Streetsblog San Francisco

Guadalajara, Mexico was host this month to the 2nd annual Congress of Cyclists in Mexico, a national gathering of bicyclist activists from around the country. I was invited to give a speech, which I somehow managed to do in Spanish (thanks to my media naranja for translating and coaching me!), detailing the history of cycling and Critical Mass in particular. I loved being at the Congress, meeting people from all over Mexico, a few old and new friends from the U.S., and one remarkable woman from Quito, Ecuador.

The city of Guadalajara is an ironic place for this conference. It is a town overrun with SUVs, streets jammed with cars, 6-lane, one-way boulevards, sprawling suburbs in five other municipalities making a metro area of 6 million or so. In spite of its obvious car-centrism, Guadalajara has a number of beautiful public plazas, several pedestrian-only zones closed to cars, both in its downtown and in a gentrified artsy-touristy neighborhood some distance from the city center. They've even installed a real European-style bike lane (or ciclovia as they're generally known in Spanish) on one of its major thoroughfares, with plans to extend a network of such lanes in several directions.

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In 1978 I was a field manager for an environmental group's canvassing operation and was driving "my crew" in an old beat-up Volkswagon from one suburb to the next. From about 3 p.m. we'd visit every house in a given area, knocking on doors seeking donations and support, ending around 8:30 or 9. One time I was in Walnut Creek or Pleasant Hill or one of those Contra Costa bedroom communities, and I did a typical San Francisco rolling stop at a stop sign in a quiet residential neighborhood. Sure enough I was stopped by a squad car and given quite a lecture on how San Francisco behavior was unacceptable out there in the 'burbs.

I remember this periodically as I roll down Shotwell in the Mission, zipping into and out of intersections with 4-way stops, always making sure I don't end up on the front hood of a car that barely hesitates as they roll through the stop signs (San Franciscan motorists are notorious for the rolling stop). I'm on a bicycle of course, taking the smaller Shotwell instead of Folsom with its bad pavement and narrow lanes, or the wider South Van Ness with its fast-moving traffic, or even instead of Harrison, which is a nice, bike-lane bearing boulevard just two blocks to the east. Some friends pointed out a few years ago that Shotwell had the advantage going north because A) it was recently paved; and B) it has 4-way stops which means a cyclist can sail down the slope into the former swamplands (from 19th to Division, Valencia to Harrison was largely wetlands before urbanization), rarely having to stop.

My cycling behavior dates back to childhood when I commuted by bike across Oakland to 6th grade, and learned the basic rule of thumb for safe city cycling: No one sees bicyclists! Therefore, to be safe, you must always make sure you are in the parts of the street where you cannot be hit, preferably away from moving cars, and not too close to parked ones either. The best, safest place to be? On the other side of a red light, where the street is mostly empty of traffic.

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Though it occurred for just four hours on two miles of streets in the Mission, this week’s Sunday Streets event has transformed the livable streets movement in some of the same ways that Critical Mass transformed San Francisco’s bicycle rights movement in the early 1990s.

“Even better than Critical Mass,” was the answer I got when I separately asked three men who had been riders on the first Critical Mass rides in 1992 how they compare Sunday Streets to Critical Mass.

“It’s more true to the original intent of most of the early Critical Mass participants--taking public  space and transforming it from an inhospitable and deadly river of steel into a convivial place where friends meet, talk, play and celebrate their community,” said Jon Winston, who was there Sunday with his family and there 17 years ago on the early Critical Mass rides. This event does what Critical Mass did, Winston said, but it lasts longer and invites a wider variety of people. "Friends meet and tarry in the street to catch up on gossip but also, lines of class and race are crossed as people mix freely and the street is returned to what it had always been for thousands of years before the automobile– a commons."

As one of the participants in the early Critical Mass rides, I saw thrilling parallels between these two events that take over the streets for just a few hours but seem to have impacts far beyond the event itself. I remembered the palpable joy of being in an unprecedented social space, a reclaiming of a violent and privatized street for public interaction.

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I got a call a week ago from the SF Bike Coalition's media person. She was looking for someone to talk to Joe Vazquez of CBS 5, a reporter who was going to do a piece on Critical Mass. I declined, having been interviewed far too often over the years, and having learned time and time again that the mass media is not going to do any favors for Critical Mass by covering it. Sure enough, the piece is now online, and you can see for yourself just how absurd the slant is. I'll give Vazquez credit for at least going on the ride, and in fact, in his sidebar piece, describing what it was like, he admits to becoming more sentient and feeling himself, instead of playing the (impossibly) neutral observer:

...along the way, I found myself unusually sentient. As a reporter, I am not supposed to feel anything while covering a story. That's how we are trained:  focus on the story.  Get it right.  Be fair.  Leave your human reactions out of the story. In this case, though, I was feeling it. My legs were sore and tired (because I haven't been on a bike in two years!)  The sunset was glorious.  Music was blaring from boom boxes on bikes... most riders were well-behaved and even polite (I watched one rider actually apologize to a car driver for tying up traffic). Critical mass is a riot, not just because it's a moving mob with a cause.  It's a riot because it's a celebration every bit as exhilarating as it is exasperating.  A true San Francisco tradition.

We can only wonder what behind-the-scenes pressure led to this new coverage. Did an editor get stuck in traffic recently? Did a local politician put them up to it? Did the station's owners get a call that a campaign would be helpful right now, in order to justify a coming attempt to control and abolish Critical Mass again? We'll probably never know. But given the ridiculous angle the main story took, it doesn't look promising. Vazquez's main point? Critical Mass "costs $155,060 in taxpayer dollars annually!"... and how does he  arrive at this bizarre number?

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The Oregon Legislature has flushed an effort to bring the Idaho rolling stop law to that state. It's a bit of a surprise, given both the simple and proven efficacy of allowing cyclists to make rolling stops, as well as Oregon's big reputation as a bastion of cycling sanity. I've been an "outlaw bicyclist" for 30 years in San Francisco, running stop signs and red lights routinely. The design of traffic laws and the engineering of our roads are focused on automobile throughput, parking-and-shopping, and not much else.

Those of us who have embarked on a generation-long effort to reinhabit the urban environment, partly by daily cycling, have had to refashion the streets through our own patterns and habits. Rather than acquiescing to "the law" or to self-defeating rules, we've made safe but creative use of the rights of way. When I come to a stop sign, it's always a yield, unless there is cross traffic there ahead of me, or if there's a cop waiting to nab me. (I've only been ticketed a couple of times in 30 years, mostly because I never cause anyone danger or inconvenience by my behavior.) If I come to a red light, depending on how far I can see the cross traffic, I'll either stop or pause, and proceed if the coast is clear.

The safest place for me is on the OTHER side of that red light, where the road is empty. Waiting to start on the green with the automobiles is to remain shunted to the unsafe corridor between parked cars and moving traffic, and often enough, being threatened by a right-turning car. You'll end up spending most of your urban cycling time in hazardous narrow corridors anyway, but whenever you can get into an open road without moving cars alongside, you're safer. It's self-evident! It's also helpful to be pedaling ahead of traffic, keeping a healthy distance from the door zone, where approaching motorists can see you clearly and make adjustments to accommodate our presence on the road.

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“Rebuilding Market Street has become a civic obsession in San Francisco. The city’s main street has been torn up and rebuilt completely at least once in every generation since the Civil War.”

Apparently it’s time again. San Francisco faces another massive effort to remake Market Street, trying one more time to get it right. What is right? Some folks harbor fantasies of a boulevard that brings out San Franciscans to re-create a life that exists mostly in our imaginations. But there is some evidence that a more vibrant and convivial street did exist in our past. An article in the long-defunct African-American journal Spokesman in 1933 described night life in the Tenderloin along Market Street:

Altogether the street is like the fairway of an enormous circus or carnival. Colors, lights, crowds, music, candy, hawkers, ballyhoo--everything is there but the elephants and the sawdust...

This photo taken around 1940 shows the old “roar of the four” as folks referred to it when four streetcar tracks, two privately owned and two public, dominated the center of the street. Cars park along sidewalks crowded with pedestrians in this image, taken midway between 4th and 5th Streets. If the view looked westerly instead of east we’d see a mid-Market full of movie palaces and locally owned small department stores and other retail outlets dependent on working class shoppers.

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This week's events make Halloween seem like a long time ago, but it was only last Friday when Clarence Eckerson, on a west coast jaunt for Streetfilms, shot this video of Critical Mass in San Francisco. Some think it was the city's biggest mass ride ever. Clarence offers a possible explanation:

With monthly rides under attack in some cities, it is interesting to see the tactic that San Francisco takes. The police department is practically hands off, and the ride is very peaceful and non-confrontational. Even drivers and spectators don't seem to mind the action.

"So," Clarence wonders, "why can't it be the same in NYC?"