Bicycling

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.

Mission Bay commuters are no doubt aware that the Lefty O'Doul drawbridge on Third Street is currently locked in the upright position and, according to SF Public Works (DPW), will remain so until approximately January 26.

For readers who haven't been on Folsom Street in SoMa in the last few weeks, Streetsblog is happy to report that the new parking-protected bike lane has gotten a lot more green paint since we last reported on it in October. Back then, the lane--the latest of several projects designed to make SoMa safer for bikers--consisted of bus-boarding islands, some stripes, and a splash of green here and there.