Bike Boxes

New designs have been drawn up for eastern Cesar Chavez Street and will be presented to the community next week, nearly two months after a contentious meeting in which attendees were told, just days before the striping of new bike lanes, that plans for a road diet were being scrapped by the Mayor's Office and Port of San Francisco because of concerns from industrial businesses about reducing road capacity for trucks hauling goods.

Working in 80 degree weather, smiling SFMTA crews installed two green bike boxes in both directions of Market Street at Van Ness Avenue today, the latest pieces of innovative infrastructure to grace the city's main thoroughfare, which continues to become a much friendlier street for people who bike, walk and take transit.

Crews were out on Market Street today laying down the first bike boxes on both sides of the Ninth Street intersection. They come as the first of five promised by the SFMTA earlier this month.

Last November, we brought you news that the SFMTA is planning to install five green bike boxes on Market Street where the numbers of bicyclists have dramatically increased since the SFMTA mandated right-turns at 10th and 6th streets. During peak hours, there are so many bicyclists on Market Street it looks a little like Amsterdam or Copenhagen. So, where are the bike boxes?

As part of its "Calm the Safety Zone" project, the SFMTA plans to install five green bike boxes on Market Street at intersections that currently have bike lanes, bringing to seven the total number of bike boxes in San Francisco. Bike advocates urged the SFMTA to install them quickly and focus on a continuous ribbon of green, separated bikeways from 8th Street to the Embarcadero to further boost the trials of innovative projects on Market Street that have made life a little easier for bicyclists, pedestrians and transit riders.

San Francisco's first green bike box can no longer be mistaken for just a car-sized strip of green paint: this morning, DPT crews stenciled in a bicycle symbol to indicate to cars that the green box on Scott Street at Oak is for bikes only. In marked contrast to the pre-stencil bike box, the new stencil seemed to help most drivers understand that they're required to wait behind the box during red lights. Only a few scofflaws ignored the bike box, often stopping behind it initially and then rolling into it - often with cell phones pressed against their ears.

San Francisco's first green bike box, painted by a smiling group of electeds and bike activists earlier this month, was heralded as an important first step toward finally advancing some "innovative design treatments" in the city's long-stalled Bicycle Plan. But nearly three weeks later, the MTA has yet to paint any kind of bike symbol in the box, and many San Francisco drivers, and even some bicyclists unfamiliar with the concept of bike boxes, are still not getting the message that it's for bikes only.

DPT crews have begun striping a new bike lane on Clipper Street between Douglass Street and Portola Drive. Streetsblog tipster Nick sent us these photos of the work, which is expected to take a week to complete, according to Damon Curtis of the MTA's bike program. Nick points out that many residents on Clipper Street support the bike lane, part of a traffic calming project in the Bike Plan.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, three members of the Board of Supervisors, MTA officials, SFBC staff and bicyclists -- standing in the glaring fall sun amidst the roar of cars on Oak Street -- celebrated the city's first new bike lane in three years today, and then grabbed the paint rolls and applied buckets of shiny green paint to the Scott Street bike box.