A bike lane moved, and this San Francisco neighborhood erupted
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
As a cyclist, I love the center lanes. I feel safe. Before the change every time I biked down Valencia I had to weave in and out of the car lane b/c 100% of the time someone was parked in the bike lane. That basically doesn't happen anymore, and the one time I had an ambulance blocking my way, I went around it _in the opposing bike lane_ not exposed to cars at all.
It's always been the merchants opposing this stuff and study after study says they are wrong about it.
Patrons of specific dining establishments sure, but they objectively inhibit transportation even more than parking spots do. This is painfully straightforward. Optimizing for wealthy people that frequently dine out is a expert way to undermine the collective interests of people who actually live in the city and those neighborhoods. Gentrification 101.
Not being doored or having my bike lane taken over us probably the base of my heirarchy of needs. Not having a RL game of pedestrian frogger is also on the list.
To be clear for anyone not familiar: Valencia already had bike lanes, and that's not the problem. The problem is that the new design is more fragile to bad driver behavior, since drivers run over the flex posts to pass stopped vehicles, and make the whole corridor a mess for everyone.
The new system is complicated and seems less safe, because you have to cross traffic to get in and out of the lane, and it's all unclear. It also puts the opposing bike traffic right next to each other, people don't necessarily stay in their lanes, and there are visibility issues at night.
Moving parking to one side of the street, then the car lanes, then the double bike lane would have been a bit better, or as someone else said make the road one-way for cars and then you have lots of room.
The idea though that Amado's closing was specifically due to the bike lane seems hard to believe unless the business was already extremely marginal (I believe the bike lane might have been the straw that broke the camel's back but it feels like a scapegoat for other issues).
Painted only bike lanes, in fact, do not really have an impact on safety. This is why it's law in the Netherlands that all bike lanes need to be protected.
New York City's solution to that was to replace some of the flex posts with anti-terrorism bollards which will stop a runaway truck. Not all of the posts. Just enough of them to get the message across.
The bollards went up shortly after.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2022/begins-work-to-hard...
The Transportation Alternatives tracker[1] tells you how much they are falling short of their promises.
And of course without bollards, cars can still enter the bike lanes at intersections[2]. I'm happy for progress where we get it, but it's hard to lean into my optimism when you know that every time the city announces it will do something, it will take 3x as long to do 1/3 of what they promised.
[1]https://projects.transalt.org/bikelanes
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/MicromobilityNYC/comments/yaqfwd/pr...
I feel like a first class citizen. I don't fear getting car doored. The bike lane is relatively clean, unobstructed, and unweathered by heavy loads. The contract for how cars and bikes should behave is could not be more clear. The only thing drivers don't seem to understand about it is that they are no longer prioritized. On that note, left hand turns are no longer terrifying. There is still loads of parking available on both sides of the road that doesn't require driving over my path.
My only real complaint is that I wish it were longer as the transition to regular lanes is whacky. Also the guard rails do seem to take a bit more space than they need to.
My impression is that everyone who rides a bicycle has this level of self-righteousness and self-importance.
From TFA: "People hate bike lanes, at least in part, because people hate cyclists. And in fairness, many cyclists give non-cyclists more than a few things to hate. They pedal against traffic. They blow red lights. They wear expensive-looking Lycra jerseys that feel like flashy overkill on city streets. The stereotype skews toward six-figure-earning, middle-aged neckbeards mansplaining about derailleurs. And there’s that eternal whiff of superiority embodied by those 'One Less Car' signs sometimes taped to the backs of bike seats, which manage to pack eco-smugness and a grammatical error into three syllables. It should read, 'One Fewer Car,' if you want to be like that."
I wouldn't say I hate bicyclers. I'm just happy that I never encounter them.
Ah yes, the righteousness and self-importance of not wanting to get doored or driven over.
To be honest, SF neighborhoods erupt for literally everything. In general, the protests are best ignored. I wouldn't much store in it.
If P(erupt|x) = 1 for all x, then there's no information content in erupt.
As for the center bike lane design, I dislike it as a cyclist. The entry curbs make it difficult to pull out mid-block without someone behind me hitting me, and if I'm biking in the car lane I can't safely merge back to the bike lane with how the curbs are.
The best design is to make those blocks car free like Market St; deliveries, ADA drop offs, and local garage owners only. Ubers can drop off on the side blocks and back in parking can go in where it fits as well.
1: https://missionlocal.org/2023/07/valencia-bike-lane-new-sign...
But we still have some shopowners bitching. Which just means I can take my business elsewhere.
Let's look at Amado's comment that "sales dropped 80% after the bike lane was installed and created a hassle for musicians due to a lack of parking". Look at Street View, and you'll see every parking spot in front and around it's property is a parklet for themselves. Hmm, if they really needed parking so bad, why did they take it away from themselves? Same is true with Yasmin with their corner spot and their 4 parking spots converted to parklets. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Amado's/@37.7570262,-122.4...
The only thing I think could help the neighborhood more is if the city declared it an actual "Slow Street" because it is slow. You'll hit every red light and have to wait for pedestrians at every intersection. You have Ubers and doordashers and freight loaders blocking the road all day. Declaring a slow street would probably push Google Maps and friends to route users to Guerrero or South Van Ness which are 1-2 blocks away and are exclusively car friendly.
Why do I like this lane? Cars drive much slower because their lane is "narrower". It's still the standard car sized lane but they are now driving between a separated bike lane (bollards) and parked cars, rather than an unprotected painted bike lane where cars tend to just take over.
Moreover, it's pretty much the only north-south bike line in this part of town. West is too hilly, east is too car oriented.
Go to their website SF Small Business Coalition and their chief complaint is customers can't park in front of their businesses anymore. Really? This is one of the densest neighbhorhoods in SF and you're gonna complain about parking on the street? https://www.sfsbcoalition.org/save-valencia-merchants. you could build them a 6 story garage to store 400 cars and they'll complain about how it's destroying their community.
I also feel like I mistook the signs to say "SF Bike Coalition" posters (sfbcoalition) instead of small business. It doesn't feel intentional, but it does feel weird.
It's crazy how quickly people go to conspiracy theories.
Everyone knows what the solution is though: make the street one way, except for bikes (with a real concrete-protected barrier between cars and bikes), and everyone is happy. Everyone except those business owners who will probably be upset at any change.
Except for the cars trucks and busses.. you know the ones who actually pay for such infrastructure. I would be more okay with such things if they separated the costs and made the bike lanes tolled or funded by bicycle registration.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of what the displaced motor vehicle traffic does when they now have less lanes of travel on which is divert to neighboring streets which causes other problems.
Do you have a citation or is this something that "feels true"?
> I would be more okay with such things if they separated the costs and made the bike lanes tolled or funded by bicycle registration.
That would be great to implement! I think you would be surprised at the result, though.
Motor vehicle user fees pay for less than half of the road infrastructure.
Everyone is paying for the roads through property taxes. (Even if indirectly through rent.)
Many people with a bicycle also have a car.
Cars require significantly more space than bicycles, cause more road wear, and car crashes tend to require more from emergency services than bike crashes, so any fees for bikes should be scaled appropriately - and remember that those without a motor vehicle are already contributing to road infrastructure.
Motor vehicle traffic isn't a fixed value. If it's harder to drive somewhere, fewer people will drive. Sometimes removing traffic lanes increases traffic capacity. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/18/mr-go
That is utter nonsense. Most of the infrastructure is paid for via the general funds. US gas taxes are laughably low, and the federal gas tax (supposed to pay for highways) has not been raised since 1993, so its value effectively halved since it was last raised.
The highest gas tax in the US is a combined 70c/gal.
Trucks are the biggest source of road damage by a very long shot (3 orders of magnitude per mile driven) and don't pay anywhere near that. Trucks would have to pay at least 2 orders of magnitude higher gas taxes than cars to come anywhere near a fair share, and that's assuming an order of magnitude difference in mileage (in a linear unit, not mpg), which is not the case unless you have an extremely efficient car and a very inefficient truck.
Suddenly the project ended, the streets got rebuilt. Then a developer swooped in and gentrified the neighborhood.
The big money in California is in owning the traffic corridors and the developers who line politicians pockets are forever salivating and mucking with these areas to try to consolidate their holdings.
I don’t think gentrification is the operative word here. Mallificatipn? Private equity bundling ready?
Meh. It's basically an island between the lanes, which is common enough.
I do think fully separated bike lanes on the sides would be better from a safety and ease of use perspective, but that's a lot more work, and it looks like the businesses complained about the idea of removing their parklet option: a fully separated bike lane would be on an inside edge of the parking spots, pushing them much further from the shops.
I'm pretty sure that's a first, even for SF...