It’s a clear, cold January afternoon, and Sarah Fine is getting ready for a daily ritual.
She helps her seven-year-old daughter Chiara onto the rear seat of her e-bike. She hands Chiara her helmet — a smaller version of mom’s, complete with a furry rainbow unicorn mane — and sets off from Dolores Huerta Elementary School, at the southern end of Dolores Street, for her home in the Excelsior.
The two-mile ride begins on the sidewalk, as Fine coasts toward San Jose Avenue while Chiara snacks on a banana. But the journey gets harrowing quickly. San Jose is practically a highway. The first stretch has only a painted lane, no physical barrier, to separate Fine from the cars zipping past at 45 mph — the posted speed limit — and often faster.
That’s not even the scariest part of the ride. Fine veers off San Jose onto two-way Arlington Street, which has no bike lane, just painted “share the lane” symbols (“sharrows”) on the pavement. She says she’s had several close calls here.
Fine then has to maneuver around a line of cars turning either left or right on Bosworth Street. The drivers have stopped and their attention is on the Bosworth cross traffic, which has no stop sign.
Fine needs to turn left onto Bosworth, which means avoiding cars in the line turning left, as well as both directions of Bosworth zipping by. She looks left, leans back slightly, and says to Chiara, “Right after this car, we’re going to make a break for it, babe.”
Fine can’t make it all the way across and has to stop and wait in a white bike “turn box” painted on the pavement. It’s protected only by a short, narrow median; Fine says drivers still cut through it to make U-turns or hit the 280 freeway on-ramp.
Finally, she completes the left turn, passes under the 280 freeway, and in 20 more seconds, turns right on Cayuga Avenue – a designated Slow Street – to take her most of the way back home.
The long slow rollout
Fine’s often-harrowing route is one that she and advocates hope will become safer with the city’s new Biking and Rolling Plan, which the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency first unveiled in November. SFMTA began working on it two years ago. The community outreach, which included meetings and ride-alongs, was supposed to lead by now to a fully-fledged plan for a citywide bike network with far more protected lanes and easy neighborhood connections than exist today.
SFMTA has pledged that the completed network will put 80 percent of San Francisco’s residents within a quarter-mile of biking infrastructure.
The two-year windup has so far produced a draft plan, released last month. It has some specifics but is more of a roadmap for the kinds of streets and spaces the city would like to see, for example, around schools. The SFMTA board of directors will vote on it February 18.
Officials are now saying it will take two decades to phase in all the safety upgrades. They’ve also conceded that they’re not adding any more car-free streets or new bike lanes along merchant corridors.
The slow pace worries some SFMTA commissioners, who have final say over the plan, as well as advocates who thought details would, well, roll out bolder and faster. At a meeting last month, board member Steve Heminger was frustrated: “I’m having trouble seeing what the plan is and isn’t.”
It turns out that each new bike lane and street improvement will require its own outreach and approval, and funding isn’t guaranteed. As history can attest, any one proposal can take years (Oak Street), and generate heated battles or legal action (Valencia Street).
“Everyone is used to seeing big plans from the city that don’t come to fruition,” says Zach Lipton, a sustainable transportation advocate who consulted with SFMTA early in the process.
Meanwhile, street safety bedevils the city. Last year, 41 people were killed in traffic collisions, including 24 pedestrians and 3 cyclists, making it the deadliest year in a decade. Despite a drumbeat of street improvements, injury collisions involving cars have stayed mostly steady since the mid-2000s.
Nearly one third of SF residents use a bicycle, scooter, or similar device at least once a week — and 10 percent do so every day. SFMTA surveys found that over half of respondents would bike more if it were safer. The Biking and Rolling Plan could make that happen for riders of all kinds, including children and seniors. But many of those children could be adults by the time it’s all in place.
A higher learning connection
SF’s new bike plan is comprehensive in laying out policies, definitions, and goals. While no one expected at this point block-by-block details for each new stop sign and curb extension, the new plan doesn’t offer specifics for routes beyond pledges for “upgrades” and “better connections.”
For the most part, it’s big-picture, not fine-grained. Nonetheless, the map – dubbed the North Star network – does offer a few tantalizing new routes.
One of them is a Slow Street connection between San Francisco State University and City College using Holloway Avenue. Others would improve neighborhood connections: between the Castro and West Portal, between the Bayview and the Portola, and between the Richmond and Presidio Heights/Pacific Heights. The plan doesn’t give block-by-block details, however.
There are callouts to improve specific routes, including the crucial east-west Wiggle route, Division Street, and the new bike lane on 17th Street.
Beyond these specific targets, the North Star network is more about themes. It’s like browsing a library at the category level without seeing the titles of any books. The goals include avoiding tangles with first responders and public transit; making better connections to parks and open space; encouraging ridership among groups historically left out of bike planning; and being “responsive to business needs.”
One theme that gets particular attention is schools.
SFMTA wants easier connections to the city’s K-12 schools. Currently 124 – more than a third – are more than a quarter mile from “all ages and abilities” infrastructure, including Dolores Huerta Elementary.
(The phrase “all ages and abilities” is a National Association of City Transportation Officials standard that grades streets on car volumes and speeds, and their proximity to bikers, pedestrians, and wheelchair users. SFMTA is using it as a goal to move to physical separation between the two groups.)
But some back-of-the-napkin math underscores worries about SFMTA’s slow roll. The agency is using the School Walk Audit Program, which began in 2019, to assess the two or three blocks around each school and come up with safety improvements.
The program is supposed to conduct 10 audits a year but has yet to meet that goal. Seven has been the maximum so far. At that pace, “it might be ‘all ages and abilities’ by 2045, and we can’t wait that long,” said SF Bike Coalition communications director Krissa Cavouras at a public meeting last month. In reality, Cavouras said, “There are no timelines for plans for school calming.”
At the same meeting, SFMTA’s board ordered staff to return this month to explain how to speed up changes for school traffic. In an interview with The Frisc, SFMTA Biking and Rolling Plan project manager Christy Osario and SFMTA planning director Maia Small emphasized their focus on school routes. The SF County Transportation Authority allotted nearly $2 million for the current fiscal year to speed up school walk audits.
For the plan to create routes that entice new riders, it will need more support, particularly from people who haven’t previously advocated for bike lanes.
Missing in action plans
Another theme is a focus on five “community action plans” for people who have historically been left out of street and transit planning. The plans zero in on the Tenderloin, Bayview-Hunters Point, SoMa, the Western Addition, and the Mission-Excelsior, where SFMTA started two years ago with special outreach.
SFMTA is supposed to craft each community plan with input from a nonprofit in each district. The only one to emerge so far is the Bayview. (The nonprofit is Bayview-Hunters Point Community Advocates.) The plan includes protected bike lanes along most of Bayshore Boulevard and parts of Cargo Way and Evans Avenue. It also calls for safety upgrades for pedestrians.
In the Tenderloin, Eric Rozell of the neighborhood’s community benefits district agrees the early engagement has helped identify key issues, including the need for better traffic calming around schools. The tightly-packed Tenderloin is home to more than 200 businesses, many seniors and families, yet many of its streets function as one-way thoroughfares that encourage speeding. “There’s a lot of competing interests and a need to make policy changes,” says Rozell.
If and when they emerge, the specifics will still need neighborhood approval, then SFMTA board approval.
When the work began two years ago, Zach Lipton says he and other advocates hoped the extensive engagement would mean that filling in details street by street, project by project, wouldn’t get “mired in outreach drama.”
They’ve said they’re not anti-bike. They’re just giving us a guide for working with them.
SFMTA biking and rolling project manager christi osario, on the community groups that are helping shape the bike network design within their neighborhoods
Osario says the early engagement could shorten the process. Building trust, she says, takes time: “They’ve said they’re not anti-bike. They’re just giving us a guide for working with them.”
The community action plans will have to mesh with broader connections between neighborhoods as well, such as the route that Fine uses to ferry her kid to and from school. Small and Osario recently rode part of it and identified a segment that could use more protection. “This is a great example of where we sort of have facilities in spots and can upgrade,” Osario says.
Political tensions over street changes still hold potential for drama. While voters citywide have approved major closures in Golden Gate Park (in 2022) and along Ocean Beach (last November), parking and bike lanes remain a sore subject for some merchants and residents. And the new Lurie administration is certain to keep tabs on the nascent effort to recall Sup. Joel Engardio for his support of the Great Highway closure.
After a deadly Jan. 19 multicar crash caused by a Tesla driver speeding at 98 mph, Mayor Lurie said in a statement, “Public safety has been my top priority from day one, and traffic safety is public safety.”
His only move toward safety policy has been to name Alicia John-Baptiste as chief of staff for infrastructure, climate, and mobility. John-Baptiste was most recently president and CEO of urban planning think tank SPUR and before that spent 16 years in top positions at SFMTA and SF Planning. She officially returned to City Hall this week and could not be reached for comment.
Back along the route between home and Dolores Huerta Elementary, Sarah Fine points out very specific changes she’d like to see. Protected bike lanes, or at least separated lanes with plastic hit posts, on Arlington. A stop sign on Bosworth. Hit posts for the Bosworth bike box to prevent drivers from making U-turns through it.
An SF native, Fine grew up riding a motorcycle. She’d love to have Chiara bike alongside her, but it’s too dangerous right now: “It’s not a matter of her competence and ability.”
Fine estimates she’s spent more than three years pushing for safer bike infrastructure in her neighborhood. She hopes she doesn’t have to wait until Chiara has grown up and left the city to get her wish.
The post New San Francisco Bike Plan Is Full of Ideas and Goals, But Short on Details appeared first on The Frisc.