A Bike-and-Roll rental station in front of the Hyatt Regency at Market and Spear.

I’ve been bicycling in San Francisco since the late 1970s so I vividly remember when almost all bicyclists could recognize each other on the streets of the city. There really weren’t that many of us even as recently as the beginning of the 1990s, just two decades ago. We’ve come a long way, and one of the less recognized aspects of this bicycling boom has been the incredible expansion of bike rentals and bicycling tourism.

I wrote a flyer back in 1986 calling for a “City of Panhandles” and one of the arguments I made in that largely unnoticed document was that a systematic effort to provide safe, separate bikeways crisscrossing the City would itself lead to a tourism boom. As it turns out, we’re experiencing a dramatic increase in tourists cycling even before we provide adequate infrastructure. San Francisco is just an incredibly beautiful place, and people come from all over the world to experience its beauty. Growing numbers of those visitors aren’t much interested in seeing it through windshields and are opting instead (or in addition) to rent bicycles.

There are three “big” companies doing bike rentals in SF: Bike and Roll, Blazing Saddles, and Bay City Bikes (a number of smaller places, like the BikeHut at Pier 40, also rent bikes). I recently spoke with Darryll White, owner of Bike and Roll, and he gave me some impressive aggregate numbers. Since 1995 the local bicycle rental business has grown from about $500,000 a year to over $10 million! The remarkable thing about this huge increase in tourist cycling is that about 90 percent of the rentals are heading to the Golden Gate Bridge and to Sausalito, where the City Council has erupted into battles over bike parking vs. car parking, even pondering charging fees to touring bicyclists. The Golden Gate Ferry service keeps at least four of its ferry runs going to accommodate the cycling tourists, which have hit peaks of 2,500 per day during recent summer months.

Blazing Saddles rents bikes and go-carts from its Hyde Street facility near Fisherman's Wharf.

This past Wednesday I was buying food at the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market in UN Plaza and lo and behold, a mini-mass of 9 cyclists went rolling by on Market, heading westward. All of them were on Bike and Roll bikes, and I stopped to marvel at the sight. Imagine if there was a dedicated bikeway up Market that connected cyclists all the way to the Pacific Ocean? Talk about a tourist attraction! And since it would go right by the Haight-Ashbury, the museums in the park, as well as the Civic Center, imagine how heavily trafficked by cyclists from out of town this will be.

As it happens the SF Bike Coalition is now promoting a plan to Connect The City, a version of crosstown bikeways, including a dedicated bikeway that runs from the Embarcadero to the Pacific Ocean by way of Market Street, the Wiggle, and Golden Gate Park. It’s a wonder that the politically powerful tourism industry hasn’t thrown their weight behind it yet. The bicycle renaissance going on across the world has an important connection to San Francisco (Critical Mass was born here in 1992) and thousands of cyclists come here for the beauty, the food, and the politics. If San Francisco were creating dedicated bikeways, and presenting itself as a bicycling capital, tourism from near and far would only increase that much more.

The big three maintain a fleet of approximately 3500-4000 bikes and employ on average one mechanic per 100 bikes to keep those bikes rolling. New bike shops continue to open around town, showcasing the bicycle as one of the few growing business sectors that doesn’t require its workers to sit in front of computers all day, mining pixels. Commuters, messengers, and recreational riders have already radically expanded the use of our common public space by bicycles during the last twenty years. The challenge now is to really redesign the city’s streets to make safe, horticulturally and artistically designed bikeways as common as thoroughfares for cars. I’m not a big fan of capitalism or business, but it’s pretty obvious that if we build a beautiful system of bike boulevards, bicyclists will come to ride them by the tens of thousands. When they do, they spend a lot of money and keep a lot of our local economy going.

What could be simpler? Transform a citywide network of streets to promote daily bicycling, promote it to the global tourism industry, and get ready for the boom, doubling and tripling the huge expansion we’ve already seen. It would create good, local jobs to remake the streets (design, reconstruction, gardening, maintenance), more to accommodate the increase in local cycling (retail stores, rentals, bikesharing facilities, workshops), and then a further increase as the tourists pour in to cycle across San Francisco’s beautiful landscape (tour guides, rentals, mechanics, restaurants, hotels, cafes)… Whatever diminishing of car and gasoline sales might occur would be more than made up for by an ecologically healthy, economically relocalized, bicycle-centric boom that increases San Francisco’s global profile as a trendsetter and a tourist destination.

Boneshakers in the 1870s.

“If the increase continues, the time is not very distant when not to own and ride a bicycle will be a confession that one is not able-bodied, is exceptionally awkward, or is hopelessly belated.”

—“The Bicycle Festival,” July 13, 1895 New York Times

The bicycle came to San Francisco during the last quarter of the 19th century. Like other places, it first developed based on wooden wheels, similar to those that were bearing stagecoaches and being drawn by horses. Horse-drawn streetcars were the predominant mode of transit in the 1870s, peaking in the 1880s, at a time when the individual horse was also still a major source of personal transportation.

Emperor Norton on a velocipede

And then came the velocipede, an odd device that attracted some early adopters of the era. Here’s Emperor Norton, a fellow who was adept at self-marketing long before Facebook made it a basic survival skill!

The boneshakers were aptly named, running over heavily rutted streets on solid wooden wheels, eventually improved by coating the in solid rubber. The bicycle was not a transit option at that early stage, but a novelty, and a device that attracted the adventurous few who were ready to break with the limits of human powered locomotion. In “The Winged Heel” column in the San Francisco Chronicle of January 25, 1879, the writer fully grasps the possibilities:

“The bicycle ranks among those gifts of science to man, by which he is enabled to supplement his own puny powers with the exhaustic forces around him. He sits in the saddle, and all nature is but a four-footed beast to do his bidding. Why should he go a foot, while he can ride a mustang of steel, who knows his rider and never needs a lasso?.. The exhilaration of bicycling must be felt to be appreciated. With the wind singing in your ears, and the mind as well as body in a higher plane, there is an ecstasy of triumph over inertia, gravitation, and the other lazy ties that bind us. You are traveling! Not being traveled.”

(I have to admit a great appreciation for that last aphorism, echoing through time a later motto of Processed World magazine that I helped produce in the 1980s: Are you doing the processing? Or are you being processed?)

Cycling in Golden Gate Park in the 1890s.

Lone cyclist in Union Square, 1880s. Courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.

The second club nationally and the first on the west coast was the San Francisco Bicycle Club, founded on December 13, 1876. They petitioned the Park Commission for permission to ride their new-fangled devices in Golden Gate Park. Overcoming their astonishment that there was actually a club for wheelmen, the park commissioners allowed them to “enter Golden Gate Park at the Stanyan Street entrance to the South Drive before 7 a.m. only.” Intensive self-policing kept the wheelmen within the bounds of the concession, and before too long the “privileges were extended.” (“When San Francisco Was Teaching America to Ride a Bicycle,” by Ida L. Howard, San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 26, 1905) But it was in the next decade that bicycling began its precipitous take-off.

“The Bay City Wheelmen [founded in 1884] was the first competition for the SF Bicycle Club. It raised enthusiasm to the highest pitch. Each man was eager to find opportunities for the keenest rivalry, for the honor of his club was at stake, and in those days wheeling was a clean sport. Sport for the true love of sport. There were none of the sordid motives which follow in the train of professionalism. To become a professional was to place one’s self outside of the social pale.”

Bay City Wheelmen at 21st and Shotwell, c. 1894.

The explosion of bicycling is easily traced in the production statistics over a scant ten years, from 1885 to 1895. Where six factories produced about 11,000 bicycles in 1885, there were 126 factories in the U.S. producing a half million bikes ten years later. (SF Chronicle, May 12, 1895)

The bike clubs organized century rides around the Bay Area and annual “Bike Meets” where the fastest cyclists would compete against each other before large audiences. One of the biggest ever was during the 4th of July weekend in 1893 when an estimated 20,000 spectators would jam a special track built at Central Park just south of City Hall to watch the scorchers as they hurtled around the loop.

Central Park at 8th and Market in 1896, site of bike racing track built special for Bike Meet in 1893.

Varney Bicycles sign on old Ferry Buildilng, c. 1880s.

Generally absent from most accounts of the bicycling boom in the 1890s is a closer look at the key ingredient that made it possible: rubber. Rubber was the magic ingredient that altered the transportation landscape, but not before it had already become an essential ingredient to much of the newly industrializing world. In his excellent book, The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire (Penguin: 2008), historian Joe Jackson describes the Rubber Age:

[During the 1860s] rubber had become essential for war. In addition to its many uses in railroads and steam engines, military catalogues of the era show new designs using rubber for shoes and boots, blankets, hats, coats, pontoon boats, bayonet guards, tents, ground sheets, canteens, powder flasks, haversacks, and buttons. Rubberized silk was used for military balloons. War also created a boom in reconstructive surgery using hard rubber teeth, nose pieces, and custom-molded prosthetics.

Jackson continues a hundred pages later:

The 1890s would be the decade of the bicycle. The seven million bicycles found worldwide in 1895 used most of the world’s rubber, a boom that would not have occurred if not for the invention of the “pneumatic rubber tyre.” Although there had been bicycles previously, they rode on solid rubber tires. These were puncture-resistant, a boom on roads where nails were frequently shed from horseshoes, but they lacked suspension, were hard to steer, and were an unpleasant ride. This changed by the late 1890s. The market was flooded with steel tubes, ball bearings, variable speed gears, and high-quality chains. Above all else, it was flooded with replaceable rubber tires and inner tubes, mass-produced in the factories of Dunlop in Birmingham, England; Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand, France; and Pirelli in Milan, Italy. The bicycle was cheap and popular. People suddenly had a means of freedom that had been unknown.

But where did this rubber come from? Synthetic rubber was not developed until WWI. Before that it was derived entirely from several species of latex-sweating trees, the finest of which was Hevea, found scattered throughout the Amazon. Two major regions of the world were permanently altered in the frenzied pursuit of rubber supplies: Amazonia and the Congo. In both cases, an extreme brutality was used, mutilating and murdering literally millions of people to produce the precious rubber, the whole process lashed by the rising demand in the U.S., Europe, and Japan created by the bicycling boom.

Five major tire and rubber companies emerged in the three decades after 1870, the three mentioned above and Goodyear and Goodrich in the U.S. North American rubber imports jumped from 8,109 tons in 1880 to 15,336 in 1890. From 1875 to 1900, the U.S. consumed half of all the rubber produced in the world. What was happening at the point of production? Joe Jackson spares us little in his description:

During the fifteen years of Belgian King Leopold’s stewardship, the population of the Congo Free State dropped from 25 million to 10 million—15 million dead for approximately 75,000 tons of rubber. That equaled one life per every 5 kilograms. In 1907, similar evils came to light on the Upper Amazon. The Putamayo is a vast area around a river of the same name, which runs through territory that was disputed between Peru and Colombia; the river joins the Amazon near the western border of Brazil… Slavers rounded up entire tribes and forced them to work on rubber plantations… Rubber baron Julio Cesar Araña’s company “systematically employed terror and torture against it native work force for higher profits. The Indians were beaten, mutilated, tortured, and killed as punishment for “laziness” or the amusement of bored overseers. Women and girls were raped, the elderly were killed when they could no longer work, and children’s brains were bashed out against trees. Morever, Araña registered his Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in London, thus linking Britian, the world’s leading antislavery nation, with a firm that was enslaving Indians… Araña had manipulated the British cult of free trade like a maestro, equipping his company with a tame set of British directors who allowed easy access to London funding… The Huitoto, Boras, Andokes, and Ocainas were flogged till their bones showed. They were denied medical treatment, left to die, then eaten by the company’s dogs. They were castrated. They were tortured by fire by water, by being tied head-down, and by crucifixion. Their ears, fingers, arms, and legs were lopped off with machetes. Managers used them for target practice and set them afire with kerosene on the Saturday before Easter as human fireworks for the Saturday of Glory. Whole tribal groups were exterminated if they failed to produce sufficient rubber. Julio Araña’s peak production of 1.42 million pounds of smoked Putamayo rubber cost thirty thousand lives.

Meanwhile, bicycling was being embraced by women in unprecedented numbers, as many saw the device as their best means for at least a partial self-emancipation. Women’s clothing was changing, and social mores were too. In “Thousands Ride the Noiseless Bicycle,” in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 19, 1895), the shift is described:

In the Park the other day, out of forty wheelmen, thirty-five were appropriately dressed in knickerbockers of some sort, short coats and caps. It is the same way with women. The long skirt is being pretty generally discarded, and if a woman cannot wear either bloomers or a short skirt she might as well keep off the wheel… People used to ride only for pleasure. Now they ride instead of taking the cars, and own wheels instead of feeding horses and washing carriages. Doctors use the silent and inexpensive steed very extensively in making professional calls. For night calls it is always ready, and there is a considerable saving in hack hire, livery stable fees and coachman’s wages. The keepers of livery stables say the bicycle has cut into their business far more seriously than electric cars ever did.

A well-known riding teacher says that most of his women pupils take their first lessons in skirts on a woman’s wheel. They go out on the road this way from three to ten times. They they come back to him in bloomers, learn to mount and dismount from a man’s wheel, which is a great deal harder than the other way, and never again can be induced to ride a woman’s wheel. Girls who ride for pleasure like to ride with men, of course, and the only way to do it is to keep the pace they set. It cannot be done in skirts on a woman’s wheel, and a man, even a polite escort, cannot be expected to ride slow forever, and so it happens that men’s wheels grow more popular with women every day, and after awhile when people stop talking about it and the small boy stop hooting it will all be very charming and agreeable.

July 26, 1896 report on the Good Roads demonstration.

The mass of cyclists in San Francisco were not narrowly focused on bicycling alone. They became the backbone of a broad movement for improved streets and “Good Roads.” On July 25, 1896, thousands of cyclists filled the streets in the largest demonstration seen in the City’s history. Hank Chapot wrote a great article (pdf) about the Great Bicycle Protests of 1896, and here’s a brief excerpt:

San Francisco, though the third wealthiest city in the nation, was an aging boomtown. Streets were muddyor dusty, full of horseshit, and increasingly crisscrossed with a hodgepodge of streetcar tracks and cable slots, creating an unpredictable, hazardous mess. The city’s old dirt roads and cobblestone thoroughfares were originally laid down for a village of 40,000 were now serving a metropolis of 360,000.

On Saturday July 25th of 1896, after months of organizing by cyclists and good roads advocates, residents took to the streets in downtown San Francisco, inspired by the possibilities of the nation’s wonderful new machine, the bicycle. Enjoyed by perhaps 100,000 spectators, the parade ended in unanimously approved resolutions in favor of good roads, and a near riot at Kearny and Market.

A five-year wheelman named McGuire, speaking for the South Side Improvement Club stated: “The purpose for the march is three-fold; to show our strength, to celebrate the paving of Folsom Street and to protest against the conditions of San Francisco pavement in general and of Market Street in particular. If the united press of this city decides that Market Street must be repaved, it will be done in a year.” Asked if southsiders were offended that the grandstand would be north of Market, McGuire exclaimed, “Offended! No! We want the north side to be waked up.We south of Market folks are lively enough, but you people over the line are deader than Pharaoh!”

So as we continue to ride in a new bicycling renaissance in San Francisco more than a century later, we can take inspiration and lessons from our predecessors. A citywide system of dedicated bikeways is long overdue. Imagine how many would ride if there were safe thoroughfares to bicycle on that would make it the most pleasant and most direct way to get from anywhere in the city to anywhere else? Point A to point B, smelling the flowers, the clean air, hearing the birds, and enjoying your friends and neighbors… why not?

Cyclists near the Conservatory of Flowers, 1899. Courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library

“When you have attained a proficiency which enables you to take out your handkerchief, wipe your nose and replace the mouchoir in your pocket without slackening your pace, you have fairly graduated… For fun there is nothing like cycling, and before many years two or three family wheels will be as much a part of the ménage as the modern range and sewing machine are now.”
—San Francisco Chronicle, 1896

The organization fighting the massive freeway plan in Vancouver

I’m just back from a fantastic five-day visit to Vancouver to help celebrate and publicly ponder Car-Free Vancouver Day. The event started six years ago along East Vancouver’s Commercial Drive (“the Drive” as it is often called there). It has grown to encompass five separate neighborhood street closures, one being the very wide 4- to 6-lane Main Street where it is closed for about 17 blocks. To San Franciscans the event has a certain familiarity, combining something of our venerable tradition of street fairs with the newer excitement of “Sunday Streets.” But unlike the well-established and highly commercial street fairs, or the city-sponsored Sunday Streets, Car-Free Vancouver Day is a product of grassroots organizing, with hundreds of volunteers working hard for months to produce an exciting day of urban reinhabitation.

Street closure as art gallery.

Learning to unicycle on Car-Free Vancouver Day

"Score a goal for community!"

Serious salsa dancing for fun

Transition town meeting in mid-street.

The event has its roots in the years-long campaign to stop a $10 billion freeway and port expansion plan that will bulldoze local farms, neighborhoods, and indigenous sites, in addition to wrecking a couple of extant urban wilderness zones at Burns Bog and Surrey Bend. The Gateway Sucks campaign emphasizes that this plan, which is still proceeding, will lock in more urban sprawl and sabotage the local greenhouse gas reduction plan, all to increase trade in raw goods and disposable junk.

Car-free Commercial Drive in midday

The East Vancouver neighborhood was the first to propose a day-long closure of the its main corridor Commercial Drive as a way to demonstrate popular opposition to further freeway building. Urban activists like Matt Hern, who along with his family was my super fantastic host, saw a street closure as a way of animating the community, bringing people face to face in a car-free zone for at least a day, but in so doing, promote a more convivial and integrated neighborhood life year-round. Based on my short visit, I’d have to say that it’s been a smashing success—the provincial British Columbia government has yet to back down on their gargantuan 20th-century development plan, but the rising tide of community activism, urban gardening, bicycle advocacy and much more is palpable in Vancouver.

East Tenth Avenue is one of Vancouver's primary bike boulevards.

Similar to Berkeley's traffic-calmed cul-de-sacs, Vancouver makes bicycling a priority in many locations.

Community gardens abound in Vancouver.

The City Farmer gate made of old tools.

The recently elected mayor is a source of controversy. On one hand he’s a big bicycle advocate and has pushed through two tangible improvements for cyclists that have generated plenty of heat from merchants and auto-centric citizens. One long-standing demand of local cyclists, an additional southbound lane for bikes on the major arterial Burrard Bridge, has been established.

This is the Burrard Bridge in Vancouver. Why can't we do this with one lane on the west span of the Bay Bridge once the east span is complete? That way bikes could ride all the way across...

Another is a two-way bike lane that has replaced one of the westbound lanes on a major boulevard in downtown, Dunsmuir Avenue.  Even more dramatic is that Dunsmuir is reached by an old viaduct that was built as part of a freeway plan several decades ago but never completed. Now the onramp has the bike lane on it and a whole lane has been switched over to two-way bike traffic. If Vancouver can do this, why can't San Francisco start planning to narrow the five lanes on the Bay Bridge, reduce the speed limit to 30 or 40 on the west span, and with the eventual completion of the new east span bike lane, we'll be able to cross the bay on bike at long last?

Dunsmuir viaduct two-way bike lane.

Dunsmuir viaduct bike lane.

This is the Dunsmuir viaduct from below. It's an old freeway ramp that was stopped a generation ago from completion through downtown. Now it has a bike lane on it, but a study has begun to see if removing it might be the best plan.

Merchants are complaining but bicyclists are delighted about the new two-way bike lane on a major downtown boulevard in Vancouver, Dunsmuir Avenue.

Using the divider as dedicated bike parking.... brilliant!

The whole downtown area endured (celebrated?) the Winter Olympics this past February, and the city’s budget is now being slashed. The same pro-bicycling mayor hired a city manager who is gutting the local school budget, park maintenance, libraries, and everything else they can cut to address the massive cost overruns the city incurred to host the Olympics. The False Creek area, once a seedy industrial zone, has been utterly refashioned (not unlike San Francisco’s Mission Bay) with the Olympic village housing area (promises for large amounts of public housing have been reneged on now, not surprisingly) and a refurbished shoreline promenade looking out at a manmade “Habitat Island.”

"Habitat Island"?

Well yes, we have to make habitat now, having fully destroyed it in the past.

Weird modernistic ped bridge near False Creek, with "green" roof on new building behind it.

San Francisco and Vancouver have a lot in common. Big money keeps flowing in, driving real estate prices into the stratosphere, and keeping them there. But an increasingly active citizenry is resisting the untrammeled capitalist growth and development model with an indomitable spirit that makes Vancouver a great place to visit IN SPITE of its much-touted “success.”

I had the pleasure of speaking to four separate gatherings of organizers, presenting some of my “typical” themes. Building on the logic of Nowtopia, I argued that the Car-Free Vancouver Day movement should work to avoid having their festival succumb to the logic of being not much more than an alternative mall. That means utilizing the public space they’ve opened for much more than commerce, in fact finding so many compelling things to do in it that they displace commerce in ways similar to the way that bicycles displace cars during Critical Mass (many of the activists in Vancouver are big Critical Mass participants too). I was happy to see a lot of other activities while I was rolling around between Main Street and Commercial Drive. Here’s some images of music and bikes to wrap up this report:

Music in the streets, in many forms and styles.

Brass to start get your party on.

The Velopalooza beer bike... central to a week-long celebration of bicycling earlier in June.

Marigold demonstrates a mature ride.

Me too!

This was in the tree over the amazing Purple Thistle crowd, a youth center with enormous creativity and energy.

The BP oil spill goes on. And on. We watch the oil on live web cam pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. And we watch. Political rage is muted, practical responses even more distant. What to do? How do we “take action” on something like this? How can individuals meaningfully respond to this catastrophe? Stop driving? Boycott one brand of gas? Stop buying things made of plastic? Let’s not flatter ourselves. A few folks I know are planning to go to a local ARCO gas station (owned by BP) to protest, which will surely be a big moment for the minimum wage employee in the cash booth, and probably an irritant to the half dozen or more motorists waiting to fill their cars.

The numbing impotence we feel is painfully calibrated to our inability to affect what’s happening. Consumer choices we might make will have zero impact on this disaster, and can’t shape the larger dynamics of a globe-spanning, multinational oil industry either. Just listen to Democracy Now on Friday morning to hear how Chevron has destroyed thousands of square miles of the Nigerian delta in its incessant exploitation of the oil there, or how the Ecuadoran Amazon too is covered in vast lakes of spilled oil.

The deeper questions about technology and science are far from our daily lives. The world we live in is embedded in complex networks of technological dependencies, which none of us have chosen freely. Nor do any of us have any way to participate directly in deciding what technologies we will use, how they will be deployed, what kind of social controls will be exerted over private interests who organize and run them for their own gain, etc. (supposedly the federal government regulates them in the public interest, but that is clearly false as shown YET AGAIN by this disaster). The basic direction of science is considered a product of objective research and development, when it has always been skewed to serve the interests of those who already have economic and political power. Public, democratic direction for science and technology is not only non-existent, we really don’t even discuss it as a possibility!

British Petroleum should be given the death penalty. Oh wait! They don’t have death penalties for corporations. In fact, though they apparently have all the rights of individuals with respect to “free speech” (which they are free to buy at any price they wish), they cannot be held accountable as individuals for overtly criminal behavior. And even if they were, their bottom-line obsessing, litigation-phobic approach to the worst oil spill in history is just an example of normal corporate behavior in 2010. Their efforts to control press access and spin the story to their advantage have been consistent since the original accident, insisting on journalists being embedded on BP boats or planes so they can control what is seen and reported.

Penalizing corporate executives that get “caught” only legitimizes the rest of the criminal class in their everyday destruction of the planet. Maybe BP executives will be held criminally responsible (probably not), but the entity whose logic controls the behavior of anyone who is its executive is virtually immune. Unlike its political competitors in human form, the corporation is also apparently immortal.

The abject obeisance of the Obama government during the first 30 days of the oil geyser is a shame. Government ignorance and inaction, following the routine corruption that granted safety and environmental waivers to BP for this drilling project, should rock its legitimacy as much as Chernobyl did the Soviet government’s in 1986. I hope that blind faith in technology would also suffer a severe blow. Assurances about safe technology, proper safe guards, etc. are made about all our energy sources, from undersea oil drilling to nuclear power to the fictional “clean coal.” (Just last Tuesday I was speaking at a class at UC Santa Cruz where a couple of earnest students tried to argue that nuclear power was the solution to global warming!) This oil geyser resembles nothing so much as an uncontrollable nuclear meltdown. But rather than radiating thousands of square miles of countryside as happened in the Ukraine in 1986, this is filling the Gulf of Mexico with billions of gallons of crude oil. The sea is already dying, which is beginning to cascade into seaside communities and economies. The death of the Gulf will have unknown further effects on weather, ocean ecology, bird migration, and much more, and that’s before the massive underwater oil plume reaches the gulf stream in the Atlantic and does even more damage. It’s an insane, unwanted experiment in a foreseeable and preventable ecological catastrophe of unprecedented scope and severity.

Turns out that BP is closer to us, in a bigger way, than a lot of folks realize. Only a couple of years ago BP and the University of California at Berkeley signed a $500 million deal that will build a new biofuels research institute at the school, to be managed by BP and it is to BP that all patent discoveries will go. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu was the UC official who made the deal. Now his deputy energy secretary is the former chief scientist for BP! Maybe folks who want to protest this disaster should explore an alliance with the dynamic student movement that has already been in motion since last fall. Protest and obstruction do have their place.

Nature in the City's new proposal for a 10-mile "wild" corridor.

But other things are afoot in San Francisco too of a more affirmative nature. A couple of weeks ago the Public Utilities Committee of the Board of Supervisors held a well-attended public hearing regarding new ways of working with local water supplies from ground water and storm water to rain catchment and graywater. On Wednesday night Nature in the City presented their new campaign for a Bioregional Park (PDF) in the heart of San Francisco, a long-term feature of which is a 10-mile corridor that sweeps from the Presidio in the north down the spine of the City’s major peaks and then angling east across McLaren Park to Bayview Hill and Candlestick Point.  A natural corridor that knits together as many existing open spaces and parks as possible, planted with native plants to restore basic habitat for local critters, bugs and plants, would also help them to migrate through the urban environment. Bikeways, hiking paths, even daylighted creeks could be part of this.

And the SF Bike Coalition just announced their new campaign Connecting the City—San Francisco's Crosstown Bikeways for All (which is not as ambitious—after all these years—as a modest little flyer I put out in 1987 calling for a City of Panhandles). So far it’s a campaign to raise money, but it demonstrates a willingness to finally push for a more serious challenge to the dominance of private cars over our public streets. It’s a campaign that dovetails nicely with the notion of a wild corridor, new ways to think about watersheds and underground creeks, and more. It’s welcome development for the bigger agenda of altering how we live.

Ultimately these small choices are the only way we CAN start to lay a new foundation, technologically and socially, for a real transformation of life that will preclude disasters of the magnitude in the Gulf. A materially comfortable life for all should be the goal of a creative and energetic campaign of social and technological re-invention so that we radically reduce our use of energy, water, and other materials.

Combining the various incipient insurgencies for other uses of public streets, maybe we can start by getting some accurate numbers. What percentage of the land area of San Francisco is covered in public streets? What percentage of that street area is dedicated to cars as opposed to bicycles, pedestrians, or even transit lines (obviously buses use the same streets as cars, but not nearly as many streets as cars; nor do they generally park curbside)? What percentage is open space, parklands, sidewalk gardens, etc.? What are the largest contiguous zones of open lands not built on in some fashion?

I propose that once we get the numbers, which we can only guess at now, it will be possible to raise the demand for a specific percentage of city streets being permanently turned over to new uses, including daylighting subterranean waterways, building city-spanning parkways for crosstown bicycling, walking, and for the critters, scurrying and slithering. What do you think? Five percent of the streets converted to new auto-free uses? 10 percent? 25 percent? How far can we go?

Our era is characterized by a profound impotence in the face of national and global breakdowns. We don’t have a political vision, let alone a movement of movements, ready for prime time. We have to build the capacity to reinvent life one block, one neighborhood, one city at a time. The good news is that thousands of your friends and neighbors are already involved in just these efforts. Paul Hawken in his book “Blessed Unrest” identifies 30 million grassroots environmental organizations around the world! He calls them the immune system for Earth. Let’s hope the immune system will behave like our own bodily immune systems, and start killing the threats to our global health, the corporations that left unchecked will certainly kill us and everything else on the planet.

He skirted Market Pond and made his way up to the Wiggle. Passing through a green arching gate he rolled along next to a long aging wall that had seen better days. On the other side of the wall used to be some kind of warehouse or big store. Now it was a grassy knoll sloping down to Market Pond.

On the crumbling 110-meter long wall was an old mural from the late 20th century. A clever mural within the mural showed the city, starting from a pre-deluge downtown full of cars and bikes and heading past itself to show Hayes River turning into a path to the west to the beach where a huge snake became a bicycle tire track. The mural was considered a civic treasure from the time before and a lot of trouble had been taken to save it after successive quakes and major storms.

At the end of the wall he went over the rushing creek and the high-arching Sans Souci Bridge, steering clear of oncoming cyclists. The veloway followed the winding course of the Hayes River, willow and laurel trees studding the banks, along with impatiens and lupine bushes. Many spots along the creek were open to the surrounding homes, mostly old Victorians that had elegantly stood along this waterway since it had been buried in cement culverts long ago. The lush gardens that filled the small valley gave off a wild variety of sweet and organic smells in the moonlight.

--from After the Deluge, A Novel of Post-Economic San Francisco (Full Enjoyment Books: 2004)

I wrote that passage in my novel a few years ago, set in San Francisco 150 years in the future. Imagine my pleasure when I found out that an ornamental portal to the Wiggle is the first project envisioned by some activists along our much-loved route. A week ago I sat down on the Wiggle at Bean There Café with Morgan Fitzgibbons, one of the instigators behind the new Wigg Party, whose mission is to have the folks who live and ride and eat along this route “become the leading community in America in the transformation to sustainability.” Recognizing what more and more people are coming to grips with, that we’re on the cusp of a dramatic change in how we live in cities, and on earth, the Wigglers want to lead the way, taking action one community at a time, anchored in place. Given the high mobility and transience of so many young San Franciscans, a focus on a local neighborhood as a site of transformation is immediately encouraging.

The incipient Wigg Party doesn’t yet have a website or an office, but about 15 people have come together after Fitzgibbons started some sustainable business consulting, and the ideas snowballed. It started to become a more comprehensive vision just this past July, as the group is organizing more consulting, an educational effort they’re calling the “Great Re-skilling,” a “Gateway to the Wiggle,” and a local currency effort (wigg-bucks? Tender wiggles?).

Why not turn whole streets into a City of Panhandles?

"I’ve read the Transition Handbook, Rob Hopkins’ work. I’m familiar with the movement. We’re not connected with them even though I should… I kind of disagree that we have these twin peaks of peak oil and climate change and that’s where it all comes from. I took the Permaculture Design course in the fall with Kevin Bayuk… "

Imagine a transformed Wiggle:

“An edible foodway, sculpture gardens at some spots, see if we can get people on the Wiggle to participate in window box programs, and if we can get the Panhandle recognized as part of it. Then we can put all sorts of things there. If we can get the whole roadway opened up for art, maybe stencils…We’re going to take a lot of inspiration from City Repair (in Portland)… Maybe we could get the entire Wiggle closed during Rush Hour!”

The Wiggle Valley, 1860s.

Unlike a long tradition of San Francisco radicalism, Fitzgibbons, sees his own agenda as compatible with the business world. I pressed him on this, skeptical as I am of any future for the buying and selling of human time. Perhaps he is representative of his generation of post-Left, post-neoliberal activists, or maybe his youthful optimism hasn’t yet been tempered by years of frustration with the stupidity of the modern work-a-day world.

“I come from a social entrepreneurial world in a way. I try to overcome these distinctions between nonprofit and for-profit. There’s this new model emerging, and the idea is to be able to turn a profit on a business that is performing a social good. Then we can bring in money for some of these other good projects we have… the profit businesses are a backyard garden business and a home audit business…”

To be sure, we’re all compelled to make compromises with respect to surviving in a capitalist economy, and there’s nothing new (or wrong) with taking the money we DO make at work and channeling it towards something more humane and worthwhile. I’ve done as much throughout my life. But I balk at the notion of profiting from doing social good, the bedrock concept of “social entrepreneurialism.” In my opinion, profit is derived from one of two sources: squeezing the paid employees, or externalizing costs to the greater public. If you are in a new market niche where there is little or no competition, you can charge high enough prices to escape the iron hand of the market for a while… but once competition enters, the path towards profitability and survival is invariably lowering labor costs and lowering costs of materials, waste, distribution, etc.—what gets called “efficiency” in capitalism, but is as often as not a brutal process of reducing people’s standards of living, and/or dumping costs (transit, waste, etc.) on to an acquiescent public sphere.

The success of the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal transformation going back well over a generation was to discredit government and the public sphere, to the point that a concept like “social entrepreneurialism” can sound progressive. But it reinforces a society that frames owners of wealth as social/historical agents and the rest of us as the silly putty with which they attempt to achieve their goals. In any case, Fitzgibbons and his cohort are very well-intentioned, and certainly in tune with a rising social movement towards Transition and Resilient Communities. I’ll give him the last word:

“That’s really the whole game, is to get people to reorient their priorities and change the world… I’m a philosopher, and I have a new world view that allows for a new kind of faith that makes sense, based on evolutionary metaphysics. I think we’re in an evolutionary process. The question is where is it going, and more specifically what are we to do? And the answer is we don’t really know what the telos is. We don’t know the ultimate answer, so all we know is we have to create sustainable cultures, so the people can come behind us and have a better answer than we do.  And that gives our lives meaning, to create that culture, that’s what we have to do.”

Wigg Party meetings on 2nd Wednesdays, next: February 10, at 1571 Fulton Street, the “Sunshine Castle,” social 8:30, meeting 9… morganfitzgibbons@gmail.com

Bicycle traffic jams ahead on the Wiggle!

In some cities people are so desperate for bike lanes they'll mark their own. Elizabeth Press of Streetfilms in New York City, on the other hand, had this to say about the work the NYC Department of Transportation has been doing in her city: "It feels like every time I get on my bike there is a new bike lane -- sometimes on the left, sometimes buffered, and sometimes completely separated from automobile traffic."

For those of us who live in cities that haven't caught the bicycle infrastructure fever or have been prevented from such by a bicycle injunction, perhaps the best we can do is tag along with her as she rides the streets with NYC DOT bicycle infrastructure staff as they show off the many classes of bike lanes and inventive facilities they have added in the past few years.

Behold and be bicycle-lane green with envy!

Photos by Bryan Goebel

"What are you doing?" I asked his partner, who stopped in the street.

"This car can't be parked here. It's the bike lane," he responded.

A woman who was a passenger in the car got out, darted across the street, and brought the driver back, and he was gone within minutes, but without a ticket. Double parking in a bike lane carries a $100 fine and San Francisco's law is "explicit about the bikes-only limitation," according to the SFBC.  However, it's the first time SFBC executive director Leah Shahum has heard of SFPD motorcycle cops telling cars to get out of the bike lane. I watched them do it on a few blocks of Valencia.

"We encourage the police department to enforce the law," said Shahum. "It's not just an inconvenience for bicyclists it's a serious hazard and we'd be thrilled to see them enforce it regularly." 

A driver is told to move his car out of the bike lane.

We’ve been waiting for years now to see some physical changes to accommodate the huge increase in daily bicycling. We did get an odd set of painted bike lanes and green bike route signs, and a significant number of bike racks for parking, before it all came to a halt due to the injunction three years ago. After perusing the much-anticipated Draft Bicycle Plan and its dense bureaucratese, full of overlapping redundant promises, I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a good while longer to see the kinds of changes that we ought to be getting.

It’s really hard to believe that after all this organizing and earnest campaigning we’ll basically end up with a few thousand “sharrows” and another batch of partial, end-in-the-middle-of-nowhere bike lanes, lanes which in any case are horribly inadequate patches on our misallocated and car-centric public streets. How is it that after almost two decades of rapidly expanding bicycling, the city’s transit priorities still treat bicycles as an annoyance that they only grudgingly are willing to accommodate? When will there be a systematic commitment to altering the streets of this city to create dedicated bikeways, separated from cars and pedestrians, comprehensively linked to provide for easy, graceful, convivial bicycling to all parts of the city?

Over at the blog Copenhaganize their basic point is summarized in two short sentences:

Each and every day 500,000 people ride their bicycle to work or school in Copenhagen. This blog highlights who they are, why they do and how it was made possible.

Forty years ago Copenhagen was just as car-clogged as anywhere else but now 36% of the population choose the bicycle. Copehagenizing is possible anywhere.

My mother is from Copenhagen so I’ve visited the Danish city many times. I think it must have influenced my early thinking, because it was back in 1987 when I drew up a little flyer calling for a “City of Panhandles.” San Francisco cyclists all know the Panhandle’s cyclepath as one of the real pleasures around here (granted, it would be better if pedestrians would have their own path to its side!) and the way it links to the Wiggle route between the Mission and the Haight is just icing on the cake. A city with some vision, rather than a plodding traffic planning bureaucracy that is led by a Mayor who is only interested in what is going to facilitate his election to the next office (and always blatantly biased towards car owners and the wealthy), would have already been working on converting key routes across the city to bicycle boulevards… not just car-centric streets with “bike boulevard” signs, but whole thoroughfares that are closed to cars and only open to bicycles and emergency vehicles. Going a couple of steps further, why not open such thoroughfares to horticultural design and public art? Imagine sculpture gardens, curving murals, daylighted creeks, linear food forests, vegetable gardens, benches and fountains… the list goes on. The city would benefit in so many ways through such a comprehensive conversion of space currently sacrificed to the insatiable uses of private automobiles.

It’s self-evident how much better such street spaces would be for neighbors, pedestrians, children, and cyclists. It would open space for a systematic approach to re-localized food security. For those who clamor for “green jobs” (I’m not one of them), such natural ribbons crisscrossing the city would require first a lot of major construction work, and then a great number of gardeners, farmers, bicycle mechanics, bike parking attendants, landscapers, artists, and more. Juxtapose such quality, engaging, meaningful work to the stupid jobs that pass as “important” in the financial district, or the wasted labor producing so many luxury highrises, office buildings and other pointless projects of “economic development”… Let the tourists join us in riding and walking through the garden paths of San Francisco! Let’s think about the work we do and the design of our city as a canvas on which to create something really astonishingly better than what we’re settling for now. The SF Bike Coalition should be a lot more aggressive and push for much more far-reaching and far-sighted transformations than this tepid and uninspiring Bike Plan, in order to live up to its political and social responsibilities!

The trial plaza at Madison Square

As commenter Josh said, "This truly is a ridiculous idea! Why would anyone want to "enjoy" a small patch of cemented area that's filled with salvage yard leftovers while inhaling unhealthy fumes from not only the cars on the busy streets that surround the designated area but by the gas station?"

Though we can't make guarantees on a pilot project that hasn't been built, we thought we'd highlight some of New York City's temporary plazas and street treatments as best practice analogs, knowing our DPW and MTA are also looking to the Big Crabapple for inspiration. 

DPW Director Ed Reiskin explained to Streetsblog by email that his goal is to keep expenses low. "As for cost, it should be minimal, since materials cost should be close to zero," he said.  "There will be some labor cost to us and MTA to put up signs, transport and place materials, and install any pavement treatments and cuts."

In New York, even the "salvage yard leftovers" have become very nice public amenities.

Anyone who doubts how much can be done with low-cost, salvaged materials should start by watching this Streetfilm with NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, which shows several of the high-profile projects they have completed at Gansevoort Plaza, Broadway, and 9th Avenue, and follow that up with this Streetfilm detailing the Madison Square plaza that reclaimed 45,000 square feet of space for public use. The NYC DOT's Pedestrians and Sidewalks webpage is quickly becoming a best practices gallery for projects that redefine the public realm, remarkable for an agency that had historically been dedicated solely to moving traffic as quickly as possible.

These examples have also become a stopgap for doubters and old-school engineers who believe that removing road capacity for vehicles and turning it over to pedestrians and cyclists is tantamount to heresy.  If it works in the densest and busiest city in America, it's harder to hide behind agency orthodoxy in your hometown.

In the Streetfilms and on the NYC DOT's website, one can see the numerous elements that have become hallmark in New York's bid to carve out under-used asphalt and open streets to people, including the terra-cotta paint for pedestrian space, green paint for bike lanes, large planters, rough-hewn salvaged or quarried stone blocks, and movable furniture and umbrellas. 

As NYC DOT Director of Strategic Communications Dani Simons explained, these treatments are temporary, budgeted from existing agency funds, and are not considered capital expenses.  She said it wouldn't be difficult mill up most of what they put in, or jackhammer out the islands, and restore conditions to how they were previous to the trials.  In the long run, assuming they are determined to be successful, many of the temporary plaza projects would be slated to be included in the city’s capital construction.  At that point, the agency would have a budget for more interesting, durable materials, and could start to do more work that might require digging up the streets, or making changes to infrastructure in the roadways.

In some cases, like Gansevoort Plaza and 9th Avenue, the agency worked with the neighborhood planning process as that matured, and adapted the project as closely as possible to the myriad interests and stakeholder demands.  In the case of the upcoming Pike/Allen Street project (PDF), the DOT has essentially copied a neighborhood plan over a decade in developement, a plan that many of the stakeholders had given up for dead just two years ago.   On Broadway and in Madison Square, the agency worked quickly with the area Business Improvement Districts (BIDS) to come up with design elements and management agreements, building iconic destinations from formerly car-packed roadways in short order.

Broadway

The idea of taking away excess roadway on Broadway in the heart of Midtown Manhattan raised a lot more eyebrows than the 17th Street project in San Francisco has, but the NYC DOT proceeded with the removal of two lanes of traffic and replaced them with slender pedestrian plazas that have not only become popular lunch spots for area workers, but destinations for tourists and visitors to the city (Project PDF) (Images PDF). 

Aerial view of a Broadway pedestrian plaza

Within days of opening, people flocked to the new open space.

Planters demarcate boundaries for the various street users

The NYC DOT worked with area BIDs, including the Times Square Aliance, the 34th Street Partnership, and the Fashion Center BID on design elements and division of management responsibilities for the new spaces.

Planters used as a barrier between traffic and those enjoying the new space.

Gansevoort Plaza

Gansevoort Plaza in the Meatpacking District in lower Manhattan used to be a sprawling empty space with no boundaries between pedestrians and motorists and no seating or design elements that would make it an enjoyable place to wile away an afternoon reading a book.

The NYC DOT responded to community input and utilized excess blocks from bridge projects that were previously stored in their salvage yards to create amenities for sitting and aesthetic enhancement.

In addition to creative use of salvaged materials, the NYC DOT added boundary markers that not only gave pedestrians and plaza users safe space, but normalized the traffic that had previously entered from five different streets and crossed in a haphazard pattern through the plaza.

Many of the NYC DOT's projects combine pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle traffic treatments to provide for the safety, convenience, and dignity of a street's most vulnerable users.  Though there are numerous examples on the website, like Vernon Blvd in Queens and Lafayette Ave in the Bronx, perhaps none is more of a complete street than 9th Avenue in Manhattan.  Having lived in New York City for eight years, the first time I saw these before and after photos, I thought I was looking at good Photoshop work:

The only good way to ride down this street, which at most hours of the day had light traffic and copious speeding, was at a hell-bent pace, taking a lane, praying that raging drivers would see you and respect your physical safety.  That is, until the NYC DOT did this:

A physically separated bicycle lane and quality pedestrian crosswalks

These "boneshakers" in 1875 were superceded a decade and a half later by air-filled rubber tubes. With that new technology, bicyclists led the Good Roads Movement in the 1890s, demonstrating in the thousands for asphalt!

By the 1905, patterns of urban traffic were still being developed. Check out this incredible video of a ride down Market Street in 1905 to see how chaotic and multifarious were the uses of the street space. Lanes and signals? I don't think so! The story "progresses" through the 20th century until we have our auto-centric, "level of service"-dominated, highway engineer-shaped street systems. Many of us are urgently trying to reshape and repurpose these remaining urban commons to other ends than merely housing and moving private automobiles. Some of us are cycling, some are gardening, others are thinking artistically about the redesign of intersections, sidewalks and the roads themselves. My previous posts about the new sidewalk gardening efforts in the Mission garnered some sharp criticisms, emphasizing that these gardens should be coming at the expense of the cars and parking rather than the pedestrians, a point with which I totally agree. Still, I'm glad to see neighbors coming together to start the process of reshaping our shared environment.

In my journey to Belem, I was surprised to encounter a street system that is in some ways normal, modern and even superior to ours, and in other ways, demonstrative of a society that has put a lot less effort into maintenance and making everything accessible. You would simply not be able to get around Belem in a wheelchair. There are no curb-cuts at any crosswalk. Instead, you face a moat-like situation. At most intersections where curb meets street, a small canyon has opened up because the endless tropical rains have dug sinkholes. Different kinds of foliage are reclaiming these spots, and often the 2-10 foot depth combined with a 1-3 foot width is quite intimidating to pedestrians, who must find a way to step or leap over the abyss.

A typical street corner in Belem, Brazil, Jan. 2009.

The ubiquitous rains erode the streets along every curb in Belem, Brazil.

The citizens of Belem aren't shy about pushing the city for improvements. Here the neighbors were demanding a new traffic signal:

                      The neighbors want a signal to calm the local traffic in Belem, Brazil.

On the other hand, Belem (a city of 1.5 million) has spent significant resources on a system of dedicated ciclovias, or bikeways, that grace the center of 6-lane boulevards, separted by fences and horticultural medians. The citizens of the area are avid cyclists, and it was due to hundreds of casualties from car-bike accidents that the local government finally ponied up and built this system of bikeways, which are in steady use day and night.

A separated Ciclovia in a 6-lane boulevard in Belem, Brazil.

After a five-legged trip home (Belem-Rio-Sao Paolo-Miami-Denver-SF) I flew to Los Angeles, the land of freeways and endless street grids, rented a car (a Sebring Convertible! were they trying to say I was having a mid-life crisis?) and promptly got stuck in a 2 hour traffic crawl from Santa Monica to Downtown via city streets (the freeways were blocked too, but locals later told me I'd have done better crawling on the freeway than on city streets). After making my way to the Los Angeles EcoVillage, where I was a guest, I had a much better experience, cycling and walking around their mid-town neighborhood. Being a pedestrian in Los Angeles is not easy though. Unlike San Francisco where I feel I can cross any street any time, in Los Angeles the streets really are always full of traffic, and crossing is difficult without the help of signals and crosswalks. Still, I enjoyed walking around and grabbed this shot of a typical neighborhood scene near where I was staying. The famous Hollywood sign is on the hill in the distance.

Los Angeles, once a great place for trains, soon to be again!

One type continues all the way up to the intersection, the other type stops at a distance from the intersection. Experience shows that the shortened type of cycle track results in the fewest casualties, whereas cyclists feel more secure on the type that continues all the way up to the intersection. Both types may be supplemented with a blue marked crossing, which significantly improves safety.

While acknowledging that the MTA’s efforts to improve safety at the intersection have reduced illegal right turns from more than thirty-per-hour in 2005, when the Central Freeway first touched down at Market Street, to less than one per hour currently (PDF, pg 335), traffic engineer Jack Fleck is convinced that it can be better:

I can’t accept a situation where we have one intersection with 15 collisions In 3 years, all of the same type, and no other intersection with more than 4 collisions in that same time (actually Masonic and Fell had 8, but we took steps to fix that).

If the number of trips cycled per day on major roads is compared to police registered changes in serious [injuries] and deaths, it will be seen that over the past 10 years there has been a decrease of 40-percent in the number of serious cyclist [injuries] while at the same time the number of trips cycled has increased by 25-percent. Thus risk has been reduced with 50%. This effect is partially attributable to improvements in the cyclists’ traffic environment during the course of this period.

The MTA may try to go ahead and remove a portion of the bike lane at Market/Octavia once the injunction is lifted but the political attitude leans against it. Supervisor Bevan Defty has called for a hearing on the issue before the San Francisco Transportation Authority and other elected officials, including Supervisors David Campos and Ross Mirkarimi, and State Senator Mark Leno and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano are opposed.

Flickr photo: blafond