Bicycling

Professor Jason Henderson's "Bicycle Geographies" class wants the ride from Daily City BART to San Francisco State University's campus to be comfortable and fun.

Three years ago today, 21-year-old Dylan Mitchell was riding his bike east on 16th Street when a garbage truck traveling in the same direction turned on South Van Ness and collided with him. He died at the scene--a scene where flowers were left during Thursday night's "Ride of Silence."

As Streetsblog readers have surely heard, police Chief Greg Suhr was forced to resign Thursday after the shooting of an apparently unarmed woman by SFPD. The police shootings of Mario Woods in December and Luis Gongora in April both seemed to show a department where officers are failing to deescalate situations and are too quick to resort to deadly force. As the Chronicle explained:

On Bike to Work Day, 48-year-old Tim Doyle nearly died demonstrating, once again, the fundamental flaw of painting bike lanes between fast-moving traffic and parked cars.

This video just came in via the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and the San Francisco Bike Ride Crew. It's truly nuts. An SFPD cruiser apparently parked in the right-turn pocket suddenly pulls out, swerves left and hits a cyclist.

San Francisco has come a long way. That was the theme of a rousing speech delivered by Margaret McCarthy, Interim Executive Director of the SF Bicycle Coalition, at a ceremony this morning in front of San Francisco City Hall. "We've seen a 184 percent increase in cycling in the past decade," she said with her trademark ebullience. "San Francisco is a biking city!"

Behold, in the photo above, San Francisco bicycle infrastructure, at the end of St. Charles way, where it deadends at Brotherhood Way in Oceanview. There's a walking path at the end that leads to Brotherhood Way. There's a large curb.

Some 30 residents of the Western Addition, Lower Haight and Hayes Valley neighborhoods (plus some interested folks from outside the area) showed up Monday night to the auditorium at John Muir Elementary School to learn about SFMTA's plans on three different, but related, projects: the Western Addition Community-Based Transportation Plan, the Lower Haight Public Realm Plan, and the Page Street Green Connections Project. From SFMTA's release about the meeting:

It's generally acknowledged that Bike to Work Day was started by the League of American Bicyclists—then called the League of American Wheelmen—in 1956. Rumor has it (can anyone confirm this?) that in California the first Bike to Work Day event took place in San Diego circa 1993.