goebel last February, "I want to get to that experiment on Fell Street quickly." San Franciscans will have waited at least two years since that statement for the city to make good on it. Photo: Christine Falvey

While Mayor Ed Lee‘s administration continues to let complaints from car owners impede safety improvements to city streets, San Francisco is falling farther behind cities like New York and Chicago when it comes to 21st Century bike infrastructure. New York has implemented about twenty miles of on-street protected bikeways in recent years; in no instance has the city delayed a project to make up for the loss of on-street parking. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel installed the Kinzie Street protected bikeway just days after entering office and plans to add 100 miles of protected bike lanes within four years.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is urging supporters to call on Lee and SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin to take a stand behind the long-overdue project and implement it with haste in pursuit of the city’s official goal of reaching 20 percent of trips by bike by 2020.

“A safe separated bikeway on this key biking corridor can’t wait,” said SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum. “We are urging the city to move this project forward more quickly, and ensure the safety of the thousands of San Franciscans who use this crosstown route daily.”

Photo: Aaron Bialick

A new set of reports released yesterday by the Better Market Street Project, a coordinated effort between San Francisco city agencies and urban designers, presents ideas for optimizing the mobility, safety and overall experience on lower Market Street when it is rebuilt in 2015.

While the authors didn’t explicitly recommend the growingly popular idea of a car-free Market Street, they did point out that “car volumes… are low, but have disproportionately high effects on other modes” and recommended a study of vehicle restrictions “both for traffic along Market Street and for traffic turning onto Market Street…to determine what diversion may occur and what benefits to other modes might be derived.” (For a full-throated endorsement of a car-free Market, check out yesterday’s editorial in the Huffington Post, where Michael Portanova points out that “most anyone who has ever used a car in San Francisco knows that if you’re driving on Market Street, you’re doing it wrong.”)

Urban design consultants have been teaming up with a raft of public agencies the last couple of years to analyze Market Street and collect public input on the upcoming reconstruction. The reports include some interesting output from that partnership, including a summary of the top priorities voiced at public workshops last May. Creating a more attractive pedestrian environment and more comfortable bicycling infrastructure are toward the top of the list.

“The Better Market Street Project is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform Market Street and bring this major artery for the Bay Area to its full potential,” said Mohammed Nuru, director of the Department of Public Works (DPW), one of the leading agencies on the project.

The reports present a collection of best practices from similar streets throughout the world that can be adapted to improve Market Street. “It’s very valuable background information to help us know if we’re on the right track with our design concepts,” said DPW Project Manager Kris Opbroek.

Drawing on some of those celebrated streets for inspiration, the reports make a wide-ranging series of recommendations to improve safety and mobility on Market. To speed Muni vehicles, the recommendations include extending and enforcing bus-only lanes, optimizing stop locations, longer boarding islands, off-vehicle ticket machines, bus-priority traffic signals, and seeking alternative locations for deliveries. The reports also suggest that continuous protected bikeways could reduce conflicts with pedestrians and buses, and recommend multi-modal solutions like locating bike share stations at transit hubs.

“We are looking forward to this much-needed renewed commitment and sense of urgency from the city to design and construct a next generation Market Street,” said San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum. ”We hear every day from the huge and growing number of people biking on the street about how important a better Market Street is for getting them to work, school and around town.”

Here are a few of the more intriguing ideas and possibilities:

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The proposed bikeway would replace a parking lane as seen here on Fell at Divisadero Street. Alternative designs could include a separate signal phase for bikes and turning vehicles. Image: SFMTA

Planners are narrowing down the final designs for the Fell and Oak bikeway project, and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) is calling on supporters to ask the mayor and SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin to ensure the project gets on the ground by summer as expected.

“The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition urges the SFMTA to implement separated bikeways on Oak and Fell Street between Scott and Baker Street as soon as possible,” said SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum. “We know city officials have heard from hundreds of people that these blocks are some of the most frightening for everyday bike commuters, and countless more just won’t bike because it feels so unsafe. Our goal is to connect the city with safe, comfortable bikeways that are welcoming for people of all ages, especially the growing number of families riding in this area.”

SFMTA planners are currently selecting a final design proposal after fielding community input last month. Among the decisions they have to make: whether to install a two-way bikeway on Fell that then splits into separate east- and west-bound routes at Divisadero, or go with completely separate one-way bikeways; which design treatments to use at intersections; and whether to include an overnight car parking lane [PDF].

A two-way bikeway option would split eastbound bicyclists off Fell Street right onto Divisadero to connect to Oak Street. Click to enlarge. Image: SFMTA

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On Monday, the State Assembly Transportation Committee passed a watered down version of AB 819, the bill aimed at freeing California planners to install next-generation bikeway designs that other American cities are using to improve street safety and make cycling a more accessible mode of transportation.

CA legislators have removed language from AB 819 that would have facilitated the implementation of bikeways like this one in Chicago. Photo: CDOT via The Bicycle Blog of Wisconsin

Assembly members undermined the bill’s original intent by removing language allowing planners to use guidelines that have been established outside Caltrans, like the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, which includes designs for protected bikeways. Instead, the amended bill would only require Caltrans to create an experimentation process through which engineers can establish bikeway standards. That process is likely to be a lengthy one.

Advocates say the amended bill could be an improvement over the status quo, but it’s a far cry from giving local transportation agencies the freedom to implement bikeway designs that cities such as Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C. have rolled out with impressive results.

“The committee’s amendment is a step toward our goal of permitting the kind of bike infrastructure that we need,” said California Bicycle Coalition Communications Director Jim Brown. “How big a step this will be depends on the kind of experimentation process Caltrans comes up with. But it’s not the blanket authorization we’re seeking for local agencies to design the safest possible bikeways.”

Local transportation officials can still implement protected bikeways, but the process is much more complex than it needs to be. Without a set of approved standards to work from, agencies are subject to greater liability, and each project must contend with the red tape of Caltrans approval — a time-consuming and expensive process.

Brown said the AB 819 amendment was passed without deliberation but still requires approval by other committees as well as the State Senate. It was introduced by the California Association of Bicycling Organizations, a group which distrusts the NACTO guide and has traditionally resisted protected bikeways despite their proven benefits in safety and increased ridership in California cities, other American cities, and abroad.

“Whether through legislation or other means,” said Brown, “we’re continuing to work with Caltrans to figure out how innovative bikeway designs already used in other parts of the U.S. and Europe can be implemented in California.”

Physically protected bikeways have been implemented with great success in cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC. But in California, where such facilities are still considered “experimental” by Caltrans, outdated state standards make it difficult for transportation planners to implement them.

New York City's Eighth Avenue protected bike lane. Photo: BicyclesOnly/Flickr

That could change under a state bill called AB 819, which would give California cities more flexibility to implement bikeway designs that are fast becoming the best practices in leading American cities.

“The goal of AB 819 is to free up communities to implement the kind of innovative facilities we’re seeing in use in other parts of the country and in Europe,” said Jim Brown, communications director for the California Bicycle Coalition.

Under current state law, facilities like protected bike lanes and bike boxes – which are not established within Caltrans guidelines — must go through an expensive and time-consuming approval process. Although some have been built in cities like San Francisco and Long Beach, they haven’t come easily.

“Cities can get permission to experiment through Caltrans, but it’s a really long decision process,” said Brown. Using “experimental” designs also leaves planners subject to greater legal liability. “It means that cities are less willing to install facilities that might actually increase bicycle ridership.”

AB 819 would allow planners to use guidelines that have already been developed outside the state, like the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, released last spring by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and approved by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, to help them plan and fund those projects.

But the bill’s reach could be limited by an amendment proposed by the California Association of Bicycle Organizations (CABO), a smaller coalition which argues that using outside guidelines for bikeways could be problematic. Their alternative proposal, which will be considered at a State Assembly Transportation Committee hearing on Monday, would only allow new types of bike facilities to be established under an experimentation process within Caltrans.

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There's nothing like the smell of fresh thermoplast in the morning. Photos: Ruth Miller

As city contractors stenciled new bike lanes last Friday at Oakland’s 25th and Webster Streets, a group of advocates, city staff, and elected officials celebrated the final project in Oakland’s busiest bicycling year to date.

“This year we put in 18.1 miles of new bike lanes and 292 new bike parking spots,” Council Member Libby Schaaf told the group.

Oakland Council Member Libby Schaaf, an early member of WOBO.

Oakland was recently recognized by the League of American Bicyclists as a Bronze Bicycle-Friendly City and “named one of the 20 most bike-friendly cities in the country,” noted Mayor Jean Quan, and “we’re working to get into the top ten.”

On top of a major expansion of bikeways this year, Uptown Oakland will get its own bike station as soon as 2013 near the 19th Street BART station, announced Jason Overman of Council Member Rebecca Kaplan’s office, which recently won a $500,000 grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Safe Routes to Transit program to create a space similar to the Downtown Berkeley bike station and host valet bike parking and repairs.

Over the next two weeks, crews will complete the bike lane along the one-way Webster Street south to 14th Street, and a complementary bike lane will be installed on the parallel Franklin Street in January. Combined, the pair will create a north-south corridor to Downtown Oakland.

Many of Oakland’s 2011 bike projects focused on completing the network of bike lanes and sharrows, including segments of major crosstown routes like Fruitvale, Lakeshore, Telegraph, and West Grand Avenues, as well as Foothill Boulevard and East 12th Street.

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