Bicycle Culture

At Rosa Parks Elementary School in the Western Addition, the bike racks are filling up. Even with San Francisco's hills and often far-flung school assignments, Dorie Apollonio thinks she and her family have helped start a trend at the school ever since they started dropping the kids off by bicycle from their home in Parnassus Heights.

Up until this year, Rabbi Nosson Potash used a pickup truck to haul his sukkah -- a structure used in ritual celebrations of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot -- to spots around Cole Valley. But now you'll find him on the city's first pedi-sukkah, a tricycle outfit he had shipped in from New York City.

SF editor's note: This video features plenty of examples of San Francisco's stressful bicycling streets -- the kind that the SFMTA hopes to transform in its Bicycle Strategy. The agency has determined that only 10 percent of the city's bike network is "comfortable for most people."

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in the Mission, an energetic crowd filled a room with about half a dozen bikes propped up on stands. Among the crowd was Juana Teresa Tello, who was there to get some pro bono guidance on how to fix up a two-wheeler that will help her get to work, to school, to the grocery store, and around San Francisco.

Move over, Nevius: The San Francisco Chronicle's latest bicycle-friendly declaration from columnist Caille Millner is a breath of fresh air, giving voice to the need for safer streets and setting the record straight when it comes to anti-bike rants.

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency released its four-year State of Cycling Report [PDF] this week. While the findings in the report may not be new to those keeping an eye on the growth of bicycling in San Francisco -- which has jumped 71 percent from 2006 to 2011 -- bike advocates say it highlights the city's faltering plans to roll out bike infrastructure in comparison to other cities.

The people behind Walk Score, the real estate rating service that goes by the slogan “Drive Less, Live More,” are out with a new rating system, based on hard data, that should prove useful to prospective city dwellers: Bike Score.

San Francisco's streets are expected to fill with bike commuters tomorrow for the city's 18th Bike to Work Day.

It can be hard to imagine what San Francisco's streets would look like if the city reaches its official goal of having 20 percent of trips by bike by 2020. As SF begins rolling out protected bike lanes like the one on JFK Drive, there's some skepticism out there as to whether the dream of bicycling as a widely accessible, mainstream mode of transport could materialize here.