Bicycle Safety

The Belmont City Council is gearing up to decide on a list of infrastructure investments intended to improve safety and reduce traffic congestion on Ralston Avenue. At a community meeting last month, representatives from consulting firms W-Trans and Alta Planning presented their Ralston Avenue Corridor Study, intended "to improve the multi-modal function" of the busy arterial street.

Of the 23 biking and walking projects with a hat in the ring for funding from the San Mateo County Transportation Authority's (TA) Pedestrian and Bicycle Program, only ten can be funded with the $5.7 million that's available. And that's the largest funding source for bike/ped projects in the 20-city county. Meanwhile, unnecessary highway expansions are on track to get hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

Despite growing demand for better walking and biking infrastructure in San Mateo County, active transportation grants from the City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County (C/CAG) cover only a fraction of the projects that cities want to build, leaving many residents without the sidewalks, bike lanes, and other basic ingredients they need to safely navigate their streets.

Congestion pricing resurfaced this week thanks to an SF Examiner article that was picked up by several other media sources, rightly framing it as a way to save lives.

Willie Brown's successors don't look so bad when reading the former mayor's windshield perspective drivel in his latest Chronicle column.

A coalition of safe streets advocates, community organizations, and city supervisors have launched a campaign for San Francisco to join leading cities in adopting a "Vision Zero" goal -- an end to traffic deaths on city streets within ten years.

Despite the slow roll-out of safer streets for bicycling compared to cities like New York and Chicago, San Franciscans are making nearly twice as many trips by bike today as they did in 2006, according to a new count released by the SFMTA. Still, city leaders must significantly increase the paltry amount of transportation funds devoted to bicycle infrastructure in order to reach the SFMTA Bicycle Strategy's goal of 20 percent of trips by bike by 2020, according to the City Budget Analyst.

When street pavement gets torn up during construction, people on bicycles need fair warning, or else they'll be in danger.

Safe streets advocates, family, and friends of Cheng Jin Lai gathered yesterday for a memorial service of the 78-year-old man who was killed by a Muni driver on October 18 while making a trip on his bicycle at the crash-prone intersection of Bryant, Division, and 11th Streets.