Bike Boxes

San Francisco bicycle riders this morning let out a loud cheer, popped open a bottle of champagne and toasted the city's first bike lane in three years: a freshly painted sliver of Scott Street on the Wiggle between Oak and Fell that now serves as a left-turn lane for the thousands of daily commuters traveling by bicycle onto Fell Street.

San Francisco is about to get its first new bike lane in more than three years along with a colored bike box!  Progress has been long stalled by the injunction but the fact that the MTA is about to whip out the paint is cause for celebration, and the SFBC is planning two events to mark the occasion.

One day after we asked when the bike box on Scott Street at Oak would reappear, lo and behold, it's back. It was apparently repainted sometime this morning. Tipster and Streetsblog commenter MichaelSF points out it appears longer. It's almost a full bike box but it's still not connected to the bike lane, like most bike boxes in other cities such Portland and New York.

If you've pedaled through The Wiggle in the last few weeks -- as thousands of bicyclists do on a daily basis -- you've probably noticed the disappearance of what was a rare San Francisco bike box on Scott Street at Oak. The only other bike box is on 14th Street and Folsom. On Scott, the street recently underwent a repaving but crews haven't re-striped the bike box, which gives bicyclists a head start in front of a line of cars, and is designed to reduce bicycle-car conflicts, especially in areas heavily traveled by bicyclists.

When we wrote about the trial pedestrian plaza on 17th Street and Market Street that DPW expects to start this May, the story generated numerous doubts about how the city would create a successful public space out of a busy street abutting a gas station. 

Lest it appear that Streetsblog doesn’t support bike-sharing in San Francisco, I should say from the outset that I love the successful bike-sharing programs that I’ve used, believe they are one of the more innovative new transit models available, and know that San Francisco is ripe for the roll-out of a large-scale program of its own.  But I am also among the large majority of Americans that Republican Pollster Frank Luntz found support infrastructure improvements and believe getting the job done right is more important than ribbon cutting and shovel readying.

Though Superior Court Judge Peter J. Busch ruled the MTA will not get an immediate exemption to the bike injunction to remove the eastbound segment of the bike lane at Market and Octavia because he didn’t think an “adequate case has been made that there's a public safety crisis,” when the hold on the bike plan is lifted as early as this spring, the agency will likely try to remove the lane anyway.