Friday, June 26, 2009

A Bicycle Lane of One’s Own

I’m working on a new route home from work, to avoid being in the Valencia St. bike lanes during afternoon rush hour. It’s OK in the morning, but is too full of adventurers in the afternoon.

There is a rather alarming spot on Folsom with a bike lane that ends abruptly mid-block, leaving one BETWEEN two lanes that are potentially turning right to get onto the freeway. That was an exciting moment, particularly as the motorist to my right, in a freeway-only lane, decided she wasn’t in the mood to get on the freeway, after all, and went straight. I’m here telling the tale, and I might see if I can make that work—I see other cyclists there, a couple—but I’m exploring other options.

My new route goes past a very beautiful little marina I’d never seen before that is full of well-kept boats. It continues behind the ball park and goes near Potrero Hill, a neighborhood I’m especially fond of. There’s a nice view of big ships in the bay and some ancient dry docks, or wet docks? Big metal rusting things from long ago. A rather desolate and industrial route in general. It’s nice and atmospheric, and I have several stretches of it all to myself, bicycle-wise. It’s about 12 minutes longer than the old way, and has more hills, so it’s a bit more exercise.

Instead of taking Folsom to the Embarcadero, I tried Second St. yesterday and today and that was not bad. It was quite congested yesterday and therefore slow for the cyclist who eschews squeezing along between the moving cars and the parked cars, but I recalled afterwards that Second St. is due for a bike lane, one of the many projects held up in recent years by a lawsuit that has prevented us from striping a single bike lane or installing a single bike rack.

On August 20, 2008, an article by Phred Dvorak began this way in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal; maybe it was in the print edition, too:

“New York is wooing cyclists with chartreuse bike lanes. Chicago is spending nearly $1 million for double-decker bicycle parking.

“San Francisco can't even install new bike racks.”

How humiliating!

Today, I’m very happy to say, the bike plan was finally approved, with 45 of 46 planned projects given the green light. The one project that wasn’t approved was the Second St. bike lanes.

The fellow who filed the lawsuit in the first place is going to appeal this ruling, so it might still be a while before new bike lanes appear. It’s amazing to think how many good things this one person has held up.

But maybe it’s just as well. From an SF Weekly story of 5/26/09 by Matt Smith:

“Bureaucrats, advocates, and local policy wonks say bicyclists' rights have progressed more thanks to [Rob] Anderson's suit than they would have without it.

“Anderson's lawsuit ‘increased the resources the MTA [Municipal Transportation Agency] put into the bike plan, the traffic analysis, and the outreach, by a factor of three at least,’ said Dave Snyder, transportation policy coordinator at San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, a private smart-growth think tank. ‘It encouraged them to consider all of the bike lanes as a package, and introduce them and get them approved as a package, which is way more efficient than what they planned to do’ before Anderson's lawsuit.

“Under California environmental law, projects must be studied and approved in their entirety. But under the original 2005 plan, city leaders had intended to add individual bike lanes incrementally, striping a bike lane here, adding a few racks there, until a network fell into place. That's an impractical way to construct a transportation system: Imagine the chaos that would ensue if the street changes needed to accommodate a light-rail line were added piecemeal.

“But Anderson's lawsuit has fixed that. It has forced the city to make a detailed, highly engineered project out of a bike plan that five years ago was, comparatively speaking at least, more of an empty political gesture.”

OK, then! Thanks, Rob Anderson.

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