Bicycle Safety

The door zone is one of the biggest urban threats to bicyclists. Conventional bike lanes that squeeze bicyclists between the door zone and automobile traffic leave little room for error, but the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is piloting a series of projects designed to encourage bicyclists to steer clear of the door zone.

John Billovits is all too familiar with the perils of one of the city's most hazardous intersections for bicyclists. For the past decade, he has traveled through the Market and Octavia intersection on his daily bicycle commute. As a senior planner at the San Francisco Planning Department, Billovits was also the project manager for the Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan, and fought against building the Central Freeway touchdown on Market Street.

New bike lanes were recently installed around San Francisco International Airport, and the reviews are coming in. Streetsblog San Francisco reader John Murphy, who was the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's 2010 Commuter of the Year, thinks there's lots of room for improvement. He sent us this scolding review, along with the photos:

Only two speakers at this week's Safe Routes to School National Conference in Minneapolis earned a standing ovation. For former Minnesota Congressman Jim Oberstar the crowd stood out of honor and gratitude. For Kimberly White, the audience shot out of their seats with sheer awe and inspiration.

San Francisco became the first large California city to implement a 15 mph speed zone around a school this morning, as SFMTA workers installed one of four signs that will go up around George Peabody Elementary School on 7th Avenue in the Richmond District. It's part of a groundbreaking citywide initiative pushed by walking advocates to implement safe speed zones around 200 schools, and comes right as the school year is beginning this week.

New designs have been drawn up for eastern Cesar Chavez Street and will be presented to the community next week, nearly two months after a contentious meeting in which attendees were told, just days before the striping of new bike lanes, that plans for a road diet were being scrapped by the Mayor's Office and Port of San Francisco because of concerns from industrial businesses about reducing road capacity for trucks hauling goods.

The family and friends of Nancy Ho, the 25-year-old woman who was killed by a delivery truck driver while riding her bicycle on Mission Street in SoMa last month, came together recently to honor her life. Ho's relatives and closest friends have been too grief-stricken to talk to us, but a college friend recently sent us an announcement about her memorial in Colma that was put together for her friends in New York, where she attended NYU.

A 67-year-old Washington D.C. woman who was hit by a bicyclist on the Embarcadero at Mission Street last month has succumbed to her injuries. Dionette Cherney, a real estate expert who had been visiting San Francisco with her husband, was pronounced dead at 5:20 this morning, said SFPD Sgt. Mark Sullivan of the department's hit-and-run detail.

San Francisco police officers issued twice as many tickets to drivers operating without a license between January and May this year than they did for all of 2010, according to data from the SF Police Department (SFPD). The spike contrasts with an overall drop in traffic violations.