Bicycling

Near the end of 2015, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a plan to grow Bay Area Bike Share from 700 to 7,000 bikes. That means the City of San Francisco itself will go from having 350 to 4,500 bikes, giving it the largest number of shared bikes per capita in the nation.

A Nielsen survey shows that 37 percent of Americans list “staying fit and healthy” as a top New Year's resolution. “Losing weight” is close behind it, at 32 percent. That's not much of a departure from last year. And, sadly, we'll probably see something else repeated in 2016: most people won't stick with it. In fact, roughly eight percent will keep those resolutions throughout the year.

Supervisor Avalos’s proposed ordinance would make it the lowest law enforcement priority in San Francisco to issue citations for bicyclists who safely yield at stop signs. However the ordinance would not discourage officers from citing bicyclists who fail to slow to a safe speed at stop signs or fail to yield to another vehicle or pedestrian.

Back in October, the Schmidt Family Foundation announced its “Just Transit SF Challenge,” a contest to come up with good transit improvement ideas that can be implemented quickly. The three winners were announced this month.

The Bike Yield ordinance was heard by the full San Francisco Board of Supervisors yesterday. It passed, with six “ayes” and five against -- two “ayes” short of what's needed to override Mayor Edwin Lee's veto pen.

While out with friends last night in West Portal, I mentioned that a cyclist was killed in San Francisco that morning. One of my friends corrected me and said "no, it was San Jose."

Yesterday the Land Use & Transportation Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to instruct SFPD to, in effect, allow cyclists in San Francisco to treat stop signs as yields. The proposal will now go before the full San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Dec. 15.

Yesterday, Governor Jerry Brown signed A.B. 40, legislation that bans tolling bicycle and pedestrians on bridges that have tolls for cars throughout the state.

At a heated community meeting last month, a bike commuter asked SFPD Park Station Captain John Sanford whether he could expect to continue safely treating stop signs as yield signs. Sanford had instituted a crackdown on that behavior, and some ticket recipients said they were told they had to put their foot down at stop signs. Sanford confirmed to the crowd that that requirement does not exist, and insisted that his officers didn't enforce it.