Bicycling

Physically protected bike lanes are coming to Valencia Street. "We are pretty sure some segments can be designed and implemented as soon as this Fall," said Janice Li, advocacy director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, to 120 people who attended its annual member meeting Wednesday evening at the Google Community Space on the Embarcadero. She added that the first stakeholder meetings for the Valencia bike-lane improvements "will be coming in March or April ... we’re really going to need to build a lot of support."

The city placed boulders under the ramps to deter encampments--what about the bike paths?

Berkeley christened two protected bike lanes today, one on Hearst Avenue on the north side of the UC Campus, and the other on Bancroft, on the university's southern border. "Hopefully, this is the first of many," said Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin, during the celebratory event on Hearst. "Let's make every street in our city a complete street."

Building dense housing around transit stations, encouraging lower emission and electric cars, designing cities to encourage walking and biking--those are all great policies. But how does one measure whether the policies are actually lowering CO2 emissions from automobiles? That was the subject of a forum today at SPUR's San Francisco location.

A Marin County Supervisor, who represents San Rafael, apparently wants to look at nixing plans for the long-planned bike and ped path on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, according to a piece today in the East Bay Times. From the article:

This week, half a year after the city started offering a permit program for dockless bike share, the SFMTA issued its first permit for a non-FordGo-bike share bike.

As cyclists who use Cargo Way in the Hunters Point/Bayview neighborhood know all too well, the bike lane, once celebrated as San Francisco's first on-street protected bike lane, is in a state of disrepair, with broken pavement, a dangerous, tire-grabbing groove, and a busted fence. And in a stark display of how some city officials regard bicycle safety, the city repaved the adjacent car/truck lanes in August, but skipped the bike lane.

The first two-way connected parking-protected bikeway in Berkeley is part of a project that includes a bus-only lane and was designed and funded by the local bus agency.

The $67.5 million 16th Street improvement project, part of SFMTA's 'Muni Forward' plan to improve bus reliability and run times, is supposedly on schedule and on budget. But there's decidedly little to see on the street.