Bicycle Infrastructure

Commuters on the Wiggle got a Bike to Work Day surprise this morning: green-backed sharrows guiding bicycle riders through the intersection of Steiner and Waller Streets.

City officials and advocates rode in to City Hall today alongside thousands of commuters for San Francisco's 18th annual Bike to Work Day. According to the SFMTA, 1,031 eastbound bicycles traveled through the Market and Van Ness intersection between 8 and 9 a.m. this morning, making up 73 percent of vehicles on Market and averaging 17 bikes per minute.

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.

Safe bike lanes and pedestrian crossings should be top priorities in the redesign of Second Street. That was the major sentiment at a community meeting on Wednesday, where city staffers rebooting the faltered Second Street Improvement Project asked attendees how they would re-envision the corridor.

This year's celebration of the Dutch Queen's Day in San Francisco was a bit special.

Much has been made about the "strangeness" of San Francisco's first parking-protected bike lane in Golden Gate Park, which employs the type of design that other American cities are increasingly using to improve safety and raise bicycling rates.

The Bay Area's bike-share system will likely be run by Alta Bicycle Share, an American vendor that already operates several systems in North America and Australia.

A new set of traffic lights that include bicycle-specific signals were erected at Page and Stanyan Streets this week at the recently renovated Golden Gate Park entrance in the Upper Haight. Crews said the lights should be activated in roughly a few weeks, though they couldn't confirm a date.