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To join the fight for Dutch-style protected bike lanes on Valencia, click here. Download your own flyers here.
Some advocates have argued that a center-running bike lane is the way to pedestrianize the street. One, of course, doesn’t follow from the other. Even Tom Maguire, second-in-command at SFMTA, in a recent email to Bornheimer, conceded that: “The parking protected design that you began advocating for last week would not necessarily preclude a Placemaking Pilot, but it would severely limit the options that could be explored.”
To simplify Maguire’s statements, the center running vs. parking protected has nothing whatsoever to do with placemaking, which all advocates for safe and livable streets support. The other argument for center-running is it is “better than nothing.” Actually, there’s evidence that the street will be more dangerous than it is now if center-running bike lanes are added (see Tweet and links below).
To paraphrase Copenhagenize, figuring out how to build safe bike infrastructure was a decades-long battle mired in failed experiments and tragedy–but the Dutch and Danish got a 100-year jump on the U.S. SFMTA is literally talking about rerunning the same experiments with human lives and limbs at stake. As Copenhagenize put it, “If you wouldn’t put pedestrians in a center-lane between moving traffic, why the hell would you put cyclists there!”
"There were blocks that felt very safe and very secure," he said. "But then you're immediately – voom! – disgorged into three lanes of moving traffic with no protection."
What happened in West Portal was entirely predictable and preventable. The city must now close Ulloa to through traffic and make sure it can never happen again