Commentary: ‘Concrete Now’ is a Chant All Advocates Need to Repeat

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"Well, it's better than nothing." ... a retort often heard about paint-and-plastic demarcated bike lanes.

Thirty-year-old oncologist Barbara Friedes was killed by a drunk driver while riding in the partially "protected" bike lane on Spruce Street in Philadelphia in July. She was killed in a totally predictable crash because that city refused to protect the lane with concrete.

Of course, I don't have to look to Philadelphia for recent examples of horrors and frustration with unsafe streets. Steven Bassett, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, was killed in the Bayview by an inattentive city employee who threw open their car door in front of him. The drunk driver who killed Ethan Boyes on Arguello was given a slap on the wrist. And, of course, the SFMTA all but walked away from its safety plan in West Portal because a few merchants whinged about driving a two-minute detour to avoid a repeat of a crash that killed an entire family.

All of these completely unnecessary tragedies are gut-wrenching. But I think the Friedes case hit me hard because I had just visited Philadelphia in April and toured its bike infrastructure. And I want to highlight this crash for Bay Area readers because it so dreadfully and succinctly illustrates a point I've tried to make again, and again, and again about our own bullshit, paint-and-plastic "protected" bike lanes.

SFMTA claims to have built over 41 miles of protected bike lanes in just the last few years. The truth is it's more like 10, because nearly all of what SFMTA calls protected bike lanes are only demarcated by paint and plastic posts, no better than the lanes in Philadelphia. Advocates, and even mainstream journalists, should never let SFMTA or any city get away with calling these protected lanes. But we've seen officials go unchallenged when they stand in front of clearly unprotected bike lanes during media events and refer to them as "protected."

Philadelphia's advocates have had it with paint-and-plastic bike lanes and are standing in front of their city hall demanding "concrete now!"

San Francisco, Oakland, and the rest of the Bay Area need to take this painful lesson to heart and copy Philly's chant.

Vision Zero will never be achieved and our streets will never be safe if we continue to allow the city to pretend paint and plastic are protection. As the Valencia Street debacle proved, again, with crash statistics, paint and plastic are not necessarily better than nothing. It also isn't about cost; cities routinely use concrete barriers for events, as San Francisco did a a few months ago for the Dreamforce conference. Look at the lead image in Oakland, of a concrete block used to close a street for a weekend event. By chance that block, one of many, was placed (albeit a little out of position) where it temporarily gave real protection to cyclists on a paint-and-plastic "protected" intersection in Oakland. So let's not let San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities pretend this is a cost issue.

The next time Mayor Breed, SFMTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin, and other officials do a Vision Zero rally on the steps of city hall and claim they've built 41 miles of protected bike lanes, advocates need to call that out, immediately. Anytime they claim they can't afford to do better, advocates need to call them out, immediately. The lies just have to stop. Because Barbara Friedes, Steven Bassett, Ethan Boyes, the Ramos Pinto de Oliveira family, and so many others weren't just killed by reckless, selfish, and/or inattentive drivers. They were killed by lies, cynical political calculus, and cowardly leaders.

So please chant it every time a politician tries to sell you on paint and plastic as "better than nothing" for safety:

Paint will not protect us. Concrete now!

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For more on the utter selfishness and political negligence that led to the death of Friedes, check out this video from the Armchair Urbanist.

Special thanks to John Boyle of the Philly Bicycle Coalition, Matthew Cassidy of the city of Philadelphia, and Alan Fisher, the Armchair Urbanist, for showing me around.