SFBC

John Billovits is all too familiar with the perils of one of the city's most hazardous intersections for bicyclists. For the past decade, he has traveled through the Market and Octavia intersection on his daily bicycle commute. As a senior planner at the San Francisco Planning Department, Billovits was also the project manager for the Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan, and fought against building the Central Freeway touchdown on Market Street.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has posted the responses from its questionnaires submitted to the mayoral candidates, as the organization's 12,000 members begin voting on who to endorse in the November 8th election. Almost all of the sixteen candidates responded, with the exception of Michela Alioto-Pier and Jeff Adachi.

Despite the department's insistence that officers are not targeting bicyclists on Market Street, new numbers from the San Francisco Police Department confirm that cops are going after people on bikes following two high-profile crashes.

It was one year ago last Thursday that a San Francisco judge freed the city from its four-year-old bicycle injunction, and allowed the SFMTA to finally begin building out the long stalled Bike Plan. Since the chains were unlocked, the number of bicyclists on the streets has dramatically risen, thanks in no small part to the new infrastructure that has made cycling more inviting to people of all ages.

BART staff has shot down a proposal from Director Robert Raburn to allow commuters to bring bicycles aboard the back cars of rush hour trains. In a memo [pdf] to the BART Board, Executive Planning and Budget Manager Carter Mau recommended maintaining the current policy, which prohibits bicycles aboard its most crowded trains during peak hours.

Fourteen years of community-driven efforts to improve conditions on Fell and Oak Streets around the Panhandle are finally paying off. The outreach continues on a vision for separated bikeways that would provide San Franciscans safe access to the flattest route connecting the western neighborhoods to areas east while making the neighborhood more livable for residents and businesses.

Bicycle riders can enjoy bike lanes on three new routes striped within the last couple of months, as the SFMTA continues to roll out the city's Bicycle Plan.