S2 Speech

Hello; I’m Samuel Wilson and today I’d like to tell you a little about the problem with San Francisco’s bike lanes.

Cars in the bike lane is a problem for everyone, car vs bike accidents increase 72% when cars decide they don’t want to wait in traffic and decide to jump into the bike lane. San Francisco is known as the mecca for cyclists and not surprisingly the number of bike crashes is high. The few number of parking spaces, heavy congestion and abundance of ubers all come together to make the city a real hard place to ride.

I traveled down to the embarcadero to see if I could understand the problem at its core. In just 20 minutes of standing on the sidewalk in front of the Ferry Building, 42 bikes rode by in the maybe 2 feet wide bike lane, and 13 cars attempted to weave through traffic in the very same lane.

The city has tried to stop incidents by conducting studies and adding designated drop off points for drivers, but many people said they hadn’t noticed a difference. Now it’s very well known that driving in the bike lane is illegal, a few bikers shouted some obscenities at cars as they blindly merged into them, and if you do get caught by SFPD you’ll receive a $238 dollar fine and a point on your license. What many people don’t know is that the state of california treats bikes as vehicles, and says that a bike lane is a separate lane of travel. Legally you are only able to drive in a bike lane if there’s an emergency vehicle trying to get by you.

Despite the bright green paint and outlines of bikes on the road, an uncountable amount of drivers like to stop in the bike lane to run into a store or drop off passengers. SFMTA has had to create a special online form for reporting bike lane violations, or you can call or tweet 311 with the vehicle information and location to have parking enforcement sent to the area. But this type of enforcement is reactive, not the best way to stop a behavior.

The Bicycle Coalition has been actively working to train commercial and uber drivers at little to no cost about where to find drop off spots and how to avoid driving in the bike lane. It’s a lot easier to drive slightly off a main road to let a passenger out than get a nearly $250 ticket.

And thats exactly what SFPD has been working to do, the central station which manages the embarcadero issues nearly 550 tickets each month to drivers breaking bike lane laws. Motorcycle cops park their bikes on the sidewalk, and watch and wait. The officers I talked to said almost every driver they pull over says they knew they were stopping in a bike lane, but simply didnt know what else to do. So clearly something has to be done to keep the bikes and cars apart.

The bike coalition is currently fighting the city to separate the embarcadero bike lane from the street. If any of you have been to golden gate park youve seen the separated bike lane safely behind the parked cars. But you probably dont know that it took nearly 10 years of activism and fighting with the city to get the bike lane put where it is today. Millions of combined hours of activism were required to get the city to even think about transforming the bike lane, and that process is at work in the embarcadero.

The bike coalition is trying to decrease the width of the sidewalk and put parking spaces in where the current bike lane is, this would move the bike lane behind the parked cars and a raised pathway for drivers exiting their cars. This would provide parking for a street that currently has none and protect bikes from the traffic, the only problem is it will take an estimated $20 million to change the current layout of the road. Philadelphia just approved a project to put bike lanes behind its parked cars after 13 years of advocacy and 5 cyclist deaths in the last 2 years.

Much like the laws enforcement, changing the layout is reactive rather than proactive. For now the city is content with having tickets issued and dealing with any accidents as they come. In fact in recent years the city has decided to increase the enforcement of cyclists breaking simple traffic laws like running stop signs and red lights, even while in the bike lane.

The city wants to use its money in other areas and the police have better things to do, all cyclists can hope for is the drivers will eventually get a ticket in the mail when they correctly report them to 311.

Biking in San Francisco is a blessing and a curse, the culture is well and alive but the city itself is very slow to respond to the ever changing forms of transportation. As cyclists we can only hope that people within city council listen to the voices of the people and do more to make the city safe, rather than try to cite the problem away. Everyone can agree it sucks to get a ticket, by moving cyclists away from cars the number of tickets issued will drastically drop and the chance of a collision will be nearly zero. We can all work together to make San Francisco a more friendly place for all and keep the culture it’s best known for alive.

Thank You