Bicycle Infrastructure

This is a week of milestones (or maybe 'near milestones' is more accurate) for Bay Area transportation.

On Tuesday evening the Menlo Park City Council approved the construction of a new streetscape for Haven Avenue that will bring wide sidewalks to the block nearest Marsh Road where there are none today -- but also leave a gap in bike lanes at a key location along the popular San Francisco Bay Trail route. The formerly industrial-only area is expected to see heavier pedestrian and bicycle traffic after a total of 540 apartment units are completed at two new housing developments further west on Haven Avenue, where the city installed wide buffered bike lanes earlier this year.

Hoodline is reporting that a cyclist was killed yesterday at around 5:30 p.m. in a collision with a car at the intersection of Silver and Alemany Boulevard. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition says the victim's name was Moises Chavez, a 51-year-old man. "Our hearts are heavy this morning and our thoughts are with family and friends of the victim," they wrote on their Twitter feed.

Streetsblog caught up with Russo on Friday near his office in downtown Oakland to talk about how he's settling in, what he thinks of the strides Oakland has made so far, and how he will shepherd the department towards a safer, more equitable and more sustainable future.

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority (CTA) released the results yesterday of what it calls "the first comprehensive estimate of the volume, frequency and coverage of ride-hailing trips by Uber and Lyft in San Francisco."

Like taking your bike on BART and Caltrain? Thank Shirley Johnson, the BIKES ONBoard group she helped form, and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which helped support her work.

As Streetsblog readers are surely aware, when it comes to public transit, pedestrian safety, and above all good bicycle infrastructure, the Dutch are the global champions.

There are now four design options for a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA)'s project to add parking-protected bike lanes, possible transit lanes, and wider sidewalks on Howard and Folsom Streets in SoMa. All four of these designs are pretty darned good. All four have pretty good protected bike lanes.

Dick Spotswood of the Marin Independent Journal was correct when he recently stated that adding highway lanes won’t fix our traffic problems. A common adage in transportation circles compares building more lanes to doctors counseling obese patients to simply loosen their belts.