SFBC

A week after a 21-year-old German tourist on a bicycle was killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver on Masonic Avenue, the first death of a bicyclist in the city this year, advocates who have been working for years to calm the major arterial are calling on the SFMTA to make immediate safety improvements.

It's no secret that many bicyclists pedaling through one of San Francisco's most popular bicycling corridors, The Wiggle, often run the red light turning onto Fell Street from Scott. Whether you agree it's a dangerous move to do so, considering the speeding traffic that thunders down Fell, the intersection has not been designed to give left-turn bicyclists signal priority, even though the SFMTA earlier this year installed a left-turn bike lane and green bike box on Scott. As it stands, bicyclists have 30 seconds to turn left on the green, but only if there's no southbound automobile traffic.

After nearly four years of legal wrangling, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Peter Busch lifted the city's bike injunction this afternoon, freeing the SFMTA to begin working on implementing the remaining projects in the Bike Plan, and soundly rejecting the objections made by plaintiff Rob Anderson and his attorney Mary Miles.

In its best attempt yet to prevent drivers from obstructing the bike lane on a troubled section of Fell Street, alongside the Arco station, the SFMTA painted the lane green today, along with the dashed lane from mid-block to Divisadero Street, as part of its new configuration. Michael Helquist of BIKE NOPA had the story up first this morning, and said the Fell entrance to the Arco station was closed for the morning and early afternoon.

With Caltrain facing a $2.3 million deficit, and its governing board considering service cuts and fare hikes, bicycle advocates from three Bay Area counties who have been leading the call for more bicycle capacity have calculated that the commuter rail line could stave off reductions if it would just accommodate the increasing demand for bike space.

When most San Franciscans turn on a faucet, they'll see water that's traveled as far as two hundred miles from Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. But that's not the case for some locally-minded gardeners, for whom careful water stewardship is as important as selecting their crops.

Cheryl Brinkman, one of the original organizers of Sunday Streets who has a strong history of livable streets advocacy, will be nominated today by Mayor Gavin Newsom to serve a four-year term on the SFMTA Board, filling one of two vacancies that have been left empty since May 1, Streetsblog has learned.

At the corner of Fell Street at Divisadero it's frightening to witness the minute-by-minute close calls between drivers and cyclists on a one-way arterial that resembles the freeway it was once proposed to be. Some drivers, on a speeding high from their descent down the hill to the problematic stretch that precedes the intersection, jostle for space, lean on their horns, yell expletives and generally have no regard for the right of way of bicyclists, let alone each other, as they queue up to turn left onto Divisadero or get gas at the ARCO BP station, which has now become the scene of weekly protests.

Pedaling up Sutter Street toward Leavenworth from his dentist's office during the height of the Wednesday evening commute, Dan Nunes is riding in the transit-only lane for his bike trip home, despite the new sharrows recently painted in the center lane to his left. There, drivers often zoom by at alarming speeds, breaking the 25 mile an hour speed limit, narrowly avoiding crashes, and treating the three-lane arterial like a highway, especially as they make the descent down the hill on Sutter just past Leavenworth.