Streetsblog San Francisco

More city businesses and their cycling customers are enjoying new on-street bike parking after the SFMTA installed four recently approved corrals, repurposing four parking spots for motor vehicles with forty-six spots for bicycles. A total of nine have been installed since the bike injunction was lifted last August.

“As you can see, it hasn’t even been a week and each rack has a bike on it,” said Nicole Cooper, manager of Timbuk2 in Hayes Valley, who was very pleased with the results. “I see more bikes, less people asking, ‘Hey, can I just drop my bike off in here?’”

Nate Rotsko of Mike’s Bikes in SoMa sees value in their new corral on Howard Street that goes beyond just tidying up the sidewalks and attracting customers. ”It also helps draw the attention of the drivers to bicycles. The fact that bikes are here helps reinforce the fact that bikes are on the street to people driving,” he said.

In South Park, customers who pedal to the popular French restaurant, the Butler and the Chef, will also find a new bike corral. The restaurant is just a few doors down from Public Bikes, where the company’s Dan Nguyen-Tan was excited about the new on-street bike parking even though Public did not receive a corral of its own.

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An SFMTA hearing officer has approved four new bike corrals that will be installed of front of Mike’s Bikes in SoMa, Timbuk2 in Hayes Valley, the Butler and the Chef restaurant in South Park and Thieves Tavern/Box Dog Bikes on 14th Street. A total of four parking spaces will be converted into on-street parking for 46 bikes.

“We have a lot of bikers,” said Nicole Cooper of Timbuk2 on Hayes Street, adding that many of them come in to take advantage of a discount offered through the I Bike SF program.

Nate Rotsko, the general manager of Mike’s Bikes on Howard Street, said the “disorganized” bike parking outside the store has been an issue for customers.

“By taking out one parking space, we’re going to provide parking space for 12 bicycles in a neat, orderly section and clean up bike parking in that area,” he said. “It will also draw attention to the cyclists in that area by moving bikes onto the street. It will inherently improve safety for commuters and people coming along Howard.”

Since the injunction was lifted August 6, the SFMTA has installed 5 bike corrals along Valencia Street, and hopes to get the new ones in by the end of the year.

“The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has been talking to business owners all across the city to inform them about this opportunity to attract more customers,” says Renée Rivera, the SFBC’s acting executive director. “Bike parking corrals are already helping the city catch up with the widespread demand for easy ways to shop and visit local places by bike and we look forward to helping even more businesses realize this opportunity.”

The SFBC has been encouraging bicyclists to tell their favorite businesses that they can get a bike corral installed for free. They’ve been handing out these flyers [pdf] to businesses.

Preparations began today for the installation of new on-street bicycle parking on Valencia Street in former bus zones, which were vacated when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency terminated the 26-Valencia line.

The SFMTA's paint crews painted on-street bike parking spaces in the former bus zones and painted additional yellow loading zones in several locations to facilitate commercial deliveries. The bike racks will be added to the on-street facilities in the next day or two.

In exchange for the increased bicycle parking, businesses like The Freewheel Bike Shop have agreed to maintain the new facilities. Freewheel's owner Carlos Corujo said he thought this reflected a larger improvement in San Francisco and the effective advocacy of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

"I like the wide sidewalks we see down Valencia Street, I like the bike lanes, I like the improved lanes and this thing is just over the top, it's great," he said.

Asked whether he would miss vehicle parking in front of his store, he said, "Oh hell no, are you kidding me? Let's get rid of all these parking spots and put bikes there."

Bicycle commuters were predictably enthusiastic as well. Maddie Oatman, who regularly commutes by bicycle on Valencia from the Mission to Alamo Square, said San Francisco was a good biking city and said Muni "seems very broken right now."

Though she said she understood that parking a car can be difficult, she noted that increased bike parking could achieve a mode shift. "Maybe it will encourage people to ditch the cars and grab a bike if there's more bike parking."

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The SFMTA has installed three new bike racks on the southeast corner of Church Street at Market to help accommodate the throngs of bicycle riders who often park their bikes illegally on the Muni island rails. I snapped these photos of the new bike racks this afternoon and one thing rang clear: it's not enough.

Damon Curtis, the Bike Plan implementation manager for the SFMTA, said the racks were installed based on requests from businesses. However, the area was a pressing priority for the SFMTA last January, when the agency asked for injunction relief to install bike racks on Church following complaints from disability rights advocates about the transit island bike parking.

"We know the demand continues to grow and as we move forward that could be an area we can look at for corrals and things like that," Curtis told Streetsblog.

Andy Thornley, the SFBC program director, hopes the SFMTA will install more bicycle parking in the area, and be sensitive to the concerns.

"Apart from the intrinsic demand of the businesses, the important thing to be aware is that there has been complaints and concerns voiced by folks in the disabled community about that Muni platform encroachment," said Thornley.

Curtis said the SFMTA has installed nearly 300 new bike racks since the partial lifting of the bicycle injunction, and had a backlog of 900 requests at the time. The agency is working as quickly as it can to meet the demand, he said.

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Growing tension over how, or even whether, Sausalito can accommodate the flood of summer tourists riding rented bicycles into the village spawned a plan by one city councilman to convert four auto parking spots to bike parking. Subsequently, there has been talk of a one-dollar tax on rental bikes to defray costs. But as the Tuesday Sausalito City Council session dragged late into the night, bikes were punted to the April 6 meeting.

The council will take up the potential conversion of four parking spots to bike parking near the ferry dock in April, said Councilman Mike Kelly.

Sausalito has seen the number of bike-riding tourists soar in recent years, most riding from San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge and returning by ferry with their bikes in tow to San Francisco. The number of riders is expected to grow to 2,500 on peak days this summer, up from 1,500 daily last year.

As for the potential one-dollar tax to be imposed at the point of bike rental, that discussion "is still in the infant stage," according to Sausalito City Manager Adam Politzer. There has only been one meeting and "this is a negotiated activity. The council is not talking about imposing a fee."

To put the potential tax on rental bikes in perspective, the typical parking space might generate about $3,500 a year in fees and fines; the tax on rented bikes would generate that amount in two days. The charge would come at the point of rental, not at the parking site.

The proposed tax has pleased city merchants, but locals frustrated by bicycle traffic complain that rental bikes clog sidewalks and add to commute times for ferry riders camped out for hour-long waits as the bikes are off-loaded from the boats.

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Talk of a one-dollar tax on rental bikes in Sausalito is fanning long-simmering tensions between the picturesque city and the local cycling community.

While most cities in the San Francisco Bay Area complain there aren't enough tourists, some Sausalitans have the opposite concern - too many tourists riding rented bicycles across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Sausalito expects the number of bike-riding tourists to soar by two-thirds in 2010, from approximately 1,500 last summer to about 2,500 on peak days this summer.

That's very good news for merchants along Bridgeway, a main street jammed with tee-shirt shops, ice cream vendors, coffee houses, bars and gift shops that prosper when the velo-tourists roll into town.

But the cyclists are decried as a "plague of locusts" by others, who claim the clusters of bikes "pollute the viewshed" in a city famed for stunning vistas.

The practical question of what to do with all those bikes has polarized the city in the past. Some residents noted - correctly at times - that the rental bikes clogged the sidewalks. And commuters griped about hour-long delays in service that stemmed from off-loading the bikes one-by-one on the San Francisco docks.

Past feuds were resolved through a cooperative effort of the rental companies, ferry operators, city staff and the Marin County Bicycle Coalition (MCBC), which has repeatedly pointed out that the non-polluting bicycles take up quite a bit less room than the thousands of cars that snarl the city's narrow streets each day.

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The San Francisco MTA has an interesting decision to make with bus zones throughout the city now that a number of bus routes were changed or terminated with the service reductions that went into effect on December 5th, 2009. Will the city open the curb space up to cars, potentially adding meters in zones with metered parking regulations, or take the opportunity to experiment with more innovative parking solutions, such as on-street bicycle parking protected by bollards, similar to the Grove Street entrance of the San Francisco Public Library?

According to the Department of Parking and Traffic Signs and Markings division, as a temporary measure, the agency has scratched out the Bus Stop markings that were on the asphalt and has painted the curb gray at at select bus stops, giving drivers extra parking. The changes effect 62 bus zones, each of which fit approximately two cars. At numerous other old bus stops, the bus zone markings remain in place and the curb is still red.

According to the MTA's City Traffic Engineer Jack Fleck, the agency has not decided what it will do with the spaces, outside of the temporary gray curbs.

"My understanding is that we are keeping our options open," Fleck said. "Right now, people can park there."

Marc Caswell, Program Manager at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, would like to see the city experiment with the newly liberated spaces before the public becomes accustomed to them as car parking. Caswell and the SFBC have proposed to the MTA that it consider adding on-street bicycle parking, commonly referred to as bike corrals.

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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?

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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, three members of the Board of Supervisors, MTA officials, SFBC staff and bicyclists -- standing in the glaring fall sun amidst the roar of cars on Oak Street -- celebrated the city's first new bike lane in three years today, and then grabbed the paint rolls and applied buckets of shiny green paint to the Scott Street bike box.

"The good news is we didn't wait until today to get started. The injunction was [partially] lifted last week and already the folks you see behind us have been hard at work," said Newsom. "They've been out there putting in some new bike lanes and we're going to be putting in bike racks every single day."

Newsom said that San Francisco is going to try a series of innovate treatments, such as the green bike box, taking cues from European cities that have become world-class bicycling cities. And like Valencia Street, he said, the MTA will begin changing the signal timing on some streets to better accommodate bicyclists.

"We're going to be trying some things that candidly we wished we were doing for the last three years that are things that are being done around the world, particularly in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, that are being proffered and exampled in places like Portland and other municipalities," Newsom said, adding that the plan is to add six new miles of bike lanes in six months and increase the city's existing 23 miles of sharrows by 326 percent.

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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and MTA Chief Nat Ford have made repeated promises that they will act swiftly to build out large segments of the city's Bicycle Master Plan when the 3-year-old bicycle injunction is lifted. Behind the good rhetoric, the agency does appear prepared to begin striping lanes and adding bike racks when the long legal wait finally ends.

Superior Court Judge Peter Busch could make a ruling on the state of the injunction as early as this Friday, though it is likely he will wait until after the November 2nd hearing. The City Attorney's office filed its response [PDF] yesterday to an opposition brief [PDF] from Rob Anderson's attorney, Mary Miles, which argues that claims the city must prove the adequacy of an exhaustive EIR before dissolving the injunction have no merit.

Most advocates and City Hall insiders who have followed the case closely don't expect a ruling before mid-November, though they are hopeful the judge's recent actions are a positive sign: the litigants had asked for a continuance to a later date, but they were denied.

"We believe the city completed a comprehensive and unprecedented EIR, but there is no certainty what the court will do," said MTA spokesperson Judson True. "Our charge is to be ready when the injunction is lifted and we are. Of the 45 projects we hope to complete, we anticipate more than 20 in the first year after the injunction is lifted."

The cost of the 56 priority projects in the Bike Plan was projected in June of this year to be about $14 million, a trivial sum compared to the agency's annual capital budget of approximately $700 million, but far more than the $1 to $2 million the agency spent on bicycle improvements before the injunction. Subsequent design changes have shaved several million dollars off that total, and only 45 of the 60 projects in the bike plan were approved by the MTA Board of Directors in June. The cost to build all 45 projects, plus bike racks and parking corrals and signage, is estimated at $10 million over two years. 

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