Bicycle Safety

If you've pedaled along Howard Street in SoMa lately, you've no doubt noticed the shoddy paving between 6th and 8th Streets.  A DPW contractor repaved the street as part of a sewer main replacement project but in several areas left a two inch shelf in the middle of the bike lane, which is causing many cyclists to drift into traffic or struggle to keep upright, especially at night.

When we wrote about the trial pedestrian plaza on 17th Street and Market Street that DPW expects to start this May, the story generated numerous doubts about how the city would create a successful public space out of a busy street abutting a gas station. 

In casting around for a good April Fool's Day joke, I found yesterday's New York Times Lede blog report on the chicken frying corporation KFC doing some pothole repair in Louisville, complete with this photo of Colonel Sanders in a hardhat and construction bib.  I thought for sure the Times had gotten an eight-hour jump on the April Fool's fun, but amazingly this report seems to be true.  Or they're holding out on a Joaquin-Phoenix-length punchline and haven't broken it to readers that this is preposterous.  The PETA subtext in the Times story is pretty funny, but I find this all a bit unsettling.

Dave Burdick yesterday offered up his choices for the Top 5 videos featuring a bicycle on the Huffington Post. While it's nice to see the mainstream blogosphere types showing some love for two-wheelers, c'mon man! Robin Thicke bouncing around NYC on a crappy bike to "Disco Beethoven" is the world's number one bike video?! I think not.

Oregon lawmakers have been engaged in a heated debate about enacting an "Idaho Stop" law, which would codify what most cyclists already do: treat stop signs as yield signs and red lights as stop signs.  The issue has come up before in Sacramento, but has never been so close to adoption.

TransForm tells Streetsblog San Francisco that legislators in Sacramento have prepared draft legislation for how the state should spend federal stimulus money on transportation projects and that there is important advocacy that needs to be done to improve it.  AB X3 20 will be introduced imminently and debated this week. 

As we reported last week, several city agencies have begun to look at ways to improve Market Street when it is repaved, including an inter-agency process spearheaded by DPW and the Planning Department.  Yet, we've still heard nothing from Mayor Gavin Newsom that suggests he'll make the transformation of San Francisco's most significant street an urgent priority. 

Kirkham Street is one of the Big 56 bike lane projects that hasn't raised many eyebrows. Unlike the looming battle over 2nd Street or 5th Street, the Kirkham lane will be on a relatively quiet residential street that runs east-west from Ocean Beach to 6th Avenue, where it will connect with the remainder of bicycle Route 40.  

Last week, I wrote about an Oakland cyclist, Brandon Thomas, who was critically injured in a hit-and-run crash on San Pablo near 55th Street. We got an email update on his condition from his mother, Stella Thomas: