Bike Lanes

San Francisco bicycle advocates are celebrating a major milestone after the city's first parking-protected bike lane cleared its final hurdle yesterday. The San Francisco Recreation and Parks Commission approved the John F. Kennedy Drive bikeway, which will be installed in Golden Gate Park this December.

SFMTA hearing officers today approved a plan to replace car parking on Eastern Cesar Chavez Street with buffered bicycle lanes. A previous iteration of the plan was dropped in June after industrial businesses in the area pressured City Hall because they objected to losing traffic lanes for trucks.

The door zone is one of the biggest urban threats to bicyclists. Conventional bike lanes that squeeze bicyclists between the door zone and automobile traffic leave little room for error, but the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is piloting a series of projects designed to encourage bicyclists to steer clear of the door zone.

When traffic engineers from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) invited the public to weigh in on the design of Golden Gate Park's first separated bikeway on John F. Kennedy (JFK) Drive last night, the discussion wasn't dominated by complaints about losing car parking. Instead, the room was filled with citizens eager to see JFK Drive finally transformed into a road safe enough for their even children to cycle on, whether they felt the proposals would achieve that or not.

On May 23, 1971, while 2,000 runners were racing to the finish in the 60th annual Bay to Breakers (the first year women were allowed), a diverse group of neighbors, most of them on bicycles, gathered on Lake Street to celebrate a first for San Francisco: freshly striped bike lanes. Neighbors had been demanding traffic calming measures on their street, and requested that the San Francisco Department of Public Works put in stop signs and bike lanes.

SFMTA crews are continuing the "green branding" of Market Street, installing "green-backed" sharrows for people who ride bikes across several different intersections headed eastbound between Octavia Boulevard and 10th Street.

In post-bike injunction San Francisco, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is gearing up to install some of the final bicycle projects held up in the Bike Plan for several years.

Alemany Boulevard will soon be dramatically safer for cycling as SFMTA crews began striping the city's newest stretch of buffered bike lanes today.

I’ve been bicycling in San Francisco since the late 1970s so I vividly remember when almost all bicyclists could recognize each other on the streets of the city. There really weren’t that many of us even as recently as the beginning of the 1990s, just two decades ago. We’ve come a long way, and one of the less recognized aspects of this bicycling boom has been the incredible expansion of bike rentals and bicycling tourism.