A scooterist was hit by a motorist making a turn across the center-running bike lane as an undeniable pattern has emerged about the dangers of the design. From Mission Local, which broke the story Thursday:
The woman was riding an electric scooter on Friday afternoon [Oct. 20] just before 3 p.m., when the driver of a Toyota drove into the painted green lane in the middle of Valencia Street near Sycamore Street, through a large gap between the bollards and bus lane curbs surrounding the bike lanes.
“She screamed, and then you could hear a collision,” said a cyclist not far behind the woman at the time, who identified himself as Josh. He said the woman was conscious but “unresponsive.”
Photos obtained by Mission Local show that the driver and passenger exited the vehicle, with the woman prone on the ground beside her scooter.
Witnesses called for help, and the woman, who Josh described as “moaning in agony,” was taken to a local hospital in an ambulance.
Although official data won't be available until next year, anecdotal reports indicate that this crash is at least the fourth serious collision since the center running bike lane was installed last spring.
Meanwhile, "In the 57 months before the Valencia Center Bikeway was installed, there were 54 crashes involving a person on a bike or a scooter," over the same blocks of the street, explained advocate Luke Bornheimer, citing city collision data. There were also two pedestrian fatalities.
A common scene: first responders coming to the aide of a downed scooterist on Valencia last August. Photo: Streetsblog/Rudick
Aaron Leifer, CAC Chair, addressing the SFMTA Board. Image from the SFMTA video feed/GovTV
It's because of these numbers that SFMTA's own Citizens' Advisory Council (CAC), a 15-member body, presented a resolution Tuesday, October 17, officially requesting that the SFMTA remove the center-running lane. "The SFMTA CAC recommends abandoning the current unintuitive and dangerous center running bicycle lane pilot on Valencia," Aaron Leifer, CAC Chair told the SMFTA Board of Directors during its regular meeting on October 17. "We've heard consistent feedback from cyclists that the middle bikeway is unsafe. They don't like it. They don't want to use it," he said in response to a question from a commissioner.
He added that cyclists want a protected bike lane on the sides of the street rather than the center, or that they want the street closed to through traffic.
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