Bicycle Infrastructure

SFMTA hearing officers today approved a plan to replace car parking on Eastern Cesar Chavez Street with buffered bicycle lanes. A previous iteration of the plan was dropped in June after industrial businesses in the area pressured City Hall because they objected to losing traffic lanes for trucks.

Though I bicycle, walk and take transit for half my trips, the other half, which usually involve shuttling children in carpools, for now necessitate driving a car. So there are days when I am on the streets of San Francisco behind a windshield, sometimes for hours, negotiating city streets. I know exactly how complex urban driving is and how aggravating congested traffic can be. And I grew up soundly in the midst of our car culture.

Anticipation is building for the arrival of San Francisco's first parking-buffered cycle track along the eastern stretch of John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park this December. The project received approval from the Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority on Wednesday, and the final step in its approval will come at a Recreation and Parks Commission hearing on October 20.

San Francisco police returned to the Caltrain station at 4th, King and Townsend streets this morning to warn bike commuters not to ride on the sidewalk one day after a sting that resulted in a number of citations for people on bikes. Bike advocates complained, however, that Caltrain has known for years the station presents a challenge to bicyclists, and said the agency's inaction has allowed conflicts between bicyclists and pedestrians to continue.

The delegation of Dutch experts who were in San Francisco this week for a series of Think Bike workshops with city officials, bike advocates, transportation planners and others honed in on three critical corridors: Market Street between 5th and 9th, Polk Street between Broadway and Union streets, and The Wiggle.

In 2007, in order to route cyclists away from a challenging 7-lane crossing on busy Hiawatha Avenue, Minneapolis built the Martin Olav Sabo Bridge.

Fourteen years of community-driven efforts to improve conditions on Fell and Oak Streets around the Panhandle are finally paying off. The outreach continues on a vision for separated bikeways that would provide San Franciscans safe access to the flattest route connecting the western neighborhoods to areas east while making the neighborhood more livable for residents and businesses.

Bicycle riders can enjoy bike lanes on three new routes striped within the last couple of months, as the SFMTA continues to roll out the city's Bicycle Plan.