Image: SFMTA

Advocates say a strong show of support is critical to ensure the project is approved without delay. Although agency staff won’t make a decision whether to recommend approval of the project to the SFMTA Board of Directors tomorrow, hearing officers will take comments from the public that could influence the project’s design details and implementation timetable.

The project would provide vital safety upgrades for bike travel on the three blocks linking the Panhandle and the Wiggle — currently fraught with danger from high-speed traffic that deters many would-be riders and sometimes leads to confrontations between drivers and cyclists.

Although the SFMTA says the project could be implemented no sooner than next spring, D5 Supervisor Christina Olague, a strong supporter and former president of the Planning Commission, told Streetsblog she thinks it can go in by this fall.

Completing environmental review on the project, she said, should be a top priority for the Planning Department. “America’s Cup was, and I think we’ve seen other huge projects that have been top priorities.”

“This creates jobs, and ultimately it creates safer pathways for cyclists, people who want to bicycle with their families, for pedestrians,” said Olague. “I think it’s something people will love once it’s in place.”

The hearing takes place tomorrow at 10 a.m. at City Hall in Room 416. You can also email staff at sustainable.streets@sfmta.com.

Students on Walk to School Day 2010. Photo: Adrienne Johnson/Flickr

San Francisco became the first major city in California to implement all of its planned 15-MPH school zones, the SFMTA announced today. With proper enforcement, the measure promises make the streets surrounding 181 schools safer and more inviting for students and parents walking and biking.

An SFMTA worker installs a 15-MPH school zone sign last August. Photo: Bryan Goebel/Flickr

“This is a big step forward for everyone who walks in San Francisco,” said Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe in a statement. “We applaud the Mayor’s leadership on this, the SFMTA’s quick action to establish the zones, and the Police Department’s commitment to enforcing these new safer speeds.”

The SFMTA began installing 15 MPH speed limit signs at schools in August. Although the agency originally estimated the zones would go in at around 200 private and public K-12 schools, only 181 “are eligible under a 2008 state law which allows the 15-mph zones on two-lane streets for 500 feet around a school,” reads an SFMTA statement. Captain Denis F. O’Leary, head of the SFPD Traffic Company, said police are out enforcing the signs.

“Walking in San Francisco should be inviting and safe for all residents,” said SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin, who added that the agency “is committed to working with our city partners to ensure that kids can get to their schools safely. We will continue to seek out comprehensive and innovative street improvements for everyone.”

“Hopefully,” said Stampe, “this will be the first of many cities.”

Factoring in proximity to bike lanes, street connectivity, topography, and commuter cycling rates, the Bike Score algorithm rated Minneapolis America's most bikeable city. Image: Walk Score

The people behind Walk Score, the real estate rating service that goes by the slogan “Drive Less, Live More,” are out with a new rating system, based on hard data, that should prove useful to prospective city dwellers: Bike Score.

The company launched the Bike Score website today, using its new algorithm to rank the ten most bikeable cities in the country. (We covered their release of city rankings for transit last month.) Minneapolis ran away with the top prize with a 79 percent bikeability rating. San Francisco tied Portland for number two, despite the fact that hilliness was a factor. D.C. and New York also placed highly (while the NYC core rates very highly on Bike Score, the bike lane deserts outside the center city score quite low).

The staff of Walk Score is made up of a whole lot of bike commuters. No wonder they were excited to launch a new bikeability ranking. Photo courtesy of Walk Score

In other bikeability rating news, the League of American Bicyclists released its 2012 list of Bicycle Friendly Communities today. There’s a lot of overlap between the BFCs and the Bike Score winners, but they are compiled use vastly different methodologies. For one thing, you won’t find two of the League’s top three cycling cities on the Bike Score list because Bike Score, so far, only looks at cities with populations over 200,000. Sorry, Boulder and Davis.

Colorado and Montana did well in the League’s rankings this year. Missoula and Durango moved up to gold, and the Colorado towns of Gunnison and Aspen made it onto the list for the first year, rolling in at the silver level. Look for your city on their updated BFC list [PDF].

The League bases its BFC choices on somewhat subjective criteria. They look for the “five Es”: engineering, education, encouragement, evaluation & planning, and enforcement. Decisions are made by staff and external reviewers, in consultation with local stakeholders.

Bike Score, on the other hand, is based on pure numbers. Individual addresses are rated on a scale of 0-100 based on four factors:

• the availability of bike infrastructure (with on-street and off-street facilities weighted differently)
• the hilliness of the area (the one factor a city can’t control)
• amenities and road connectivity
• the number of bike commuters (because “biking is social” and there’s safety in numbers, explained Walk Score’s chief technology officer and co-founder Matt Lerner)

To then determine the score for the city, the individual address scores are used to compute scores for each block, and then the block-by-block scores are weighted by population density.

“For every location in the city, we add up the number of meters of bike lane, and there’s a distance-to-K function so the closer you have a meter of bike lane, the more valuable it is, and we don’t give you any credit after about a mile out,” said Lerner. “For every address, we do that calculation. It’s a new metric that is really about a specific location, not about the city overall. So what we’re really measuring is, for average person in that city, how good is biking.”

Note: The capability to score your own home isn’t available on the website yet, as it is for Transit Score and Walk Score, but Lerner says they hope to enable that soon so real estate agents can use Bike Score to advertise the homes they have for sale, as they do now with the other two. Walk Score has an Apartment Search function that allows renters to search by nearby amenities, distance to transit, commute time, price, number of bedrooms – and, of course, Walk Score. It interfaces with craigslist to show the complete ad all in one place with the walk/bike/transit information.

Right now you can plug in any address in the country and get a Walk Score for it, but even once Bike Score’s full functionality is rolled out, it won’t be so widespread. “With Bike Score we have to go out and get bike lane data from each city,” Lerner said, “so it’s more of a manual process.” They’re taking votes via Twitter for the next cities they should score.

A sample diagram of parking-protected bike lane guidelines.

The SFMTA is developing a new engineering guide for bike infrastructure that should help bring street designs like protected bike lanes to more San Francisco streets. Known as the Innovative Bicycle Treatment Toolbox, the guide promises to accelerate the city’s adoption of high-quality bikeway design treatments.

Intersection guidance markings also known as "green-backed" or "super" sharrows.

“The Innovative Bicycle Treatment Toolbox creates standardized guidance for the city of San Francisco in the use of new bicycle treatments being implemented throughout the U.S.,” said SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose.

The guide is based on proven designs for bike infrastructure that more American cities (including SF) are implementing to make bicycling safer and more accessible to a wider range of people. While these treatments are becoming more common in the U.S., they have yet to be established in “official traffic engineering regulations such as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) or the Highway Design Manual,” said Rose.

The treatments included in the toolbox: protected and buffered bike lanes, door-zone bike lane treatments, green paint on bike lanes and intersection guide markings, bike boxes, “safe-hit” posts (a.k.a. “traffic channelizers”), back-in angled parking, “green wave” signal timing for bike speeds, “two-stage left turn” markings, and “neighborhood greenways” (a.k.a. bike boulevards).

“These are smart, innovative designs that, once implemented in the right places, will make San Francisco’s streets safer and easier to bicycle on,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “We commend the SFMTA’s work in thinking out of the box and urge them to move forward with implementation on our many city streets that need improvement.”

Though the SFMTA has already implemented most of the treatments in the toolbox, they aren’t widespread. The most recent examples are the city’s first parking-protected bike lane in Golden Gate Park and the green-backed sharrow markings guiding riders through the Wiggle.

A two-stage left-turn treatment.

The SFMTA plans to use these treatments more frequently to reach its goal of 20 percent bike mode share by 2020. By establishing its own guidelines, the agency can “ensure consistency and predictability of these new treatments within our jurisdiction, while providing discussion of how these new treatments are addressed in existing regulations,” said Rose. ”This toolbox will help planners and engineers decide whether an innovative treatment is appropriate at a given location that is slated for bicycle improvements. It will also make it faster and more efficient for engineers to design the innovative facilities.”

Streamlining this process is critical to the widespread adoption of cycling in the city. The current rate at which the SFMTA is rolling out improvements is widely seen as insufficient to meet its ambitious mode share goals.

The toolbox is largely informed by the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a manual that leading bikeway engineers from cities around the country, including SF, contributed to. Although bike advocates are pushing for legislative changes at the state level to give cities more freedom to use treatments from the NACTO guide, their most recent effort was undermined, and local planners can face greater liability when using treatments not included in more established guidelines like the MUTCD. Creating this set of guidelines could provide planners a set of locally-approved, widely tested standards to rely on.

Rose said the guide “includes specific implementation details that are in line with California laws, while making style determinations to ensure consistency of application throughout San Francisco, even if there is more than one legal way to do so.”

The toolbox could also be looked to as an example for five other cities that will share expertise on innovative bike infrastructure in the Bikes Belong “Green Lane” project.

Agency staff said the toolbox is still in draft form and not ready to be widely published yet. Although the guidelines will “continue to be a living document,” Rose said, the agency will submit “a finalized version” to the SF County Transportation Authority by June 30.

Door-zone treatments to discourage bicyclists from riding in the door zone in conventional bike lanes.

Back-in angled parking.

Green bike lanes.

Supervisor David Chiu: "Does anyone think we can do better in San Francisco?” Photo: Volker Neumann/SFBC

City officials and advocates rode in to City Hall today alongside thousands of commuters for San Francisco’s 18th annual Bike to Work Day. According to the SFMTA, 1,031 eastbound bicycles traveled through the Market and Van Ness intersection between 8 and 9 a.m. this morning, making up 73 percent of vehicles on Market and averaging 17 bikes per minute.

While the city’s recent cycling boom and expansion of bike infrastructure were widely celebrated, some leaders said SF could do much more to catch up with cities like New York, Minneapolis, and Davis and make cycling on its streets safe and accessible for riders of all abilities.

“Does anyone think we can do better in San Francisco?” said Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, eliciting cheers from the crowd. “San Jose just decided to segregate bike lanes in their downtown area. In Davis, California, they bike at four times the rate of what we do here in San Francisco. Can we do better than Davis and San Jose?”

“Right now, we are spending about a quarter of a percent of our MTA budget on cycling improvements,” said Chiu, who spearheaded the 2010 legislation that led the city to adopt the goal of increasing cycling to 20 percent of all trips by 2020. “We need to do better.”

Supervisor Jane Kim, seen here on her ride through District 6 today, said she'll only feel safe riding regularly on her own with protected bike lanes. Photo: SFBC/Flickr

D6 Supervisor Jane Kim said that while she enjoyed riding with a convoy on Bike to Work Day, she would only feel comfortable biking regularly on her own with protected bike lanes on streets like SoMa’s high-speed motorways — a sentiment shared by many San Franciscans. “I want to keep working make sure we have that type of infrastructure in San Francisco,” she said.

Mayor Ed Lee, who rode in from the new parking-protected bike lanes in Golden Gate Park with SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum and city officials, didn’t seem to have the same sense of urgency for expanding bikeways as other proponents, but did speak about how they could improve his would-be commute. “I think there’s something we can do at the turn onto Van Ness so that I can come to work very easily,” he said.

Mayor Ed Lee rides with his transportation advisor, Gillian Gillett (right), on a Bike to Work Day convoy on Oak Street where a protected bike lane is planned. Photo: Volker Neumann/SFBC

The broad show of support from city leaders, said Shahum, was encouraging. “It’s not often we get so much political support for an issue.”

The turnout for Bike to Work Day this morning appeared to be SF’s biggest yet. Along the Panhandle, one of the city’s busiest bike corridors, a rush-hour platoon of roughly three dozen bike commuters were seen lined up waiting for the light to change at Masonic Avenue. Bike to Work Day counts have increased 66 percent over the last five years, according to the SFMTA. The agency also says 54 percent more people were biking on compared to a regular day one month ago.

D5 Supervisor Christina Olague, who rode in along the Wiggle, said she’s “very committed” to seeing the Fell and Oak Street protected bike lanes implemented by this fall. Although her eastbound ride in was “pretty smooth,” she said, the lack of a protected lane on Fell means she might “have to worry about getting back.”

After the pageantry of Bike to Work Day is over, the question remains whether leaders will make good on the commitment to making the city’s streets safer and more accessible for people to bike to work every day.

SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin rides with the convoy on the Panhandle. Photo: Volker Neumann/SFBC

D10 Supervisor Malia Cohen speaks with Supervisor Eric Mar (left), Mayor Lee, Supervisors Scott Wiener, Christina Olague, and David Chiu. Photo: Volker Neumann/SFBC

D11 Supervisor John Avalos, a regular bike commuter, rode in from the Excelsior District. Photo: SFBC/Flickr

Department of Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru (left), D2 Supervisor Mark Farrell (center), and the SFBC's Andy Thornley in front of City Hall. Photo: Frank Chan/SFBC/Flickr

Image: SFBC, based on data from SFMTA

San Francisco’s streets are expected to fill with bike commuters tomorrow for the city’s 18th Bike to Work Day.

The city has more bike lanes, more people on bikes, and more political momentum for bike policy today than in years past. ”We definitely expect to see more people bicycling on Bike to Work Day this year than ever before,” said San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum, “given that the number of people of biking every year has been increasing significantly — 71 percent over the last five years, given that it’s supposed to be really lovely warm weather, and given, most importantly, that the city has added more dedicated bike space in the last year than ever before.”

In San Francisco’s most visible display of bicycling growth, SFMTA Bike to Work Day morning commute counts show that bike traffic has risen steadily over recent years on Market Street, which the SFBC now calls the busiest bicycling street west of the Mississippi. Last year at the Van Ness Avenue intersection, bikes made up 75 percent of vehicle traffic as car traffic plummeted on the corridor.

Since the bike injunction was lifted in 2010, the SFMTA has striped bike lanes in locations around the city, including some of SF’s first physically protected routes. The parking-protected bike lanes on John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park are “substantially complete” as of this week (save some finishing touches), according to the SFMTA. Construction is also nearly complete on a two-way bikeway on Cargo Way.

The 23 miles of bike lanes added by the SFMTA since August 2010 “really cover very diverse neighborhoods,” said Shahum.

Bike commuters tomorrow will benefit from new curbside, post-separated bike lanes on Division, Laguna Honda, Alemany and Cesar Chavez as well as the green lanes on Market. Buffered bike lanes have also been striped on Bayshore and Sloat, and new conventional lanes can be found on 17th, Folsom, Illinois, North Point, Townsend, Kirkham, Phelan, Holloway, Ocean, Portola, and McCoppin. The SFMTA also continues installing bike racks (in corrals and on sidewalks) and sharrows throughout the city.

“When there’s more dedicated bike space, time and time again we see more people bicycling, and we see a more diverse cross-section of people biking,” said Shahum. “We see more parents riding with their kids to school, we see more older folks riding to a farmer’s market, we see more of San Francisco’s work force biking downtown rather than heading in in their cars.”

Market Street commuters on Bike to Work Day last year. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Riding into City Hall tomorrow will be a large cast of city officials, including Mayor Ed Lee and all but one member of the Board of Supervisors. (D7 Supervisor Sean Elsbernd said he used to ride every year prior to his son’s birth, but bicycling is no longer “practically an option” as he needs to drop his wife and son off by car.)

Almost every member of the SFMTA Board of Directors (save Jerry Lee, who is out of town) will also be riding, according to Shahum, including Christina Rubke, Mayor Lee’s recent board nominee to replace Bruce Oka. Other officials expected to ride include SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin, Department of Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, SF Environment Director Melanie Nutter, and Carla Johnson, the new director of the Mayor’s Office on Disability.

The decision makers participating in tomorrow’s event will have to raise their commitment to safe cycling throughout the rest of the year to help the city reach its bike mode-share goals. As the SF Bay Guardian pointed out yesterday, while cycling is on the rise, the current rate of improvements is far from sufficient to meet the city’s goal of getting 20 percent of commuters on bikes by 2020 (it’s currently estimated at 3.5 percent).

Despite some recent high-profile project delays, Shahum said, “It’s really exciting to see that some of the problem areas that the mayor and others experienced riding last year are getting stepped up attention and are getting improvements now.” She noted that the long-awaited protected bikeways on Fell and Oak Streets are also headed to an SFMTA hearing next Friday, May 18.

Tomorrow morning, 11 commuter convoys will head to City Hall from various neighborhoods throughout the city, and 27 energizer stations will be set up along the way, half of which will have a “bike doctor” on hand to help commuters keep their bikes in shape. The SF-to-Google (SF2G) Peninsula convoy, which Shahum noted usually carries about 40 riders on its regular rides throughout the year, is expecting to be joined by 500 people (they had 400 last year).

At City Hall, Shahum said the SFBC will be highlighting the economic benefits that bicycling brings to the city, announcing six of the city’s top bike-friendly businesses chosen from “tons and tons” of applicants who are encouraging their employees to bike with incentive programs and secure bike parking.

“We’re hearing from so many people that there are employers who are deciding to move to or stay in San Francisco because their employees love living in a city, and they want to be able to bike and take transit,” she said.

Image: Mark Dreger/SFBC

As it happens, I spent the spring of 2010 living in a city that has a 20 percent bike mode split. Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, with formidable hills and about 315,000 residents (1.2 million in the greater area), has been rolling out protected bike lanes over the past few decades and continues to promote bicycling through a campaign called “8,000 Reasons to Cycle.”

Like San Francisco, Aarhus is improving its bike infrastructure to catch up with the most successful cycling cities, like nearby Copenhagen, which has a citywide bicycling rate of 37 percent (and is shooting for 50 percent by 2015). You can check out Aarhus’s three-year Cycling Action Plan here [PDF].

The Aarhus campaign video provides a nice glimpse of what the “20 percent” vision would look like: groups of cyclists, young and old, using dignified, dedicated bicycle infrastructure everywhere you go. It also lists a few of the “8,000 reasons to cycle” (in case you’re wondering, “8000″ is the Aarhus postal code). Here are the translations from Danish:

• Reason #674: Big smiles
• Reason #762: Exercise and fresh air
• Reason #2,548: Faster through traffic
• Reason #6,237: Quality time with the kids
• Reason #94: CO2-neutral transport (well, that one’s in English)

All these reasons are great benefits of cycling, but what Aarhus, San Francisco, and many other cities around the world find time and time again is that the most important factor that gets people to bike more is safety — a convenient and seamless network of calm streets and protected cycling facilities.

San Francisco’s own progress is already highly visible during rush hour on Market Street, the busiest bicycling street west of the Mississippi, according to the SF Bike Coalition, where bicyclists make up as much as 75 percent of roadway traffic. That number only seems to have grown since the SFMTA has added green, post-separated bike lanes west of 8th Street and diverted car traffic off of Market.

Who knows — it could look something like Copenhagen on Bike to Work Day this Thursday.

Market Street. Photo: SFBC/Flickr

Photo: Google Maps

Safe bike lanes and pedestrian crossings should be top priorities in the redesign of Second Street. That was the major sentiment at a community meeting on Wednesday, where city staffers rebooting the faltered Second Street Improvement Project asked attendees how they would re-envision the corridor.

The residents who attended worked in small groups. Of the 12 group presentations that came out of the workshop, most called for some form of physically separated bike lanes — be they parking-protected, bi-directional, or striped curbside. There appeared to be little appetite for conventional bike lanes placed in the door-zone as originally called for in the SF Bike Plan. Most of the visions also included reduced traffic lanes, amenities like parklets and bike corrals, and transit-only lanes (or at least lanes wide enough to fit buses). One group called for banning private autos altogether on Second between Market and Harrison Streets.

Although it’s unclear how strongly the community proposals would be reflected in the final plan, the emphasis on safe bike lanes from attendees young and old was a promising sign, given that neighborhood resistance to the removal of car parking or traffic lanes was one of the major factors behind the project’s stall-out over the last few years.

The meeting drew a packed crowd of roughly 100 people, including SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin, SF Department of Works (DPW) Director Mohammed Nuru, and D6 Supervisor Jane Kim, who noted the “amazing turnout” from community members.

“Second Street is one of our priority corridors in our office for pedestrian safety and other transit improvements,” said Kim. “We have a lot of pedestrians that go up and down it, from the Financial District all the way to the ball park, and the work that we could do over the next couple of years for the street will be incredibly important both for our neighborhood and for our city.”

The SF Bike Plan, approved in 2009, had called for conventional bike lanes on Second, but approval was postponed to allow SFMTA and DPW staff to revise the plan. However, after a series of bureaucratic tangles and miscommunications between the agencies, dedicated funds for the project expired in February. Agency staff are now looking to re-fund it through sources like the Prop B street improvements bond, Proposition AA (a local vehicle license fee), and the federal One Bay Area Grant.

A pedestrian was injured at Second and Bryant in March. Photo: Brock Keeling, SFist

Cristina Olea, project manager for the DPW, said the project cost could range between $6 million and $10 million, largely depending on how much concrete work is needed for improvements like curb extensions. Although staff said major sidewalk widenings aren’t on the table due to their relatively high cost, corner bulb-outs could be included to help improve dangerous pedestrian crossings. In particular, many attendees pointed to the intersections at Harrison and Bryant Streets near Highway 80, which both have double turning lanes.

In March, a 35-year-old man was injured in a crosswalk at Second and Bryant by a driver who fled the scene — one of hundreds of citywide pedestrian injuries every year that cost San Francisco about $76 million annually. A woman was also killed at Second and Townsend Streets a year before that. In the last five years, there were 31 pedestrian crashes, 11 bicycle crashes, and 64 vehicle crashes on Second Street, according to a DPW presentation [PDF]. Over a quarter of those took place at the Harrison and Bryant intersections (17 and 12, respectively).

Attendees seemed to voice mixed feelings on removing car parking and banning left turns, both of which could free up room to accommodate bike lanes and speed the 10-Townsend and 12-Folsom Muni lines (the 12 is planned to be replaced by the new 11 Downtown Connector route under the Muni Transit Effectiveness Project [PDF]). A couple of groups recommended including a center turning lane like the one on Valencia Street.

Staff plans to hold two more community meetings in August and October and aim to have the plan approved by the SFMTA Board of Directors in a year. Construction on the project would take a year and could start by 2014.

Be sure to check out the neighborhood advocate blog Great Second Street.

Second and Harrison Streets. Photo: Aaron Bialick

KTVU's David Stevenson distracts a cyclist from potential hazards like drivers opening car doors on Valencia. Image: KTVU 2

“As twilight descends,” Stevenson told viewers, “the most vulnerable of the crowd dodge dangers on every block.”

“Dangers”… like distracting them by shouting through the passenger window, pointing a TV camera at their faces?

Stevenson’s behavior seemed to border on an offense that’s suable under Berkeley’s new bicyclist anti-harassment law, had it taken place in that city. As a colleague of mine put it, driving down Valencia yelling, “Where’s your helmet?” at bike riders is like waving a loaded gun in the air and yelling, “Where’s your bullet-proof vest?”

At best, Stevenson’s report was a sloppy analysis of bike safety that neglects to field any perspective from bicycle advocates or research the actual causes of bicycle crashes and injuries. The segment simply cited the numbers of bicycle riders killed and injured, then implied that helmets and lights are the most effective solution for preventing deaths and injuries. Stevenson made no effort to weigh factors like driver inattention or speed, which can have deadly consequences. (Speeders are, of course, harder to harangue from the passenger seat than cyclists.)

There’s nothing wrong with the friendly promotion of bike lights as an essential tool for night visibility (though Stevenson pointed to bicyclists without lights in daylight).

But if Stevenson had even grazed the tip of the iceberg on the complex debate around bike helmets, he’d find there’s far from any consensus about their efficacy as a safety measure. No doubt, wearing one is (and should be) a personal choice. But for starters, Stevenson might have looked into why the European Cyclists Federation, comprised of 65 bicycle coalitions in 39 countries, actively campaigns against mandatory helmet laws and “shock-horror” helmet promotions that unrealistically depict bicycling as an abnormally dangerous activity. As worldwide Danish bicycling advocate Mikael Colville-Andersen of Copenhagenize is keen to point out, there’s little evidence to support the notion that riding a bike carries a higher risk of head injury than many other everyday activities like walking, climbing stairs, or driving.

And if Stevenson was truly concerned about bike safety in the Bay Area, he might note the danger of dooring, the single most common cause of motorist-induced injury suffered by San Francisco bicyclists. He might also wonder about the drivers whom he taped stopping in the bike lane on Valencia, and why such streets lack safer designs like protected bike lanes.

Stevenson shames a bicyclist weaving around cars stopped in the Valencia bike lane for not having rear lights. Image: KTVU 2

It’s too late for KTVU to take back this particular affront to the public discussion about street safety. But here’s an intriguing datapoint for a potential follow-up: An Australian study suggested that mandating helmets for motorists could potentially save 17 times as many lives as a bicycle helmet law (without the adverse impacts of discouraging bicycling and reducing the “safety in numbers” effect [PDF]).

The SF Bicycle Coalition's Andy Thornley leads the Dutch-orange bike caravan on John F. Kennedy Drive. Photo: Aaron Bialick

This year’s celebration of the Dutch Queen’s Day in San Francisco was a bit special.

When the event’s 100-or-so celebrants traversed the city by bike in the second annual “Market-to-Mill” ride (Market Street to the Dutch windmill in Golden Gate Park, a.k.a the Bay to Beach route), the orange-clad caravan traveled through San Francisco’s first bicycle lanes designed with a Dutch standard of safety in mind.

Bart van Bolhuis, Consulate General of the Netherlands, told Streetsblog that riding the new parking-protected bike lanes on John F. Kennedy Drive felt like cycling in his home country. “Especially biking with 100 people dressed up in orange,” he added.

Bart van Bolhuis, Consulate General of the Netherlands. Photo: Aaron Bialick

A key feature of the JFK bikeway, Bolhuis pointed out, is the buffer area which separates bicycle riders from the door zone and provides space for people getting in and out of their cars. Most conventional bike lanes in San Francisco place riders in the path of opening car doors on one side and passing cars on the other. Drivers also make regular incursions into the bike lane to maneuver into parking spaces or double park. That creates an obstacle course that’s too stressful for most people to ride in. By placing bicyclists to the right of parked cars, JFK is the first street in San Francisco designed to accommodate car parking while eliminating those hazards.

“People have to feel safe on their bikes, and these kinds of bike lanes are very helpful,” said Bolhuis. “The most important thing is that it will create safety, and the feeling of safety, for other kinds of bicyclists as well — mothers with children, elderly people — and that’s something we have to establish in this city, not only for the brave, but also for the people who want to bike in nature, or to school.”

A parking-protected bike lane in Amsterdam. Photo: Amsterdamize/Flickr

Transportation planners in the Netherlands have been refining separated bikeway designs since they ramped up their implementation about 40 years ago. Today, bike trips account for 37 percent of all trips in Amsterdam (58 percent in the city center), and just about everyone who’s able to ride does so regularly.

Bicycling in San Francisco could some day feel as safe and normal as it does in the Netherlands if the city continues providing more protected bike lanes and traffic-calmed streets in the coming years. The SFMTA consulted Dutch bicycle planners last September to get ideas for improving three of San Francisco’s most important bicycling corridors (the JFK project wasn’t included). The agency is currently developing plans to administer some of those recommendations, the first of which will be on the Wiggle.

“San Francisco, more than most American cities, has the potential to model the successes of places such as the Netherlands and Denmark, where they have invested in great bicycling infrastructure for people ages 8 to 80, and where it’s paying off with healthier, happier people traveling more easily and safely,” said San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum, who spent an eight-month sabbatical living in Amsterdam. “With our temperate climate, compact city layout, and strong biking culture, San Francisco is poised to move in this direction. The new, physically separated bikeways on JFK Drive are an example of how San Francisco is committing itself to being a great bicycling city for people of all ages and backgrounds, not just the hearty few.”

“This really is about ensuring greater access on our streets for San Francisco’s diverse population, who is biking more and more,” she added.

The JFK bikeway, which Shahum noted could be looked to as a model for planners in other cities in the Bikes Belong Foundation’s Green Lane Project, seems to be quickly growing on San Franciscans and park visitors and has had a profound traffic-calming effect. More and more people — young and old, experienced riders and casual riders — can be seen using the lanes every day. As was the case in other American cities that have implemented protected bike lanes, drivers also appear to have grown accustomed to floating parking lanes, and the bike lanes are rarely, if ever, blocked by cars anymore.

Bolhuis did note that some visitors on JFK on a busy Saturday morning, like tour bus drivers and passengers, may still “have to be educated a bit” to keep them from parking in the buffer area and help them to be aware when crossing the bike lane. Still, he said, riding the lanes “feels really good.”

Photo: Aaron Bialick

The caravan makes a stop in the car-free zone of JFK. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Bike parking and celebration at the windmill. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Photo: Aaron Bialick

With the swaths of bikes parked at the windmill, you'd think you actually were in the Netherlands. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Photo: Mark Dreger/Flickr

The SFMTA striped new bike lanes on Folsom Street between 13th and 19th Streets last week, creating a safer and more direct connection for bike commuters between SoMa and the Mission.

The bike lanes, which came along with a road diet and street re-paving, were called for in the Mission Streetscape Plan. They provide a continuous connection for SoMa-bound bicycle riders, who previously had to make a one-block jaunt east to Harrison Street and back via 11th to stay in a bike lane. The new design, which reallocated space from two traffic lanes to bike lanes and a center turning lane (where a planted median is planned), should also calm motor traffic on the street.

“We’re already hearing from members that these new lanes are making their daily commutes easier and safer,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. ”Folsom Street is a core biking corridor that links Mission District residential and commercial districts to SOMA and downtown.”

Folsom only allows eastbound traffic east of 11th Street, but Shahum noted that the SFMTA has discussed plans to two-way it and add protected bike lanes. “We urge the city now to continue with these much-needed improvements,” she said.

See more photos on the San Franciscoize Flickr account.

Calling the video “horrific,” East Bay Bicycle Coalition Program Director Dave Campbell told the Oakland Tribune that the incident highlights the need for a bike lane on Tunnel Road, especially since drivers often speed up on the approach to a nearby highway. Caltrans and the cities of Oakland and Berkeley are working on putting in a bike lane, according to the Tribune.

Still, as Campbell noted, “No amount of engineering is going to stop the kind of reckless driving like we saw in Concord.” So the question remains: Will Berkeley authorities prosecute this clear case of reckless endangerment, or let another all-too-common case slip through the cracks?

Update: As Christopher Kidd pointed out in the comments, the victims could also potentially file a civil suit against the driver under Berkeley’s new bicyclist anti-harassment ordinance.

Just a hunch: Might the kids riding in front of Stanley's camera like the new bike lane? Image: KRON 4

Much has been made about the “strangeness” of San Francisco’s first parking-protected bike lane in Golden Gate Park, which employs the type of design that other American cities are increasingly using to improve safety and raise bicycling rates.

As someone who lives next to Golden Gate Park, I’ve been going out of my way to ride on John F. Kennedy Drive almost every day since the easternmost section was installed a few weeks ago. The sense of safety and dignity that the protected bikeway affords is highly enjoyable. And day by day, as more drivers grow acclimated to the new arrangement and fewer block the bike lane, I’ve watched a growing number of children and casual bicyclists enjoy riding on a calmer, quieter street in a space that truly belongs to them.

Callie, 7, gives the new bikeway a thumbs-up. Photo: Aaron Bialick

There are ample signs that drivers are getting used to it. In fact, after crews striped the second of three sections yesterday between the de Young Museum and Stow Lake Drive, I found all the cars parked where they’re supposed to be.

Still, floating parking lanes are new to San Francisco, and some members of our local media just can’t resist sensationalizing this transitional phase, focusing on the initial complaints of a few people who aren’t used to it yet. When KRON’s Stanley Roberts went out to JFK Drive last week, he seemingly ignored the swaths of riders, young and old, who use the reconfigured lane. “It was hard for us to find someone who likes it,” he told viewers.

Well, it wasn’t hard for me as I made my way along JFK Drive yesterday. Pretty quickly, I found Colleen and her 7-year-old daughter Callie, who live in the Inner Richmond and regularly bike in the park twice a day. They said the new separation from cars makes them feel safer.

“I think that once the car drivers get used to it, it’ll be easier,” Colleen said. “Right now, they’re confused, and once they understand they’re not supposed to park in the bike lane, it’ll be good.”

Jesse, who parks on JFK Drive to coach his son's baseball team, thinks the new configuration is better. Photo: Aaron Bialick

I also spoke to Jesse, a father who regularly parks his car on JFK when he coaches his son’s little league baseball team. Standing in the new buffer zone, which keeps bicyclists and motor vehicle passengers out of each other’s way as people get in and out of their cars, he told me he likes it. The only concern he noted was the need to remind kids to watch for bike traffic as they cross the lane.

“From the driving experience, it’s better,” he said. “If you’re on the road, the bikes are safer, and there’s separation between the motorists and the bicyclists.”

As in cities like New York, Portland, Chicago, and Long Beach, where these kinds of bikeways have been successfully implemented, there’s an adjustment period, but people seem to be getting used to it fairly quickly.

The real story that Roberts missed is that JFK Drive represents the future: a street design that helps a broader segment of San Francisco feel comfortable biking around the city.

Photo: Aaron Bialick

The newly-striped stretch next to Stow Lake Drive. Photo: Aaron Bialick

New stretch next to the Rose Garden by the de Young Museum. Photo: Aaron Bialick

This group even found plenty of room to do squats while they were unloading. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Alta runs Boston's Hubway Bike Share system, among others. Photo: The Fosbury Flop

A board committee of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) is expected to recommend selecting Alta tomorrow, according to a memo [PDF] from CEO Jack Broadbent. The memo says that Alta ranked the highest out of six bidders in meeting the agency’s criteria.

If awarded the contract, Alta would run a system initially consisting of 1,000 bicycles and 100 station kiosks – half in San Francisco and the other half in four cities in Silicon Valley. The contract would be capped at $5,969,000, according to the memo.

The Portland-based Alta already runs systems in Boston, Montreal, Melbourne, and Washington D.C., where the wildly successful Capital Bikeshare was recently reported to be nearly operationally profitable. Alta has also been selected to run systems in New York City and Chicago, expected to launch later this year.

In each city Alta has partnered with the Montreal-based Public Bicycle System Company, which manufactures the bikes and kiosks. PBSC also makes the equipment for the Barclays Cycle Hire in London.

Alta Bikeshare is an affiliate of Alta Planning + Design, a bicycle- and pedestrian-focused transportation planning firm which has an office in Berkeley.

The system is expected to be rolled out throughout August and September.

The traffic signals are pointed backwards until activated. Photo: Aaron Bialick

A new set of traffic lights that include bicycle-specific signals were erected at Page and Stanyan Streets this week at the recently renovated Golden Gate Park entrance in the Upper Haight. Crews said the lights should be activated in roughly a few weeks, though they couldn’t confirm a date.

The crossing connects a route from Page to John F. Kennedy Drive, where the SFMTA is also constructing a parking-protected bike lane. The signals, which will give a green light solely for pedestrians and bicyclists to enter the park, are part of the latter phase of a San Francisco Bike Plan project. The intersection will also be equipped with pedestrian countdown signals and bicycle sensors, according to plans on the SFMTA’s website [PDF].

A bicycle ramp was also added as part of renovations at the entrance late last year.

See the "before" image here (via Google Maps). Photo: Aaron Bialick

Photo: Richard Masoner/Cyclelicious

Editor’s note: This story marks the return of former Streetsblog San Francisco editor Bryan Goebel, who will be contributing occasional pieces.  

Bicycle advocacy can be an especially daunting challenge in the South Bay and the Peninsula, where car-centric policies and culture rule the day. At this week’s Silicon Valley Bike Advocacy Summit the focus was on improving relations between advocates and government officials at a time when a growing number of cities in the Silicon Valley and big companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple are starting to embrace the bicycle.

“We have more individuals who are becoming engaged and we have more institutions who are becoming engaged and more organizations who want to work with us,” said Corinne Winter, executive director of the Silicon Valley Bike Coalition (SVBC). ”There’s a coalition of individuals and organizations who are really interested in seeing the bike become a commonplace thing, whether it be for transportation or recreation. That group of people is growing quickly in our area.”

Although there are no official counts on the burgeoning numbers of people who ride bikes in Silicon Valley and the Peninsula, Winter said it’s evident on the streets, especially in San Jose.

“Bike culture in San Jose has been growing really rapidly. It started with a lot of folks in the fixie crowd, and now I’m seeing more folks riding the Dutch-style bikes around town,” said Winter. The popularity of the San Jose Bike Party has been another indication.

Just last week, the San Jose City Council unanimously approved six bike projects that will add 8 miles of new bike lanes downtown. Five of the projects will include road diets and lane reductions, and many sections will include bike lanes with extra space between motorists and bicyclists, said John Brazil, who heads up the city’s bike/pedestrian program. The projects are expected to be completed by the end of June.

There was no opposition to the removal of vehicle lanes and that came as a surprise to the city’s Transportation Director, Hans Larsen, who also attended this week’s summit.

“I am blown away by that,” Larsen told Streetsblog. “Ten years ago we were nearly crucified for talking about getting people out of their cars. You’d go to a community meeting talking about transit and bike use and you didn’t get a whole lot of support.”

But now “individual council members and the mayor particularly made points about reaffirming our direction to be a more sustainable city and get more people to bicycle.” Larsen also credited SVBC for organizing and “getting the word out.”

The city also plans on installing green bike lanes on San Fernando Street, along with a public bike share system at 15 stations in the downtown area, sometime this summer or fall. In addition, Brazil said plans are in the works to “test and identify best technologies for bike signal detection, including capabilities to accommodate green wave signal timing, bike lead interval signal timing, etc.”

At the summit, veteran bicycle advocate Randy Neufeld gave an inspiring opening keynote, telling the crowd that advocates must go beyond engaging individuals, and create a true coalition that involves all segments of a city’s political power structure.

“Think: how do you engage local employers? How do you engage local retail? How do you engage chambers of commerce and business associations? All community organizations, health organizations,” said Neufeld, the director of the SRAM Cycling Fund. “I’m not suggesting you abandon your individual members. They’re very important to you. But think about it. There’s a difference between engaging a particular individual.”

“Think of it not as a coalition addressing these people, or pushing these people, but getting the coalition to be something bigger than it is now, where these people are actually part of the coalition,” he said. “We’ve got this difficult job of trying to change and move a culture and we’re not pushing city hall, we’re working with city hall to move the culture. They can themselves be a part of this coalition.”

More than 150 people attended this year's Silicon Valley Bike Advocacy Summit. Photo: Bryan Goebel

This year’s 150-plus attendees included a number of mayors, elected officials, public health professionals and advocates interested in sharpening their skills. The SVBC relies heavily on volunteers to advocate for better bicycling infrastructure and smarter planning within the region’s 40 jurisdictions.

Winter said one of the most significant outcomes of the summit was bringing together law enforcement officials and advocates for a closed-door session on how to deal with group bike rides “that have created animosity on both sides” in places like Woodside, Portola Valley and Los Altos Hills.

“There was a real sense of ‘yes, this is something we want to work on, let’s keep meeting about it.’ We didn’t come to any conclusions. It’s a big topic and it’s going to take awhile. But there was a commitment to enter into that process,” said Winter.

Winter said SVBC’s biggest priority is to work on adding and improving bike infrastructure.

“We’ve really tried to organize the coalition more and start local teams in three communities up and down the Peninsula. So, we have membership groups who meet in San Jose, Palo Alto and Redwood City on a monthly basis and we’re leveraging our volunteers on the local level to find out exactly what is relevant on the infrastructure level,” she said.

Students check in for Bike to School Day at Buena Vista Horace Mann School this morning. Photo: Kate McCarthy, SFBC/Flickr

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) Executive Director Leah Shahum said an enthusiastic group of more than 50 kids rolled in on two “bike trains” at this morning’s ride to Sunnyside Elementary School, despite pouring rain.

The citywide attendance numbers aren’t in yet, but organizers anticipated about 2,000 participants this year – a sharp rise since the city’s first event in 2009, which saw about 600. Participation has steadily grown since. Last year, 1,600 students turned out for Bike to School Day, including 120 at Grattan Elementary in Cole Valley — one-third of the school’s students, Shahum pointed out.

Biking to school throughout the rest of the year is also becoming more popular among students and parents with the help of San Francisco’s Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program, which began promoting walking and biking at 15 schools in October 2009.

In May, Sunnyside Elementary will finish up its popular Walk and Roll Wednesdays, which offers kids prizes for walking, biking, or taking transit to school. Near Glen Park, Fairmount Elementary also holds multiple bike trains every Tuesday. SRTS staff also teach biking skills at the participating schools and provide family education along with the SFBC, which just released a revamped version of its Family Biking Guide.

Bike to School Day also seems to be attracting more city officials each year. SF School Board President Norman Yee rode in to the Sunnyside this morning, and five city supervisors biked to schools in their respective districts: Carmen Chu, Eric Mar, John Avalos, Christina Olague, and Jane Kim.

Parents say the event increasingly serves as an “entry into riding” for many students, said Shahum, who noted that 42 percent of elementary school students live within one mile of their school, according to data from the SF Unified School District (SFUSD). The district is also making it a higher priority to place students at schools within their neighborhoods, and the SFMTA is currently implementing 15 MPH zones at over 200 schools around the city.

“What we’re seeing more and more, especially among [SRTS schools] is more parents, teachers, and school leaders engage well beyond Bike to School Day,” she said.

Nik Kaestner, director of sustainability for SFUSD, said the bike racks “were overflowing” at Sunnyside this morning. To meet bike parking demand, SFUSD is close to installing up to four bike racks (which hold eight bikes each) at all 104 of the schools in the district, he said.

“We’ve put in the infrastructure that makes it easier for parents to leave the bike there during the day instead of having to schlep it back,” said Kaestner. SFUSD will also evaluate the usage of the racks at each school to determine which schools need more capacity. High schools, he noted, are particularly likely candidates.

“It definitely seems like biking is something that is in and hip right now in San Francisco, and our parents want their kids to be part of that culture,” he said. “We’re seeing that when we go to the schools that participate.”

A "bike train" on its way to Sunset Elementary. Photo: Marc Caswell, SFBC

Photo: Marc Caswell, SFBC

A bike train prepares for departure to Peabody Elementary in the Richmond. Photo: Andy Thornley, SFBC/Flickr

The Peabody bike train travels along San Francisco's first bike lane on Lake Street. Photo: Andy Thornley, SFBC/Flickr

Bike parking at Sunset Elementary. Photo: Marc Caswell, SFBC/Flickr

Bayshore and Alemany Boulevards, next to a Highway 101 onramp. High-speed motor vehicles on streets like these still pose the greatest threat to pedestrians by far. Photo: Aaron Bialick

In the midst of a wave of media attention around the recent bicycle-pedestrian death in the Castro, walking and bicycling advocates today re-affirmed the greatest dangers facing pedestrians on San Francisco’s streets: high-speed roads and dangerous driving behavior.

In a KQED radio forum this morning, Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe, SF Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) Executive Director Leah Shahum, SF Bicycle Advisory Committee Chair Bert Hill, and Captain Al Casciato of the SFPD Traffic Company all seemed to agree that the recent death of Sutchi Hui was as tragic as any, and that safer streets will require better street engineering as well as more effective enforcement and education efforts to elicit more courteous behavior among people using all modes of transport.

Still, there’s no question, they said: The vast majority of the more than 800 pedestrian injuries or deaths on San Francisco’s streets every year involve motorists and occur disproportionately on high-speed “arterial” streets.

“In a way, this is kind of a man-bites-dog story,” Stampe said of the bike-ped crash — an event receiving an unusual amount of attention precisely because it happens so infrequently, while too-common car-pedestrian crashes go vastly under-reported. ”This is a real tragedy,” Stampe continued. “I don’t think anybody disagrees, a lot of people are upset, and it’s not okay for people to be hit in a crosswalk and killed in San Francisco. But the fact remains that three people a day are hit by cars… and that’s an underestimate.”

In fact, four other pedestrians have been killed this year alone, according to the SFPD, two of them in the same week as the bike-pedestrian fatality. The death of one still-unidentified victim killed by a Muni bus driver also made national headlines, but the other three victims killed by auto drivers, including 45-year-old Tom Ferguson (killed on the same day as the bus victim), received little more than a few blurbs in the media.

As the SF Bay Guardian pointed out, from 2000 to 2009, 220 pedestrians were killed in San Francisco, mostly by car drivers who rarely face criminal charges. None of those deaths are known to have involved bicycles. Media attention, however, seems to have focused on the two fatal bicycle crashes that occurred within the last year, and their reports rarely provide the statistics about traffic deaths in San Francisco. (Some of the more dramatic cases, like the Concord driver who ran over a family biking on the sidewalk this weekend, killing two, tend to garner more media attention.)

The behavior of Chris Bucchere, the bicycle rider who killed 71-year-old Sutchi Hui at Castro and Market Streets, has been roundly condemned, even by bicycling advocates, particularly in light of an online post in which Bucchere described “plowing through the crosswalk” and seemed more concerned about his broken helmet than about Hui.

“Of course, if there were problems and someone behaved recklessly, they should be held accountable. I would be the first to say that,” said Shahum of the SFBC. “Fortunately, though… these are very rare occurrences.”

The SFBC, Shahum pointed out, has long provided bicycling education classes and outreach efforts which instruct bicyclists to always yield to pedestrians. In fact, the organization released its new “Bicycle Rules of the Road” tip sheet for its Bicycle Education and Safety Week during the same week Hui was injured. Last Friday, in light of Hui’s death, the SFBC set up an outreach booth to hand out safety literature on Market Street and released a statement saying staff is “deeply saddened” by the news and “troubled” by Bucchere’s account of the crash.

While a few callers on this morning’s forum complained of bicyclists “flying all over” with impunity, Captain Casciato assured the audience that officers issue “quite a bit of citations” to bicyclists. He also pointed out the value of offering alternatives to traffic fines. In “the next couple weeks,” he said, the department will roll out a bicycle and pedestrian traffic school program, similar to the options available to drivers. The department will also make it easier for bicyclists who have received traffic citations to file formal complaints about street engineering that is difficult for bicyclists to navigate legally, he said.

Far more effective in reducing pedestrian injuries will be the SFPD’s new targeted enforcement plan, which focuses on the most dangerous violations in the areas with the highest rates of pedestrian crashes. As Stampe pointed out, over half of the city’s pedestrian injuries occur on just five percent of its streets — namely, high-speed roads in areas like the Tenderloin and South of Market.

“It’s pretty intuitive. It’s the wide, fast streets that act like freeways, where folks feel like they can drive really fast and don’t have to watch out for each other,” said Stampe. “What that tells us is if we can target our enforcement and our fixing the streets in those areas, we can make a big difference pretty fast and keep a lot more people safe.”

Fell Street looking west from Divisadero. Images: SFMTA

The SFMTA revealed the design [PDF] for protected bike lanes on three blocks of Fell and Oak Streets at an open house on Saturday. The plan would create a safer connection from the Panhandle to the Wiggle by installing a one-way buffered bike lane on each street, partially separated from motor traffic by planters. The proposal would also paint green markings where bike traffic merges with turning motor traffic, re-calibrate the traffic signals for 20 MPH movement, construct pedestrian bulb-outs and zebra-striped crosswalks, and add angled car parking spaces (mostly on Baker Street) to replace over half of those removed to make way for the bikeways.

Leah Shahum, executive director of the SF Bicycle Coalition, said the organization is “encouraged to see the city officially proposing wider, physically separated bikeways on Fell and Oak Streets” and “grateful to see that the design includes many new corner, sidewalk bulbouts that will make it easier and safer for people to walk across these intimidating streets.”

“We believe the designs shared at the community workshop should move forward and be implemented to make it safer for the thousands of people who bike this corridor every day,” she said.

Although in January the SFMTA set the implementation timeline for next winter, staff said it has again been pushed back until spring, almost a year later than the city originally predicted. The SFMTA asserts that the project is on schedule according to the new timeline.

The plan uses green pavement treatments to emphasize a number of bike markings, including bike boxes, ”super” sharrows where bikes and cars mix, and bike lane “entrances” at the beginning of each block. The approach at the intersection of Fell and Divisadero Streets, where green markings have already been added to reduce conflicts with drivers queuing up for the Arco gas station, would remain mostly as it is, though a bike box would be added.

The hot spot in front of the Fell and Divisadero Arco gas station would look mostly like it does today.

At Oak and Broderick Streets, drivers would be prohibited from turning right across the bike lane onto southbound Broderick using a physical barrier. That would also prevent through-traffic on Broderick from crossing Oak in the southbound direction.

Oak and Broderick Streets, where a physical barrier would prevent cars from crossing the bike lane in the southbound direction.

Turnout at Saturday’s open house wasn’t as robust as at December’s meeting, but comments from attendees seemed overwhelmingly supportive of the project. Still, a few critics seemed to keep staff and other supporters busy fielding complaints about the perceived trade-off of losing car parking – the main reason the agency ditched the original idea of implementing the bikeways as a trial this June.

Under the proposed plan, 57 of the 103 parking spaces displaced by the bike lanes would be replaced, mostly by converting existing parallel parking spots to back-in angled parking and perpendicular parking, mostly along the west side of Baker Street between Fell and Haight Streets. The real estate for those spots would come from excess road space on Baker. In a post on the Panhandle Park Stewards blog yesterday, Dale Danley argued that the added parking “would make the entrance to the Panhandle less attractive, from the vantage point of anyone traveling along Baker St or approaching from the east.”

Fourteen more parking spaces would be created on Hayes Street by removing bus stops at Broderick Street and Central Avenue, which could also speed up travel times on the 21-Hayes line.

SFMTA staff also provided a form for residents to petition for the creation of a residential parking permit (RPP) zone on their block, which would give residential car owners priority for curbside parking by imposing restrictions on non-permit holders. A block can only be added to an RPP zone with signatures from 51 percent of the residents. Roughly 120 paid parking spots were also opened for overnight parking at the Department of Motor Vehicles last year.

To implement the project, staff said the SF Planning Department must complete environmental review, which would then need approval from the Planning Commission. He also said an SFMTA public hearing on the project will likely be held in May, although no decision would be made then. The project would then need to be finally approved by the SFMTA Board of Directors.

“Given how many people are biking and walking on these stretches of street — despite how intimidating they are without proper facilities for biking and walking,” said Shahum, “we hope the city will conduct the environmental review with all due haste and get these important safety improvements on the ground by this fall.”

Stay tuned for more details on the implementation process.

An overview of the project. See more in the PDF document.

A map of where car parking would be added and removed.

"Mixing zones" would merge the bike lane with vehicular turn lanes at some intersections.

As illustrated here, the project area is currently a hole of unrestricted parking surrounded by several RPP zones.

A handy set of topography graphs illustrating why neighboring streets like Page and Hayes don't serve bicycle traffic very well compared to Fell and Oak. See more info in the PDF document.

Boris's cycling superhighways aren't good enough, says Ken Livingstone. Photo: EcoBlog

Remember the Times of London’s “Cities Fit for Cycling” campaign? Earlier this year one of the most prominent dailies in the UK launched an all-out blitz to make bicycling safer in British cities, complete with a comprehensive policy platform. The campaign is for real: The Times is now getting London mayoral candidates on the record with their bike policy positions.

Here’s how this political slugfest is playing out so far. Tory Boris Johnson, the mayor who launched the largest bike-share system in the English-speaking world and built the first corridors in a network of “cycle superhighways,” hasn’t done enough to make cycling accessible and safe, according to his chief rival, Labor candidate Ken Livingstone.

Livingstone, who was ousted from the mayoralty by Johnson in 2008, made his reputation as a transportation reformer in his first stint as mayor. He instituted London’s congestion charge in 2003, completed a range of high-profile pedestrian reclamation projects, and initiated the idea of building high-volume bike routes. Now he’s attacking Johnson’s bike-share initiative for being out of reach to most Londoners, and assailing the cycle superhighways as little more than paint on the street.

A political campaign group called “Londoners on Bikes” is going to deliver a bloc of at least 3,000 votes to the candidate who commits to the strongest platform for bicycling. Here are some highlights from Livingstone and Johnson, according to the Times.

Livingstone:

• Safer junctions. Along with a comprehensive safety review of all major junctions, we will trial a cyclists-only green traffic light phase.
• Safer Cycle Superhighways. Redesign Cycle Superhighways with safe junctions, continuous routes, better segregation and proper maintenance. Mayor Johnson avoided dealing with the real challenges in favour of a quick headline and splash of blue paint on the road.
• Listen to cyclists about where secure parking is needed. Work with Network Rail and others to provide Dutch-style cycle parking hubs, and create a web-based tool for cyclists to tell transport planners where more facilities are needed.

Johnson:

• Review 500 key junctions across the capital to specifically examine safety for cyclists. This includes 150 major planned schemes as well as every junction on the Cycle Superhighways.
• Work with the London Criminal Justice Board to strengthen criminal justice procedures for dealing with cyclist deaths and serious injuries.
• Deliver safer infrastructure for cyclists, including building 12 Cycle Superhighways, which are trialing innovative new safety features such as trixi mirrors.

Check out the Times coverage for the complete platforms from Livingstone, Johnson, and the Liberal Democrat and Green Party candidates.