One section of the faltered plan for Second Street. Image: SFDPW

A plan for streetscape improvements on Second Street has faltered after the city agencies overseeing it neglected to implement them before dedicated funds expired.

The project that won’t receive the funds is a package including bike lanes, pedestrian safety improvements, and road repaving on Second Street between Market and King Streets.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, acting as the SF County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) Board, approved a measure today redistributing the expiring $4.8 million in federal funds to three other projects in order to avoid forfeiting them.

The Department of Public Works (DPW) and the SFMTA “failed to steer the project toward successful implementation,” states a memo from DPW Director Mohammed Nuru and SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin to Jane Kim, supervisor of District 6, which includes Second Street. “While we are deeply disappointed that the project has stalled at this juncture, we want to assure you that both DPW and SFMTA are dedicated to implementing this project in the near future.”

The SFCTA, which oversees transportation financing in San Francisco, approved the funds in 2010 from a federal Congestion Management Agency Block Grant. That grant was awarded on the condition that it be spent by February 1, 2012.

But in what the SFCTA called a “surprise,” the SFMTA and DPW failed to meet that deadline after a series of communication breakdowns between the agencies. The SFCTA board called today’s special last-minute hearing to vote on a new plan to divert the funds.

According to an SFCTA document [PDF], $3.4 million of the diverted funds will go to the Cesar Chavez Streetscape Improvement Project, $948,200 to the Two-Way Haight Street Project, and $529,815 to add overhead SFGo signs on Second Street — a program aimed at facilitating wayfinding for drivers which has faced criticism for making city streets look more like freeways.

The memo details a long sequence of bureaucratic tangles, including the agencies’ failure to finish revising plans for the bike lanes on Second in response to public feedback. The bike lanes are one of 11 SF Bike Plan projects not initially greenlighted by the SFMTA Board of Directors. The SFMTA’s project revisions stalled in 2009, and DPW’s project manager was not aware the bike lanes have not been legislated.

Biking and walking advocates said that regardless of the merit of the projects now receiving the funding, the redistribution sets a dangerous precedent for protecting dedicated funds.

“While it’s a relief that city leaders are committing to advance critical pedestrian and bicycle safety improvements on Second Street, we are still deeply concerned that nearly $5 million could almost fall through the cracks,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “This should be an urgent wake-up call that city leaders must do a better job of prioritizing pedestrian and bicycle projects and working together for safer streets. As someone who worked hard to pass the [Proposition B] streets bond last fall, I worry about the city’s readiness to deliver on tens of millions of dollars of pedestrian and bicycle projects that people are clamoring for.”

Staffers from the three agencies said they were working on a new plan to fund the Second Street project, which may now cost as much as $8 million, “depend[ing] on the desired level of bike improvements that come out of the planning phase,” according to the memo. Potential funding sources include the Prop B street improvements bond, Proposition AA (a local vehicle license fee), and the federal One Bay Area Grant. Staff said they are continuing the public outreach process, and the new timeline sets project completion at no sooner than 2015.

“This isn’t about picking one project over the other,” said Walk SF President Manish Champsee. “However, I do think there is a contract, if you will, between public agencies and the public, that when the public is promised something such as pedestrian safety and walkability improvements, that those improvements do get made.”

Photo: Mark Dreger/Flickr

SFMTA crews were out striping bike lanes on Portola Drive today from O’Shaughnessy Boulevard to St. Francis Circle. The new lanes complement those striped on the rest of the street in recent months.

Streetsblog reader and Portola resident Mark Dreger reported spotting the crews this morning, noting that the project will provide a bicycling connection “on a street with no good parallel alternative for bicycling.”

Portola, which runs alongside Twin Peaks, is a road fraught with harrowing high-speed car traffic. It’s also the only direct road connecting the west end of Market Street to the intersection of Sloat Boulevard and West Portal Avenue, also known as St. Francis Circle, in the Parkside neighborhood.

The new bike lanes should provide some room for a more comfortable ride. The reduced width of the other traffic lanes, noted Dreger, “should also serve to traffic calm the street a bit.”

The project is part [PDF] of the San Francisco Bike Plan currently being rolled out by the SFMTA. The lanes connect with a buffered bikeway striped on Laguna Honda Boulevard in February, which connects to the Inner Sunset and areas north.

More photos after the break.

Photo: Mark Dreger/Flickr

Photo: Mark Dreger/Flickr

Photo: Mark Dreger/Flickr

The Masonic Avenue redesign. Image: SFCTA

The Masonic Avenue Streetscape Project took another step forward today after the board of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority approved funding to conduct an environmental impact report (EIR). The board also gave the green light to funds to construct the city’s first on-street two-way protected bike lane on Cargo Way in Hunter’s Point.

The Masonic Avenue redesign will transform the dangerous corridor with traffic calming, greening, and other improvements for pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit. The project’s EIR will be completed by the SFMTA and the SF Planning Department by June 2012, according to memos accompanying the resolution passed by the SFCTA [PDF]. Once cleared, the SFMTA would approve the report as an addendum to the San Francisco Bicycle Plan before beginning a 12- to 18-month phase of “detailed design work” on the project.

The $41,000 required for the EIR, as well as the $94,000 for the Cargo Way bikeway construction, come from Prop K sales tax funds.

The SFCTA is still seeking funding for the project’s estimated $18 million construction, but potential sources include the Proposition B bond measure and grants from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Caltrans, the agency memos state.

Residents will have to wait until at least 2014 for construction to begin on the Masonic redesign, which will bring the city’s first physically raised bike lane to the corridor.

Cargo Way, meanwhile, will see the city’s first two-way, on-street bikeway protected by a raised concrete barrier and fence, according to the memos. The bikeway will fill a gap in the San Francisco Bay Trail, connecting Third Street and existing bike lanes on Illinois to Heron Head’s Park and Hunters Point. It will be placed along the south side of the street to minimize conflicts with trucks accessing the north side.

The project was approved in the 2009 Bike Plan and is expected to be completed by March 2012.

The plan for a bi-directional, protected bikeway on Cargo Way. Image: SFCTA

Image: SFCTA

]]> http://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/10/25/funding-approved-for-masonic-eir-and-cargo-way-protected-bikeway/feed/ 15 http://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/08/17/new-designs-to-be-presented-for-eastern-cesar-chavez-street/ http://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/08/17/new-designs-to-be-presented-for-eastern-cesar-chavez-street/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:54:38 +0000 Bryan Goebel http://sf.streetsblog.org/?p=272493 [...]]]>

The pedestrian environment on eastern Cesar Chavez Street is in desperate need of improvement. Photo: SF Planning Department

New designs have been drawn up for eastern Cesar Chavez Street and will be presented to the community next week, nearly two months after a contentious meeting in which attendees were told, just days before the striping of new bike lanes, that plans for a road diet were being scrapped by the Mayor’s Office and Port of San Francisco because of concerns from industrial businesses about reducing road capacity for trucks hauling goods.

The new designs will not be made public until the August 24 meeting, where options for short-term and long-term plans will be presented. Sources who have seen the designs say the short-term plan does not remove a travel lane like the original plan. Instead, it would remove parking to add one-way protected bike lanes on both the north and south sides. The short-term plan is part of an air quality grant to improve biking and would not change the sidewalks.

“The plan that was going to go out in July was going to put a bike lane between a parking lane and a bunch of trucks,” said Peter Albert, the manager of urban planning initiatives at the SFMTA. “It seems like the low hanging fruit in that whole thing was the on-street parking, so why was on-street parking for basically two dozen spaces so sacrosanct that it was forcing bicyclists to pit themselves against trucks and buses?”

Under the new designs, he said, “the bike experience is much better because you’ve got no parked cars or dooring to the right, you’ve got complete clarity on your path and the trucks don’t have to intersect with you in any way.”

The Problem with Evans

The tricky part is where Cesar Chavez intersects with Evans Avenue and turns from four lanes into five lanes. There are two options for what to do at that hairy intersection in the short-term plan.

The first would get bicyclists through the intersection by removing a westbound lane on a 600-foot stretch of Cesar Chavez just west of Evans and east of Connecticut. That would leave enough room to paint protected bike lanes, and when compared to the original Bike Plan proposal, would slightly improve traffic flow for autos. The less-than-ideal option for the intersection, which is sure to encounter opposition from bicyclists, would not include any bike lanes, and only use sharrows to guide bicyclists through. Walking advocates don’t like this option either, as it leaves no room to widen the woefully inadequate sidewalk pictured above.

The long-term proposals, part of the Eastern Cesar Chavez Community Design Plan — which covers Cesar Chavez from Hampshire to Illinois — offer a better solution. The Planning Department is proposing a cantilevered path to widen Cesar Chavez Street around the Evans Avenue intersection to accommodate a total of 4 lanes of traffic, bike lanes, and sidewalks. They also plan to present proposals for a two-way protected green cycletrack with a six-foot buffer, and another option that would offer one-way protected green bike lanes on the north and south sides with six-foot buffers.

Pedestrians Won’t See Immediate Improvements

This is what pedestrians currently have to contend with on Cesar Chavez near Mississippi. Photo: SF Planning Dept.

The new drawings for short-term options don’t address the skinny sidewalks because, unlike the road diet that was originally envisioned, the eastbound lane on eastern Cesar Chavez would not be removed. Without doing that, there is little room left on the 59-foot wide street to expand the sidewalks and build bike lanes.

Albert said a $79,000 Bay Area Quality Management District grant being used to re-stripe Cesar Chavez isn’t meant to cover widening sidewalks, but the paint will serve “as a footprint of a road we’d like to be much better in the long-term.”

“I’m confident that either one of [the short-term options] is vastly better than what we’re living with right now,” he said.

“The sidewalk has got to be fixed. In the near term, at the bare minimum, the bike lane project should set the stage for improving walking conditions,” said Elizabeth Stampe, the executive director of Walk San Francisco.

Albert said he definitely “wants to revisit with the community this whole idea of a transit line along Cesar Chavez,” and that that’s one reason why removing a traffic lane along the entire stretch doesn’t make sense right now.

Trucks, Private Autos and Pollution

The June community meeting where the audience was told the road diet was being taken off the table failed to directly relay what the underlying issue was:  industrial businesses expressing concerns that reducing road capacity would increase congestion and hurt their bottom line. David Beaupre, a senior planner at the Port of San Francisco, repeated this concern in an interview with Streetsblog yesterday.

“If we start to impact the capacity of Cesar Chavez it’s going to negatively impact the economic opportunities to that part of the city,” he explained. “It’s going to begin to push those types of businesses out of the city, which means, you know, the food distribution, the auto repair shops, the cleaning services, and people are going to have to start driving more to get their services in south city or wherever.”

Beaupre acknowledges, however, that the majority of traffic on Cesar Chavez is not trucks, but private automobiles, but said eliminating a lane could impact the transit option, because”Muni can’t run if there’s only one lane.”

As a general rule, traffic engineers consider 2 percent of all vehicle traffic to be heavy traffic, or trucks and buses. Sources told Streetsblog the SFMTA was currently gathering comprehensive traffic flow data on eastern Cesar Chavez that should give everyone a clearer idea of the traffic make-up. It’s expected to be presented at next week’s meeting.

Beaupre also expressed a concern that reducing the capacity would create more pollution because of idling trucks, and force them to divert onto quieter neighborhood streets in the Bayview. But Peggy da Silva, the educating and training manager at Veritable Vegetable, which is located on Cesar Chavez and uses a fleet of trucks to haul organic produce, said trucks face tighter air control regulations than private automobiles.

“There’s a lack of understanding in the community about trucks. People think, because they’re big, that they pollute more and they don’t necessarily. Professional drivers are also probably less of a risk to people than, you know, your average person driving down the street,” da Silva said.

The project area. Image: SF Planning Dept.

Reducing Private Auto Traffic

Da Silva said the city should prioritize the movement of goods on Cesar Chavez by reducing private vehicle traffic on the street, which would reduce air pollution and the risk of injury and “support the health of our re-emerging industrial sector in Southeast San Francisco.”

“We don’t want the trucks idling. I think that’s an agreement for all of us. Therefore, we need to make sure that the essential vehicles on this street can move,” said da Silva.

Albert, the SFMTA official, called the latest designs breakthroughs, and said he hopes the August 24 meeting can move beyond “pitting trucks against buses against bikes against pedestrians.”

“It gives us the opportunity to pilot a much better environment,” Albert said. “If it works really well, if we manage the congestion, we provide the bikes their protected path, then we can come back with confidence and say this works for the community, everybody likes this better, let’s go back and find the capital funding to make the pedestrian improvements substantial.”

The community meeting on Eastern Cesar Chavez will be held Wednesday, August 24th from 6-8 p.m. in the community room of the Good Samaritan Family Resource Center at 1294 Potrero Avenue. Download the flyer here [pdf].

Illinois Street. Photo: SF Bicycle Coalition

Bicycle riders can enjoy bike lanes on three new routes striped within the last couple of months, as the SFMTA continues to roll out the city’s Bicycle Plan.

Illinois Street now offers a safer north-south route from Mission Bay to Dogpatch while Alemany Boulevard and Sagamore Street connect the city’s southern neighborhoods.

On Illinois, car parking was replaced on some stretches, but rearranged on others for a total addition of three spots, according to the SFMTA [pdf].

Bike lanes added on Sagamore Street connect riders from Alemany to already existing bike lanes on Brotherhoood Way. Some parking spots were reconfigured to safer angled parking. A similar configuration was done on Illinois Street. That should make it easier for drivers who are pulling out of their spots to see bicyclists.

The addition of a two-way center turn lane should also help calm motor traffic on the street and provide a safer way for drivers make turns. Part of the bike lane also includes double stripes on the right side, which should discourage users from riding unsafely in the door zone.

Buffered bike lanes on Alemany Boulevard that began construction in May have also been fully marked and supplemented with soft hit posts to provide better separation from fast-moving motor traffic.

Illinois Street. Photo: SF Bicycle Coalition

Illinois Street. Photo: SF Bicycle Coalition

Back-in angled parking on Sagamore Street. Photo: SF Bicycle Coalition

The double-stripe on the right discourages people from riding in the door zone. Photo: SF Bicycle Coalition

Sagamore Street connecting to Brotherhood Way. Photo: SF Bicycle Coalition

Alemany Boulevard. Photo: SF Bicycle Coalition

Alemany Boulevard. Photo: SF Bicycle Coalition

Alemany Boulevard. Photo: SF Bicycle Coalition

A folded bike on board the Los Angeles Metro. Flickr photo: davidagalvan

Muni rail and bus passengers can now bring folding bikes aboard, the SFMTA announced today. The measure will help provide more commuting options for residents who rely on Muni’s metro and bus lines but aren’t able to easily connect to them by foot or other transit.

“This will make bicycling an option for even more people more often,” SF Bike Coalition (SFBC) Executive Director Leah Shahum said in a statement. “We commend the SFMTA for helping even more people move around our city easily on both bicycles and transit.”

Cycling San Franciscans have long bemoaned the inability to bring bikes aboard Muni and still look forward to the day when trains can accommodate regular bicycles. Front racks installed on Muni buses have allowed them to carry bicycles for a number of years, but the Breda light-rail vehicles currently used by Muni are poorly designed for the task. Folding bikes are still prohibited on cable cars.

“In the eyes of the SFBC and many in San Francisco’s cycling community, there has long been a need for bicycle access on Muni’s light-rail lines,” the SFBC explains on its webpage about light rail, noting that “almost all other U.S. cities now allow bikes on their light-rail systems.”

In addition to supplementing longer trips, transit can serve as a vital safety net for bicycling in circumstances where bicycle users are unable to ride such as inclement weather, flat tires or exhaustion.

The SF Bicycle Plan, approved in late 2009, lists folding bicycle access on rail vehicles as a priority along with trials for allowing all bicycles during off-peak hours. SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told the SF Chronicle today that the “idea is being studied but could prove problematic, given that the trains are often crowded before and after the morning and evening commutes.”

Photo: Aaron Bialick

In post-bike injunction San Francisco, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is gearing up to install some of the final bicycle projects held up in the Bike Plan for several years.

The agency’s efforts will likely get another shot in the arm after a grant was approved today by the SF Board of Supervisors City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee. Although the SFMTA’s Bicycle Program would ultimately be better served by a system of dedicated revenue streams, it’s one more step towards catching up with improvements that should have begun rolling out five years ago.

“The landscape for bicycle projects is changing quite rapidly since the injunction’s been lifted,” said Oliver Gajda of the SFMTA’s Sustainable Streets Division, who pointed to downtown bike lanes on 2nd, 5th, Fremont, and Howard Streets as well as a cycle track on Innes Avenue near Hunter’s Point as some of the priority projects that could benefit from the grant.

Bosworth Street in Glen Park, where bike lanes were installed as part of the Bike Plan. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The funds come from the state’s Transportation Development Act, which allocates some money to pedestrian and bicycle projects. Once cleared by the full Board of Supervisors, $355,000 would go to the SFMTA for “various pedestrian and bicycle projects” along with $341,000 for the Department of Public Works to fix sidewalks and build wheelchair-accessible curb ramps.

The SFMTA Bicycle Program has compiled a schedule of completed and upcoming projects on their website. Work has begun on Portola Drive and the Alemany Boulevard cycle track, while streets next in line for improvements include Potrero Avenue from 25th to Cesar Chavez Streets, Sagamore Street and Sickles Avenue by the Daly City Border, and the notoriously harrowing Bayshore Boulevard.

By the end of the year, Golden Gate Park is set to receive the city’s first parking-protected cycle track. By summer’s end, the SFMTA expects to stripe bicycle lanes in nearly every part of the city from Phelan Avenue by the City College main campus to John Muir Drive by Lake Merced to Illinois Street along the eastern waterfront.

That should be welcome news to D11 Supervisor John Avalos, who said the city’s outer neighborhoods seem to be neglected when it comes to bike improvements.

“I often see that a great deal of the resources go in the center part of the city and fewer go out towards the Excelsior, Sunset, and [Visitacion] Valley,” said Avalos. “To the extent that we’re able to re-prioritize and make things happen out that way, I think we’d be hitting our goals of being a transit-first city.”

Crews striped the first stretch today eastbound from Rousseau Street to Justin Drive. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Alemany Boulevard will soon be dramatically safer for cycling as SFMTA crews began striping the city’s newest stretch of buffered bike lanes today.

Despite acting as a vital connection between the Glen Park and Bayview neighborhoods, this stretch of Alemany between Rousseau Street and Bayshore Boulevard [pdf] has long been uninviting for people who bike without any protection from drivers traveling at dangerously high speeds.

“Alemany Boulevard is such an important connector in the city, and with these new bikeways we will see even more people riding comfortably to work or school or the farmers market or simply for fun,” said San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum.

The section has long reinforced the 280 freeway as a gouge through the city’s southeastern neighborhoods with a vast, parallel six-lane roadway. The new bike lanes, which will be separated from motor vehicles by safe-hit posts and a striped buffer as wide as nine feet, will provide residents a more accessible route to destinations like the thriving Alemany Farmer’s Market and bike routes toward downtown San Francisco.

“The bike lanes have eight-foot lanes here. This is good, cause these cars are flyin’ down here,” said the project foreman as crews striped the first stretch from Rousseau Street to Justin Drive.

The bike lanes will connect with existing lanes on Alemany to the west and link to the Glen Park BART station. However, to the east of Putnam Street as Alemany passes underneath the 101 freeway, the bike lanes will disappear, and turn into sharrows.

Crew members said they expect to finish the project this week. See more photos after the break.

Photo: Aaron Bialick

The west end at Rousseau Street where the existing bike lanes end. Photo: Aaron Bialick

A rider navigates around the construction zone. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Just east of today's addition. Notice the dark preliminary lines marking the stripe placement. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Passing underneath the 101 freeway where only sharrows will be added. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The approach towards Bayshore Boulevard on the east end of the route. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Preliminary markings westbound on the north side of the 280 freeway. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The improvements will make it easier to get to the Alemany Farmer's Market without a car. Photo: Aaron Bialick

This stretch of road between the 101 freeway and the farmer's market is apparently so dangerous the sidewalk needed to be barricaded. Unfortunately, it will only receive sharrows. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Bayshore Boulevard, the natural shoreline of San Francisco. Photo: Aaron Bialick

These bike lanes on Bosworth Street connect bike commuters from Alemany to the Glen Park BART station. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Market Street approaching Sanchez. The bike lane will be extended along the painted lines and the three front parking spots will be replaced. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Preparations for improvements [pdf] to the Upper Market Street bike lanes are underway and when completed will mark a step towards safer passage for travelers by bike at three intersections along the city’s busiest bike corridor, where a vision for a protected bikeway was dropped nearly forty years ago.

The extended bike lanes should provide safer guidance through intersections where they previously ended abruptly, forcing people on bikes to merge or squeeze between faster-moving motor traffic and parked cars. The redesign will facilitate riders more safely by replacing several right-turn lanes and fifteen hazardous parking spots between Castro Street and Octavia Boulevard.

“The improved bike lanes will help draw more people to the Upper Market businesses,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC). “There are a ton of families in the neighborhoods lining Market Street, so I think we’ll even see more people bicycling with their kids, which is already a growing trend.”

Cars will still be able to turn right by merging into the bike lane, a standard practice in San Francisco: “Bike lanes serve as the right-turn lane for all vehicles by definition,” the SFMTA noted in a presentation on the project last year.

Upper Market Street was actually slated to receive the city’s first parking-protected bike lanes in 1972 during its reconstruction, according to an article in a recent issue [pdf] of The Tube Times, the SFBC’s magazine. After neighbors organized by the SFBC and other community groups testified at a public hearing on the need for a separated bikeway, rather than the proposed six-lane widening, the Board of Supervisors approved a bikeway plan 10-1.

Ultimately, “the Department of Public Works opposed the idea and despite urging from the Board of Supervisors, these visionary protected bike lanes on Market Street were never built,” wrote the SFBC.

“Market Street is a work in progress,” said Shahum. “This is a step forward, and there’s a lot more we can be doing on all the sections on Market Street to make it even more inviting to the growing number of people bicycling, so we’ll keep watching and learning what works.”

Market Street approaching Noe. The two front parking spots will be replaced. Photo: Aaron Bialick

What does family-friendly mean? What’s more important: safety or parking? Do most San Franciscans ever ride a bike in the city?

Before I get to all of those questions, can I suggest to you a different framing and headline for the Scott James article that ran today: Cyclists and pedestrians still left exposed because a few people oppose safe street plan.

If that sounds like the biased view of a former transit reporter, then consider this. Just this past Wednesday, as I rode my bike down 17th Street through the intersection with Dolores, I was struck by a minivan going the opposite direction that was making a left turn onto Dolores. I was thrown to the ground, lucky to only be bruised and scraped. My bike, by contrast, was totaled from the impact. I was lucky to be in decent enough shape to console the driver of the minivan, who was deeply shaken by the crash.

To paraphrase James: I’m recovering from a bad case of road rash – not from ill-fitting cycling shorts in which I wouldn’t be caught dead, but from the direct impact of a collision with a left-turning driver on 17th Street who didn’t see me traveling straight on my bike through the green light until it was too late.

Can you imagine why I’d be rubbed the wrong way by Mr. James’ suggestion that building a safer bike lane is anti-family and anti-senior citizen?

Count me in among the “emerging group of residents and businesses raising concerns about how the city is carrying out its ambitious bike lane agenda.” When the city compromises on safety to satisfy a few vocal people, citizens have every reason to raise concerns. As part of the compromise on 17th Street, the SFMTA agreed not to remove parking it planned to replace with bike lanes. Instead, it has added extremely narrow bike lanes next to the parking that are not up to the standard prescribed by the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ in its recently released set of urban bike facility guidelines.

The impact of my crash.

The crash I was in wouldn’t have been avoided with better bike lanes – it would take a focused effort to address the left-turn visibility issue at the intersection. But many hundreds of cyclists, myself included, will be exposed to a greatly increased dooring or clipping risk on the new stretch of bike lanes because the compromise solution was implemented. The compromise was on safety, and anyone who hopes to ride a bike in the city lost.

Another line in James’ column got to me: “city leaders had forgotten that most people did not bicycle (7 percent of trips in the city are by bike, according to the coalition), including parents who must shuttle children or those with physical limitations.” A more salient figure is that 7 in 10 San Franciscans rode a bike in the city in 2009, according to a David Binder poll, and every day on my bike ride, I spot more and more parents shuttling their kids on bikes. After my crash, it makes me cringe all the more to think that the city isn’t doing everything it can to make the ride safer for those parents who choose to make an environmentally friendly decision that gets their kids out in the fresh air every morning.

In the building I live in, every unit has a garage space, and most are occupied with cars (a higher rate than the 70 percent of households in the city as a whole that own a vehicle), but almost all of the tenants also own bicycles, which can be found in the garage as well. This is hardly atypical. Glance into any open garage in the city and you’re likely to spot as many bikes as cars.

Which makes you wonder: does family-friendly mean lots of parking and streets that are unsafe to walk or bike on? Or does it mean streets that are safe enough for all users, from small children to seniors? Shouldn’t there at least be some streets in San Francisco that are safe for everyone, even if it means converting a few hundred of the city’s 280,000-plus on-street parking spaces to curbside bike lanes?

I write this not as a maniacal speeding bicyclist but as a regular San Franciscan, someone who was too intimated to ride a bike on city streets when I first moved to 17th Street. After all, at Streetsblog, I was the Muni reporter, not the bike reporter, and wrote well over a hundred stories about the former and perhaps two dozen on the latter. Only through hours of staring out the window at my stretch of 17th Street, the personification of Jane Jacobs’ eyes on the street, did I build up the fascination and courage to try riding myself. My use of transportation modes, from walking to transit to biking to driving, couldn’t be more balanced. The most common long ride I make is from home to my brother’s house in the Richmond to visit my two young nephews. When I ask for safe and family-friendly streets, I mean that I literally want to be able to visit my family safely.

It would be easy to take Mr. James to task for trying to bring the trumped-up controversy over bike lanes to San Francisco, and for attempting to turn a strong woman who advocates for safer streets in San Francisco into the next focus of undeserved controversy, just like another strong woman who works for safer streets in New York. But I’d rather turn the attention from Mr. James’ attempt to gain traction on anti-bike sentiment to the need for truly safe facilities for everyone in this city.

We know that bicyclists and pedestrians (in other words, just about every person in San Francisco) both face grave danger from cars on the city’s streets. After all, 755 pedestrians were injured by cars in the city in 2008, and 390 bicyclists were in injury collisions with vehicles. By contrast, there were just 21 pedestrian-bicycle injury collisions, none of them fatal, belying James’ rhetoric portraying bicyclists as the biggest menace to pedestrians. Pedestrian and bicycle safety is a shared goal, founded on calming traffic.

So what am I to do about Mr. James’ piece? Of course, the thing my parents taught me to do in such situations.

My parents were both journalists. One of them still is. That meant they were avid readers of the local newspapers, and when the newspaper ran a story they found particularly slanted or poorly done, their recourse was to cancel their subscription. This usually would last for a month or two, during which time I’d feel inconvenienced about not being able to read the sports section or the comics, but it was a quiet yet poignant form of protest, sometimes against the very newspaper my dad used to work for.

That’s why I’m glad I’ve recently signed up for the New York Times’ new online subscription system. When the otherwise stalwart institution of journalism runs an article like Mr. James’ piece today, I have the satisfying recourse of canceling my subscription. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. No doubt my partner and I will find this an inconvenience for the next month or two, but journalism in the nation’s finest paper needs to be held to a high standard. An overtly slanted article marked by a suburban obsession with automotive storage over the safety of bicyclists and pedestrians is not up to that standard.

Michael Rhodes is a former Muni reporter for Streetsblog. He is currently a master’s student at UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning.

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: Aaron Bialick

Bicyclists have begun taking advantage of the new bike lanes being installed this week along the western section of the 17th Street corridor, with many riders saying they began feeling a greater sense of safety just as soon as the first stripes were laid down by Wednesday from Valencia to Church Streets.

In interviews with Streetsblog, several people on bikes roundly cheered the improvements, described as simply “fantastic” by one rider. “It’s really nice because we always bike on 17th Street and the [car] traffic is not that high,” said another traveler trying out the new lanes with a partner.

“Improvements on 17th Street will help the fast-growing number of people bicycling between the Castro, Mission and Potrero neighborhoods,” said San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum. “There are so many families with children riding bicycles in these areas already, and this new bike lane will help welcome even more people of all ages onto their bicycles.”

SFMTA counts show a 75 percent increase in bike traffic on 17th Street at Valencia from 2006-2010, according to Shahum. The long-awaited project comes as part of the San Francisco Bike Plan, which is currently being put into action after a four-year bike injunction delay.

While SFMTA crews have begun work along the roughly two-mile stretch from Corbett Avenue to Kansas Street, bike lanes between Church and Sanchez are temporarily on hold as planners try to figure out a solution that addresses safety concerns about the streetcar tracks, according to the SFMTA Sustainable Streets Division’s Mike Sallaberry.

Proposed lanes included in the Bike Plan. Image: SFMTA

The lanes approved in the Bike Plan would have directed riders through the 17th and Church Street intersection at an angle intended to avoid catching bicycle tires in the streetcar tracks, but the westbound bike lane ends at Church Street in the latest layout presented on the SFMTA’s website [pdf].

If bike lanes were to be striped on that section of 17th Street, they would be placed between the tracks and parked vehicles, squeezing bicyclists into a narrow space. A safer solution would be to replace the curbside parking, but, for now, Sallaberry said the SFMTA is considering installing sharrows in the center of each set of tracks.

A victim of parked cars and rail tracks at 17th and Church Streets. Photo: Michael Rhodes

“It is important that the city upgrades 17th Street to be safe and inviting along the entire route,” said Shahum. “We want to be able to welcome anyone from ages eight to eighty onto their bikes on this important east-west route, so it should be a continuous, dedicated bike space.”

Replacing parking with safer curbside bike lanes is already part of the 17th Street project on the eastern section from Valencia to Kansas Streets, where upwards of 200 vehicle spaces will be re-purposed. While parking demand factors could be at play in the differing treatment, the relative impact of replacing the roughly forty spots between Church and Sanchez does seem smaller for a block that likely also holds greater demand for safe cycling travel.

SFMTA crews also striped a new dashed left-turn bike lane on 16th Street this week, making room between existing travel lanes from Sanchez to Market Streets as laid out in the Bike Plan, although the design appears to be a tweak from the original [pdf].

16th Street from Sanchez to Market. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Sharrows can be found on blocks of Hoff and 16th Streets directing riders from the bike routes of 17th and Valencia Streets to the 16th and Mission BART station as part of the project. Photo: Aaron Bialick.

Riders take advantage of the newly separating stripe. I personally prefer the aesthetic of this leftover sharrow marking to the standard bike lane stencil. Photo: Aaron Bialick

While remaining hazards from cars were apparent, many riders were happy just to have a newly dedicated travel lane. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Another happy traveler. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The SFBC's rendering of what a protected bike lane on Fell Street could look like.

During routine business at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board meeting Tuesday, Director Cheryl Brinkman recounted how enjoyable it was to ride her bicycle on the new physically separated bike lane on Division Street between 9th and 11th Streets. Brinkman said she hoped the SFMTA would consider how it could improve the connection for cyclists between the Wiggle and the Panhandle, including the possibility of adding physical separation to the bike lanes on Fell and Oak Streets between Scott and Baker Streets.

“I think it’s such an important connection and I’ve been riding that stretch more and more recently,” Brinkman told Streetsblog. “I don’t know if it’s the quality of the traffic changing, or if I’m getting older, but riding with the moving traffic so close to my handlebars is very unpleasant. I choose not to ride that section anymore.”

Brinkman added that she had heard from several people living in the Sunset and the Richmond districts that they would ride downtown to work if it weren’t for those three blocks along Oak and Fell. “It seems such a shame to have that great corridor but to have those three blocks that way,” said Brinkman. “It shouldn’t be designed so that only the brave cyclists use it. No one should be dissuaded because they are frightened.”

As it turns out, Mayor Gavin Newsom is open to a study to improve that section of the bicycle network. According to Johanna Partin, a policy adviser to the Mayor, he would be “supportive of anything that would increase bike safety in the city.” Partin said Brinkman’s comments were a catalyst for addressing those blocks of Oak and Fell. She said Newsom was going to encourage the SFMTA to look into the possibility of improving the bicycle facilities and was going to ask them to work with the neighborhood to address concerns that might arise about parking, for instance.

“He’s supportive of beginning the process with the neighbors. Because it’s such a heavily trafficked area, there’s going to need to be some significant community outreach and traffic studies,” said Partin. “He’d be very supportive of that, but he wants to make sure the study was thorough.”

Over the past year and a half the SFMTA has tinkered with various treatments to try to improve the conflict between cyclists and cars trying to enter the Arco gas station on Fell Street at Divisadero, including the recent green lane. A group of neighbors and advocates as part of Fix Fell Now! also held weekly protests at the Arco station.

This is the first time anyone with the power to change the street has spoken seriously about traffic studies and physical separation and the news caught even the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition by surprise. The SFBC recently announced its vision for a network of physically separated bike lanes, “Connecting the City,” which included a bi-directional, physically separated cycle track on Fell Street, but they had not heard from the Mayor or the SFMTA about a study.

“We would love to see a continuous separated bike way along the curb from Scott Street to the park,” said Renee Rivera, acting executive director of the SFBC. Rivera said Connecting the City had called for removing a travel lane and moving the parking off the curb so cyclists could ride without worrying about moving traffic or doors swinging open. According to Rivera, the SFBC would support the removal of parking rather than the travel lane because parking would not trigger environmental review under CEQA.

“The key thing is a buffered bike lane,” said Rivera.

Though Newsom’s term is ending in a few weeks and a traffic study and community outreach would take considerably longer, Brinkman said she was committed to following through with the SFMTA staff to test the feasibility of the protected lanes.

Editor’s note: Matthew Ridgway is a principal at Fehr and Peers, a transportation design and engineering firm that routinely consults on bicycle and pedestrian projects throughout California. His firm was hired to help develop Fresno’s Bicycle Master Plan. Bryan Jones, the city of Fresno’s traffic engineer, contributed to this report.

A collective sigh of relief could be heard throughout San Francisco this past August when a judge finally lifted the a four-year Bicycle Plan injunction, freeing the city to move ahead with striping miles of bike lanes. News outlets in the city depicted the denouement of one of the more confounding dramas in transportation planning, as the curtain on Rob Anderson’s quixotic mission to thwart clean transportation came to a final close.

But the biggest story in expanding bicycle networks in California has been quietly unfolding two hundred miles away from the City by the Bay in Fresno.

Yes, Fresno.

Even with an astounding 15.2 percent unemployment rate and home prices down by 48.6 percent over the last five years, Fresno has managed to add more bike lanes than most cities outside of New York, which has completed construction of 200 miles of bike lanes in three years. Given Fresno’s size, the per capita addition of lanes makes it competitive with the accomplishments of Janette Sadik-Khan, though with much less fanfare.

Take the numbers: over the past 12 months Fresno has built 30 miles of new on-street bike lanes and three miles of new trails, with an additional 30 miles of bikeways in the works (compare that to San Francisco’s plan to add 31 miles). And that’s before its City Council unanimously approved its first comprehensive Bicycle Master Plan, which focuses on the Five E’s of Engineering, Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, and Evaluation.

These were not necessarily easy wins. Most of the on-street bikeways were built through road diets, which meant removing auto lanes to add bike lanes. Most of the 30 bikeway miles were installed on roadways with excess capacity within the core and downtown of the city.  The city even developed a website to educate both bicyclists and motorists on the reasons for – and benefits of – road diets.

Transforming the city into a Bicycle Friendly Community has been no small feat and there are tremendous hurdles to surmount before you can call the city a bicycle paradise. The Fresno region has spent approximately $2 billion in the past decade on new six-lane freeways such as State Routes 168 and 180. Fresno leads the State of California in freeway lane miles per capita, as well as local major street lane miles per capita, both of which create economic impacts and maintenance challenges for the city and state. Freeways also create considerable barriers for every other mode of transportation. Fresno is the fifth largest city in the State, and yet during the busiest time of day, drivers can get from one side of the metro area to the other in less than 20 minutes. The Fresno region also leads the state (and, in most categories, the nation) in air quality non-compliance, poverty and public health issues such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and asthma.

Facing these land use and socioeconomic challenges, city staff realized that a citywide bike network could support a cost-effective transportation system while also revitalizing Fresno’s downtown and neighboring communities. Ultimately, Fresno’s goal is to become the “Bicycle Capital of the Central Valley” and be a leading example for the smaller rural Central Valley jurisdictions on how to develop more sustainably.

This year, the region launched the 2010 Bike Fresno Campaign, which focused on encouragement and the Joy of Biking. The campaign featured some terrific social media that would make even the most hardened souls shed a tear. Upcoming events will keep the spotlight on Fresno: next May the city will host the Eye-Q California Classic Weekend, a weekend-long festival focused on health and physical activity. As part of the festivities, the organizers will close 10 miles of SR 168 to cars and open it to bicycles for the day.

It will likely be some time before the city would ever be mentioned in the same breath as some of the European cycling capitols, but with the exciting pace of change, bicycle advocates and planners should officially take notice.

Check out the Fresno’s ambitious plans here: City of Fresno Bicycle, Pedestrian, and Trails Master Plan. This news reporter did a great job covering the new bikes lanes and road diets. View videos here.

Photos: Bryan Goebel

San Franciscans who live in the Sunset or want to pedal to the beach now have a three-mile stretch of bike lanes on Kirkham Street from 9th Avenue to the Great Highway. I rode the new bike lanes over the weekend and it was a mostly calm, relaxing ride. I typically pedal through Golden Gate Park to get to Ocean Beach (a much smoother trip since the repaving) but on Sunday I decided to explore a few quiet neighborhoods along Bike Route 40.

The SFMTA recently striped Kirkham, narrowing the auto lanes to 10 feet and giving bicyclists 6-foot wide bike lanes on both sides going east and west. Three medians between Funston and 17th have been converted to raised concrete islands, the result of a community process than began five years ago to help tame the street and make it more welcoming to pedestrians.

For long stretches on Kirkham, it was a very pleasant ride. The most uncomfortable part was not climbing the hills, it was crossing 19th Avenue, San Francisco’s busiest traffic sewer. The westbound bike lane turns into sharrows at 18th, and to get across the congested intersection at 19th, I had to plod through the mess of cars waiting to turn right. It was a bit dicey not just for me but for one woman on foot who got stranded on the median trying to cross.

The SFMTA did consider removing the parking spaces along that portion of Kirkham to add a westbound bike lane along the curb, but it probably would not have been popular in the neighborhood. The Kirkham project as it exists sailed through without any resistance because it had little effect on parking. There’s also the issue of right-turning drivers who would likely obstruct the bike lane. The SFMTA surmises since this section is downhill most bicyclists will be traveling at similar speeds to cars on a green light, but if my experience is common, bicyclists should be very careful when crossing this ugly intersection.

Kirkham Street at 19th Avenue. There's a bike lane heading eastbound but not westbound along this stretch.

Heading back eastbound passed 19th wasn’t as bad. Although the bike lane turns into sharrows from 20th to 19th Avenue, there are plans in the works to eventually put in a bike lane on this stretch. First, though, the SFMTA has to work out some signal looping issues with Caltrans. That side of the intersection was less congested on a Sunday, but it also wasn’t the best day to observe traffic patterns.

Along the way, I did pull off to try and confirm the one other complaint I’ve heard about the bike lanes: that drivers adjusting to the narrower street are drifting into the bike lanes and edging dangerously close to bicyclists. I saw this happen mostly when there were no bike riders in the lanes. When the bike lanes were full, drivers seemed more conscious (even if a few of them were on their cell phones) and I never had any close calls on my ride. Still, the SFMTA is monitoring the situation. If enough bicyclists complain, the agency could consider painting in a center line. The rationale behind no center line was that it would make drivers uncomfortable, causing them to slow down.

The SFMTA is also collecting before and after data, so they can get a more exact picture of how drivers are reacting.

Despite these few issues, the bike lanes on Kirkham are great and will hopefully encourage more people who live in the Sunset to hop on a bike. I saw lots of happy bicyclists in the lanes, including a few families, even though parts of Kirkham don’t meet the 8 to 80-year-old test because of the hills, especially traveling eastbound.

The Kirkham project is one of about 20 post-injunction bike projects the SFMTA is hoping to finish by the spring of 2011. While some bike advocates have complained the process is too slow — considering the four-year-old wait we had with the bike injunction — the agency is working at a pace of completing one bike project every two weeks.

Have you ridden the new Kirkham Street bike lanes? What was your experience like? Feel free to share below.

The bike lanes also turn into sharrows at Sunset Boulevard.

Aaaah, the beach.

A cyclist on Market Street in San Francisco, now ranked 4th in the nation for bicycle commuting. Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography.

Despite a four-year bicycle injunction starting in 2006, San Francisco’s share of bicycle commuting has risen, lifting the city to 4th on the League of American Bicyclists’ (LAB) list of 70 largest American cities, while Oakland rose two spaces to 5th. The list is compiled each year from data collected by the Census Bureau as part of its American Community Survey (ACS).

“I’m proud that San Francisco continues to be a leader in promoting bicycling as a healthy, sustainable transportation alternative,” said Mayor Gavin Newsom. “With the safer and more inviting bike network we’re creating throughout the City, more and more San Franciscans will start bicycling.”

San Francisco’s 10 percent increase and Oakland’s 18 percent increase in bicycle commuting in 2009 came during a year when the number one and number two bicycle-commuting cities in the country, Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, respectively, lost bicycle mode share relative to other forms of transportation. Despite these drops, Portland and Minneapolis are still far ahead of the Bay Area, with 5.81 percent of Portlanders bicycle commuting and 3.86 percent in the Twin Cities. Compare that to San Francisco’s 2.98 percent and Oakland’s 2.53 percent.

These numbers should seem low to those who ride regularly on Market Street in San Francisco during commute hours, where cyclists have been the majority of the street’s users the past several Bike to Work Days. Overall bicycle usage in cities is actually harder to measure than the very specific commuting percentages would suggest, because ACS data collection under-counts cyclists, according to LAB. From their website:

Workers were asked to list only the means of transportation they used on the largest number of days in that week. This means that if the respondent rode a bicycle to work two days but drove three, they would not be counted as a cyclist. Likewise, workers were asked only for the means of transportation used for the longest distance during the trips. If someone biked one mile to a bus stop and rode the bus for two miles they would not be recorded as a bicyclist.

Both the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which is responsible for adding new bike lanes, echoed LAB’s sentiment and highlighted the large growth they expected now that the injunction has been lifted and bicycle infrastructure is being added at a relatively rapid clip.

“Bicycle commuting has increased in San Francisco 61 percent since 2006,” said Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., Executive Director/CEO of the SFMTA. “We are committed to doing the work needed to keep the number of bicyclists growing in the years ahead.”

The SFMTA suggested the year-on-year increase in cycling despite the lack of new infrastructure could be an indicator that the rate in bicycle commuting will surge with new lanes and more racks. Since November 2009, when Judge Peter J. Busch modified the 2006 injunction on the Bicycle Plan to allow a limited number of bike lane projects and other improvements, the SFMTA has added eleven new bike lanes, over 1,900 sharrows, 400 sidewalk bike racks, five on-street “bike corrals,” a green lane  on Fell Street and a fully separated green lane on portions of Market Street.

While the SFBC commended the recent surge in infrastructure, they called on the city to do more.

“We know that 7 in 10 San Franciscans rode a bike last year, from parents dropping their kids at daycare to workers heading downtown to families exploring the city,” said Renée Rivera, SFBC’s acting executive director. ”We also heard Mayor Newsom say he wants San Francisco to be the number one U.S. city for bicycling, and we hope he keeps this promise by completing the Market Street bikeway and other improvements, which will help people feel confident, comfortable and safe when they bike.”

A 37-year-old Oakland man has been identified as the driver of a 1989 Mercedes-Benz who allegedly killed 22-year-old Nils Linke of Germany while he was riding his bicycle Friday night on Masonic Avenue near Turk Street, a tragic reminder that the SFMTA needs to act quickly to fix one of San Francisco's most notorious traffic sewers.

SFPD spokesperson Lt. Lyn Tomioka said Joshua Calder faces charges of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, DUI, felony hit-and-run causing death and no proof of insurance. Tomioka wasn't sure if Calder was being held without bail, but he was booked Friday night. Police told the Chronicle he drove away from the scene but was located two blocks from the crash, at Turk and Tamalpais Terrace.

According to CBS5, Calder was traveling southbound on Masonic Avenue around 10:40 p.m. Friday when he hit and killed Linke, who was identified as a tourist. A spokesperson for the German Consulate in San Francisco told Streetsblog Linke had been traveling alone on his visit.

For years now, advocates and residents who live on and near Masonic Avenue have been trying to get the SFMTA to turn Masonic into a complete street, replete with bicycle and pedestrian amenities that would slow traffic, and make it a safer place for everyone. At a recent community meeting, the agency offered four options to do that, including a cycle track.

As Michael Helquist of BIKE NOPA pointed out today, the SFMTA has been hearing loud calls to fix Masonic since 2008 when 500 residents signed a petition citing speed concerns. It was hand delivered to SFMTA Chief Nat Ford.

During a press conference today for new Clipper fare gates, Ford was asked to respond to concerns about Masonic.

"We've put about four options out there now to really look at how to redesign that street," said Ford. "Unfortunately, Masonic could use some traffic calming. I have to be cautious, because you can imagine, this is a very litigious situation. Our hearts go out to the family of the young man who got killed, but we have to also make sure that we're making prudent legal steps going forward in dealing with this issue."

We're attempting to get more details on the victim, the suspect and the growing calls to Fix Masonic. Look for more coverage this week. 

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.

"We are celebrating San Francisco's freedom to once again make streets safer for everyone and look forward to real improvements on the streets in a matter of days," said Renée Rivera, acting executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. "This is the first time in San Francisco's history that this many bike lane projects are approved and ready to be striped. These long-awaited improvements will help growing numbers of people feel more confident, comfortable and safe when they bike to shop, to work and to play."

Busch's ruling (PDF) late today ends a long legal ordeal for the city, bike advocates and the increasing numbers of San Francisco bicyclists who have been starving for significant improvements in bicycle infrastructure. Though the city got a partial lifting late last year, the SFMTA has been held back from moving full speed ahead on innovative projects it has in the works, and very often was hesitant to make even minor improvements, fearing it would jeopardize the city's case. The agency will now be on track to add 34 miles of new bike lanes, nearly doubling the current number.

"Today is the beginning of a new era for bicycling in San Francisco," said SFMTA Chief Nat Ford. "The SFMTA Bike Program staff has been working tirelessly to prepare for this day and we are committed to doing the work needed to keep the number of bicyclists growing in the years ahead."

Mayor Newsom also issued a statement saying the city's efforts "to promote bicycling as a healthy and environmentally sustainable transportation alternative will surge."

In his ruling, Busch said he disagreed with all of Miles' key arguments and found that the city's exhaustive EIR on the Bike Plan fully complied with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). "The Court finds that the City did not abuse its discretion in certifying the EIR as in compliance with CEQA, nor did the City abuse its discretion by the process of approving the EIR."

In an interview with Streetsblog earlier this week, Ford said that the first post-injunction bike lanes will be installed on Townsend, Laguna Honda and North Point.

"We have a bunch of projects teed up and we'll be ready to go," said Ford.

Advocates hoped that crews would be out on the streets as early as Monday.

"The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is studying the list of projects that will be implemented and we have been looking for opportunities to make those projects better than ordinary bike lanes," said Andy Thornley, the SFBC program director. "We understand the MTA is also looking into whether to make them more than an ordinary bike lane, whether it's a buffered lane, a separated bike lane or even a cycletrack."

Thornley said the Townsend, Alemany Boulevard and Division Street bike lane projects are examples of projects "that seem to be opportune for upgrading."

"We are hoping that when these projects are implemented they are even better than we have seen in the designs."

Since a partial lifting of the injunction last November, the SFMTA, according to a press release, has "completed nine new bike lane projects, installed 1,600 shared roadway markings, installed more than 402 sidewalk bike racks and five on-street 'bike corrals." It also installed green bike lanes on Market Street and on a section of Fell Street near the problematic Arco station.

Anderson, in a comment he wrote on Streetsblog, has said he may appeal. "We'll appeal if we lose and we think there's a legal basis for an appeal."

Cyclists Cheer The News

Cyclists throughout the city cheered the news today that the bike injunction had been lifted and looked forward to the new infrastructure soon to be installed.

Brett Wingeier, a regular cyclist who stopped in the midst of a steep hill to be interviewed by Streetsblog, smiled widely and exclaimed, "It's fantastic!" Wingeier said his wife is an urban planner and he was very familiar with environmental review as required under CEQA. "The whole [environmental review] thing, it was always just a crippling amount of work that you would have to do, a huge barrier to stuff." He also questioned the motives of the plaintiff in the case, Rob Anderson. "It seemed just messed up."

Wingeier was hopeful city engineers would forge ahead with new bike lanes and other amenities, a prospect he assumed would draw new cyclists to the streets. "There are some people who will ride anyway and they will be safer. There are some people who will see better bike lanes and a more bike friendly city and people will start riding who don't ride now."

Anna Sojourner, an engineering geologist who writes and reviews CEQA reports, said her reaction was "glee." While defending CEQA and saying she made her living because of it, Sojourner said she thought she understood Anderson's mental state and said of the original lawsuit, "It was just venal, venal."

On the bright side, she also said the four year struggle to certify the Bike Plan could be "the best thing that ever happened to us."

"It's certainly going to make the application of CEQA with regards to bicycle infrastructure more clear and more robust," she added.

Lewis Schump, a cyclist who has only been riding in San Francisco for three months, knew nothing about the injunction but said the addition of new bike lanes could only be a good thing. "Right now it's pretty straight forward where the safe and easy routes are, but if there are more it will be great," he said.

Robert Lehman, who has been riding a bicycle in San Francisco since 1979 and rides ten miles round trip to work downtown, said "it was just a pretty nasty mean-spirited thing when it happened in the first place. It set the city back a whole bunch."

Lehman noted that many parts of the city suffered from inadequate infrastructure and he thought the greatest increase in cycling would come from those neighborhoods as they were connected to existing bike routes. He also stressed the need to provide more options to parents who want to ride their kids to school and day care.

"There are a lot of people I know at work and they'd probably ride if there was a safer way to do it," he said. "What's gotten built so far is really good and year after year you get more people riding and I hope it just keeps expanding."

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Peter J. Busch issued an order late this afternoon finding San Francisco in compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, in seeking to implement its Bicycle Plan citywide. The ruling effectively dissolves an injunction that continued to prohibit City engineers from moving forward on some planned bicycle route improvements intended to enhance the safety and usability of streets for bicyclists. A previous order from Nov. 2009 lifted significant portions of the original 2006 injunction, but left limited restrictions intact while the adequacy of environmental review for certain projects was adjudicated.

"I am very gratified by the ruling from Judge Busch, who carefully considered an enormous amount of evidence in this case, and found that the City met its environmental review requirements," said City Attorney Dennis Herrera. "Today's decision clears an important hurdle toward making San Francisco safer for bicyclists, and healthier for all of us. I am very thankful to the many dedicated public servants involved in this policy initiative and meeting the stringent legal requirements to fulfill it, including Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors, the Municipal Transportation Agency, and the Planning Department."

The case is: Coalition for Adequate Review et al. v. City and County of San Francisco, San Francisco Superior Court No. 505-509, filed July 28, 2005. A copy of the order is available on the City Attorney's Web site at http://www.sficityattorney.org/.