Streetsblog San Francisco

Frank Somerville puts on his skeptical anchor man face to introduce KTVU's electrifying exposé about "government bikes."

KTVU sure blew away viewers yesterday with its latest muckraking segment on the government scandal that is bike-share.

My mind, for one, was blown by the audacity of KTVU’s comically disingenous attempt to paint bike-share as nothing more than an “obscure government agency’s latest spending spree,” as anchor Frank Somerville introduced it.

“Even its strongest supporters concede there’s no actual scientific data showing the multi-million dollar plan will improve our air quality,” he said.

Well, KTVU reporter Mike Mibach didn’t really seem interested in actually answering whether bike-share has helped reduce driving in any of the 500 cities that have launched it — not even DC’s Capital Bike-Share (yes, that’s the label on the sample bike shown in his segment). In DC, bike-share shattered expectations in its first year with 18,000 registered members logging over a million trips — double the projections. According to survey data, the system led to an overall increase in transit and bicycling use, and an average savings of $891 per year in transport costs for users.

But according to KTVU, it’s all just a waste and the SF region shouldn’t try to get results like that. Nope, we should just sit back and watch as NYC launches a 330-station system (which got 4,000 people to sign up within the first 24 hours of membership sales).

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Cross-posted from Vibrant Bay Area, a new collaborative blog from urbanist writers around the Bay Area.

AC Transit’s proposed East Bay Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line got a cheap kick in the gut yesterday from the Chronicle’s Matier & Ross. The duo took aim at the cost of BRT, a “jaw-dropping $18.7 million per mile,” but didn’t take a minute to compare the project to anything else in the Bay Area. BRT is a steal compared to other planned expansions, like BART to San Jose, but you wouldn’t know it by reading the Chronicle.

Image: AC Transit via Oakland Local

Bus rapid transit, or BRT, is a bus route separated from traffic using transit-only lanes with specialized boarding platforms. Where BRT is fully implemented, it functions like BART. Fares are paid before boarding and bus entrances are level with the platform. When a BRT line runs along city streets, they turn lights green as they approach intersections. Each of these measures speeds the bus service, making it more reliable and faster than regular, mixed-traffic buses.

AC Transit’s BRT line will cost about $178 million to run 9.5 miles along International Avenue in Oakland and San Leandro. Though the improvements won’t be as robust as what you’d find even in poorer countries like Colombia, there is still plenty of work to do. Planning, stations, new buses, signal infrastructure, medians, and other infrastructure will dramatically improve service along the corridor. In 20 years, it’s expected to attract 40,000 riders per day, 24,500 of whom will be new. For the number of riders AC Transit will attract, this is a long way from “jaw-droppingly” expensive.

The Greenbrae Interchange Project in Marin will cost $143 million and add capacity for 825 more car trips per day, or $173,000 each. BART’s extension to San Jose will cost at least $7 billion and serve, at most, 78,000 trips per day, or $90,000 each (though Eric at Transbay Blog thinks this is absurdly optimistic). At only $7,265 per new trip, East Bay BRT is far and away a cheaper, more cost-effective undertaking than nearly anything else under way in the region.

It’s a double shame, then, that businesses along the corridor have sought to dumb-down the project and strip it of features and length that will attract more riders. They fear a loss of parking and worse traffic, but by reducing the scope of the line they’ve cut off a vital link to customers. It has been shown again and again – San Francisco on Polk Street and Columbus Avenue; Utrecht [PDF]; Melbourne [PDF]; New York; Toronto [PDF]; and elsewhere - that the best customer base a business can have are those who walk, bike, or take transit.

The Chronicle would better serve the community by trying to inform rather than smear. The facts show that AC Transit’s plan is a coup for cost-effective transportation and will bring transit to a corridor that desperately needs better service. One would hope that a journalist (or two) would be interested in such things.

I finally got around to seeing the Oscar-nominated “Silver Linings Playbook,” and it’s a charming film. It certainly deserves to be right up there with the top pictures of 2012. And as the film unspooled, I got a pleasant surprise: Neither of the main characters owns (or drives) a car.

Except for the opening scenes where Pat (Bradley Cooper) is driven home to a Philadelphia suburb after eight months in a mental health facility, Pat and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) spend nearly the entire movie getting to know each other while on foot. Whether it’s on a date, walking home from a friend’s dinner party, going out for a run, walking to eat cereal at the local diner, or just arguing in the street, this film shows them moving as pedestrians and it’s very refreshing. You really sense that the characters need to be in this alfresco mode, and that talking while walking is therapeutic and healthy.

Of course, one could argue their carlessness plays up their mental health problems and that they are not fully integrated with “normal” society. So do the filmmakers want us to think that since both of them are going through emotionally tough times, they’re not stable enough to drive? Possibly.

But it also just might be that their constitutionals and interactions give these characters more depth and let us get closer to them. Unburdened by the automobile, they have time to sort things out, to communicate, and to let their minds breathe.

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The folks at SF Weekly seem really upset about the end of free car parking on Sundays. The shock is apparently severe enough that Erin Sherbert put up a post yesterday directing readers to sign the petition demanding an absolute end to the SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s expansion of parking meters, launched by the Eastern Neighborhoods United Front (ENUF). (Just a reminder: ENUF’s spokesperson won a Streetsie Award this year for “most absurd argument against SFPark meters.”)

Many San Franciscans tired of the free parking mess on commercial streets actually aren't "pissed off about paying for parking on Sunday." Photo: Judy Watt/Flickr

Signing on the to ENUF petition, Sherbert wrote, is car owners’ last stand against “the new oppressive parking rules.”

Apparently SF Weekly is little behind the curve when it comes to the basic nuts and bolts of parking policy. But in a sign that you don’t need a parking PhD to get why meters make streets work better for everyone, SF Weekly’s readership seemed to welcome the end of free parking on Sundays.

None of the readers commenting on the SF Weekly post were actually “pissed off” about Sunday parking. To the contrary, there were a few comments supporting Sunday meters, like “bulk2,” who wrote, “Sorry, but free parking on Sunday is a legacy from an era when shops were closed Sundays… I’m sick of my taxpayer dollars going to fund everyone’s private car parking on public streets. Muni still costs $2 on Sundays last I checked.” Reader ”ChachitoSF” simply asked, “Is this a joke? Know your readership or rename yourselves ‘Walnut Creek Weekly.’”

The reaction on Twitter was similar. Transbay Blog’s Eric C. pointed out that SF Weekly isn’t in the habit of telling readers what they can do “if we’re pissed about paying for Muni on Sunday.” And @LightExposures suggested that anyone “pissed about paying for parking on Sunday” should “ride a bike, and calm the hell down.”

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Photo: Aaron Bialick

Move over, Nevius: The San Francisco Chronicle’s latest bicycle-friendly declaration from columnist Caille Millner is a breath of fresh air, giving voice to the need for safer streets and setting the record straight when it comes to anti-bike rants.

For readers weary of the Chronicle’s regular bicycling coverage — a space mainly filled by a victim-blaming former sports writer with an irrational fear of bike lanes – take a break and enjoy watching Millner hit the nail on the head:

My heart sings every time I see a new bicyclist in San Francisco.

The more, the better, I say. I want to see 10-year-olds riding to school. I want to see middle-aged women on wheels, wearing long coats and pedaling slowly so as not to disturb their full baskets on the way home from the market. I want to see old men, even if they’re a little wobbly, heading out to the senior center on old two-wheelers.

You should want this, too – it means a better city for all of us.

In writing this, I can close my eyes and picture the avalanche of hostile e-mail that will pour in. Nothing gets people around here more worked up than bicyclists, and they love to screech out their reasons for why the rise of bicycles in San Francisco represents a crumbling of civilization.

They write letters that are full of righteous indignation, presuming that bicyclists are the only uncouth people on our streets – as if they’ve never rolled through a stop sign (if they’re drivers) or (if they’re pedestrians) never waded into the street without looking, expecting the flow of traffic to magically cease in their presence.

There’s something unseemly about these letters, about the affront their writers feel at having to share the road with bicyclists. How dare they claim space that used to belong to me is the undertone of all of this sentiment. How dare they slow me down or force me to pay attention when I’m trying to get through traffic.

It’s tiresome, it’s whiny, and it’s wrong.

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A green bike lane on Market Street. Photo: Bryan Goebel

Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius took another shot at stoking some bicycle controversy today with his latest fact-free piece sharing his “concerns” that bike lanes “may be on [a] crash course” with cars.

“Bikes and automobiles are still crashing into each other,” as Chuck breaks it to us. ”Part of the problem is simply sharing the street. But there’s also a concern that the green bike lanes may actually be encouraging collisions,” he wrote.

Since Nevius doesn’t actually provide any evidence for this “concern,” we can’t really be sure why he’s publishing another article on the matter of bicycle safety. But taking even a surface-level look into his baseless claims only seems to reveal yet another attempt to ruffle some feathers around bike lanes.

While the bike lane examples Nevius chooses seem largely arbitrary, he does point to the intersection of Market Street and Octavia Boulevard, which had the highest number of pedestrian and bicyclist injuries in 2011, with a total of ten (Nevius probably would’ve done well to actually cite the numbers). But the vast majority of bicycle crashes there are caused by drivers making illegal right turns onto the freeway.

State Assemblymember Tom Ammiano has pushed for a change in state law to allow camera enforcement, and the SF Bicycle Coalition said violations have dropped since a concrete island and other improvements were installed there. Still, Nevius somehow names the bike lane as the problem. (Quick fact correction for his piece: The SFBC confirmed that Nevius misquoted Executive Director Leah Shahum as saying they were illegal left turns. Also, this section of bike lane isn’t painted green.)

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A truck parked in a crosswalk at 10th Ave. and Irving Street. (Really?) Photo: Aaron Bialick

As you may have heard, there’s a proposal on the table to increase parking enforcement and fines as the SFMTA grapples with a $14 million budget hole. Like clockwork, the San Francisco Chronicle’s came out with another windshield-perspective editorial bemoaning the city’s determination to uphold parking laws.

As Streetsblog readers occasionally note, the SFMTA’s budgeting process often leads the press to characterize parking enforcement as a revenue raiser, not good urban policy. And today’s piece in the Chron is a good case in point: The paper glosses over the fact that enforcing parking laws maintains safe movement on our streets, instead deploying a batch of arbitrary numbers to plead, in essence, “Come on, can’t illegal parkers keep getting a break?”

[San Francisco's Transit-First Policy] comes with a price, no secret to anyone who’s walked back to a vehicle after running an errand that took a little too long. Tickets slapped on windshields cost more than ever – and the citations are going up.

To meet a projected $19.8 million shortfall over the next two years in the city’s transportation budget, the governing agency wants another $6.5 million in ticket revenue. The city collected $86.3 million in fines in 2011.

Higher traffic tickets are sold as a way to ease traffic, keep Muni moving on crowded streets and create more curbside slots as wary drivers flee a flotilla of ticket-writing officers in scooters. But it’s clearly something else: a traffic-enforcement tool that’s being diverted to pay for the city’s costly transit system.

Really? Let’s start with the basic fact that illegal parking has very real negative impacts. Double parking slows Muni and endangers bicycle riders. Parking on the sidewalk and in crosswalks endangers pedestrians (particularly the elderly, disabled, and families with strollers) and degrades the walking environment. The lack of turnover at metered parking hurts businesses and forces more drivers to cruise for a spot, increasing air pollution, congestion, wear on our poorly-maintained roads, and — full-circle — double parking.

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