Bike Lanes

Last week, we wrote about a construction site on Market Street where bicycle commuters were forced into a traffic lane with trolley tracks and cars. The situation exemplified a lack of consideration for the safety of people walking and biking sometimes found at construction sites when enforcement of safety requirements is lacking.

We recently wrote about the benefits to bicycle riders that come from temporarily removing car parking at construction sites. But there are other times when construction can do just the opposite, throwing them into harm's way.

The SF Board of Supervisors today approved changes to the city's planning code to make it easier for developers to convert gas stations to uses like apartments and storefronts on major transit and pedestrian streets.

In most of San Francisco's bike lanes, people are forced to ride between parked cars and moving cars. The looming threat of opening car doors and cars entering the bike lane is unsettling enough to keep many San Franciscans from riding a bike at all.

Three months after San Francisco's first parking-protected bike lanes were striped on John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park, the street continues to thrive as a calmer, safer place all users. The flocks of people using the lanes this summer appear to include more families than ever, and by and large, drivers and pedestrians seem to have adapted well to the new configuration.

Contrary to what the name implies, bike lanes in San Francisco have cars in them all the time. Presumably, a car left with blinking hazard lights on means the driver is just "running in for a minute," as if to minimize the impact of endangering people on bicycles.

A new buffered bike lane was striped on 8th Street last week, re-purposing a traffic lane for bicycles on one of SoMa's fast, one-way motorways. The new configuration, which removes bicyclists from the door zone and provides a much wider lane, is an improvement over the four speed-inducing traffic lanes and skinny bike lane that previously existed. Still, many say it's just a small step toward a truly safer street.

The SFMTA has begun striping work on new bike lanes along 8th Street in SoMa and 17th Street in the Mission and Potrero Hill.

The SFMTA recently striped a partial bike lane and sharrows on a block of Lee Avenue connecting Ocean and Holloway Avenues in Ingleside. The improvements are a small piece of a plan to calm traffic and improve bicycling conditions on the Holloway corridor, which connects SF State University to City College Ocean Campus and the Balboa Park BART Station.