Bicycle Safety

ABC 7 news anchor Cheryl Jennings talked to some of San Francisco's key city officials and advocates about Vision Zero, the campaign to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024, on her show "Beyond the Headlines" Sunday.

What if Yankees legend Yogi Berra had followed a season with 24 homers and 144 hits with one featuring 27 homers and 189 hits? Would the baseball scribes have declared “Yogi Power Shortage” because only one in seven hits was a homer instead of one in six? Duh, no. The headlines would have read, “Yogi Boosts Production Across the Board.” The fact that a greater share of base hits was singles and doubles would have been incidental to the fact that Yogi’s base hits and homers were both up.

Residents of North Fair Oaks have made it clear that they want a safer Middlefield Road with wider sidewalks, but San Mateo County has yet to commit to a redesign that could make a real difference on this important commercial street.

When a driver rear-ended Bert Hill, he was using all of the safe bicycling techniques in the book -- after all, he's one of the most heavily-consulted bike safety instructors in San Francisco. Hill even had a major role in the SFMTA's new video for Muni drivers on how to share the streets with people on bikes.

ABC 7 is back with another blurry watercolor painting of street safety issues -- this time, setting sights on California's new 3-foot bicycle passing law. ABC reporter Dan Noyes went to great lengths to film real-world examples of the issue, setting up a camera to film passing bike commuters and drivers on Market Street, and drawing out chalk lines to measure how much room drivers are giving. Bizarrely, Noyes and crew even rigged a camera to their vehicle to film themselves violating the law.

A study of Ralston Avenue in Belmont recommends easing the way for cut-through car traffic while shunting cyclists onto indirect routes -- and the City Council seems to think that's just fine.

At this morning's Walk to Work Day press conference, SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin announced a plan to implement 24 bike and pedestrian safety projects over the next 24 months [PDF]. This is the most concrete safety plan unveiled so far, ever since city leaders pledged to pursue Vision Zero.

San Mateo County's Mid-Coast Multi-Modal Trail just barely made it into the list of Pedestrian and Bicycle Program projects approved for funding by the Transportation Authority (TA)'s Board of Directors last Thursday. Despite this step forward, building the trail will be difficult thanks in large part to restrictions on how TA funds can be spent, which hamper walking and biking projects.

The Atherton Town Council this afternoon will review a draft of its first ever bicycle and pedestrian plan, which it crafted over the past eight months with resident input. The plan has attracted little notice, even though it calls for safety redesigns on major streets like El Camino Real, Middlefield Road, and Marsh Road.