Bike Lanes

About 170 people showed up last night at the First Baptist Church for the launch of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's grassroots campaign to rally support for the city's long-stalled bike plan and get it re-adopted by Bike to Work Day.

While all bicycle facility improvements in San Francisco remain at a halt because of a disruptive bike injunction, other Bay Area cities are moving ahead. Take Brisbane. Our reporter, Matthew Roth, snapped this photo of a blue bike lane that was installed near the Brisbane/South San Francisco border in early January. The concept was thought up by a working group of professionals and bicyclists and Fehr and Peers, a transportation consultant firm, designed it.

I just finished an interesting journey that took me to the World Social Forum at the mouth of the Amazon River system in Belem, Brazil, and then to Los Angeles and finally home, just in time to attend a presentation last night at CounterPULSE of Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes III. The show consists of rare and obscure footage of life in San Francisco going back over 100 years. A few of the clips are striking reminders of how much the basic "technology" of roads and how we use them has evolved during the past century.

San Francisco's Traffic Code states that a motorcycle officer or the driver of any other emergency vehicle is allowed to park in a bike lane when "engaged in emergency services." California code is a little less clear but Streetsblog tipster Andrew Turley points out that cops obstructing the bike lane can create dangerous conditions for cyclists forced to merge into busy traffic. He came upon an officer parked in the bike lane on Market Street between 8th and 9th today. He sent these pictures and his account of what happened when he confronted the officer, who was preparing to eat a plate of eggs at Sam's Diner:

Until the city certifies its Draft Environmental Impact Report in a few months and Judge Busch lifts the bicycle injunction, we have to get more resourceful about maintaining our safety as cyclists.

San Francisco's bike injunction has prevented the MTA from testing colored bike lanes on city streets but it's not stopping the Presidio Trust from doing its own experiment.

One of the many casualties of the bicycle injunction has been the community led plan for reconstruction of Cesar Chavez Street between Guerrero and the 101.  Over the past five years, community groups led by CC Puede, the Precita Valley Neighbors (PVN), Mission Antidisplacement Coalition (MAC), Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), and PODER have participated in workshops and charettes that produced a plan to transform a traffic sewer into a livable street with greenery, a bike lane, wide sidewalks, and safe pedestrian crossing times. 

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.

One of the unintended consequences of San Francisco’s bicycle injunction, which Rob Anderson and fellow NIMBYs will likely rue for some time to come, is the arduous thought and labor that advocates and professional planners have invested in doing away with LOS all together.