Bicycle Infrastructure

Joe Lamberti, who rides his daughter to Golden Oak Montessori School in Castro Valley on his cargo bike, was stark about bike and pedestrian infrastructure in Alameda County's unincorporated areas. "It sucks!" he said while heading into last night's charette about bike and ped plans, held at the Castro Valley library.

Building dense housing around transit stations, encouraging lower emission and electric cars, designing cities to encourage walking and biking--those are all great policies. But how does one measure whether the policies are actually lowering CO2 emissions from automobiles? That was the subject of a forum today at SPUR's San Francisco location.

Last February, Jan Weissenberger was riding his bike from the Larkspur Ferry terminal to his home in San Rafael, when, as he was heading north on Ross Common, he was passed close on his right by crazed motorist Matthew Marshall Engle, driving a dark-red SUV. Engle blasted his horn, screamed threats, and backed his car at him.

"Think about how fast you're driving. Think about that next stop sign. Just think if you're driving a motor vehicle," said Alvin Lester, co-founder of Bay Area Families for Safe Streets, and the father of 21-year-old Arman, who was killed in 2014 while riding his skateboard at 3rd and Cargo Way in San Francisco. Lester made his plea at a press event at City Hall this morning, held to discuss the apparent success in reducing fatalities and serious injuries on San Francisco's streets in 2017.

As cyclists who use Cargo Way in the Hunters Point/Bayview neighborhood know all too well, the bike lane, once celebrated as San Francisco's first on-street protected bike lane, is in a state of disrepair, with broken pavement, a dangerous, tire-grabbing groove, and a busted fence. And in a stark display of how some city officials regard bicycle safety, the city repaved the adjacent car/truck lanes in August, but skipped the bike lane.

The $67.5 million 16th Street improvement project, part of SFMTA's 'Muni Forward' plan to improve bus reliability and run times, is supposedly on schedule and on budget. But there's decidedly little to see on the street.

Mission Bay commuters are no doubt aware that the Lefty O'Doul drawbridge on Third Street is currently locked in the upright position and, according to SF Public Works (DPW), will remain so until approximately January 26.

For readers who haven't been on Folsom Street in SoMa in the last few weeks, Streetsblog is happy to report that the new parking-protected bike lane has gotten a lot more green paint since we last reported on it in October. Back then, the lane--the latest of several projects designed to make SoMa safer for bikers--consisted of bus-boarding islands, some stripes, and a splash of green here and there.

Yesterday evening, some 70 people came to stand on the edge of Upper Market to protect cyclists traveling between Octavia and Laguna from motorists encroaching on the bike lane.