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As a well-traveled cyclist, I yearn for the truely separated roadways my peers ride in other places. In Holland, for instance, their cycletrack treatment is cl
by bsimpson 10y ago
As a well-traveled cyclist, I yearn for the truely separated roadways my peers ride in other places. In Holland, for instance, their cycletrack treatment is closer to a special sidewalk for bicycles than a repainted stretch of highway. Each mode of transportation (walking, riding, driving, mass transit, etc.) has its own path. This separation of concerns (segmented by both mass and speed) makes getting around safer and easier for everybody.
The thing that San Francisco has and Amsterdam doesn't is private garages in most freestanding buildings. For instance, the northern-most section of the Wiggle has the city's most protected bike lane - there are cement planters separating the bike lane from fast-moving car traffic. Unfortunately, to support private garages, there are gaps in these planters enabling homeowners to enter/exit their driveways. Delivery vehicles and private cars frequently idle in the spaces between these planters, trapping cyclists in the bike lane and forcing them to merge into car traffic that isn't expecting them.
The city does nothing to stop this, and the drivers are incredibly hostile. I've tried getting off my bike and asking people (as kindly as possible) to move, explaining how parking in the bike path puts me life at risk. The nicest response I've gotten was being told to go fuck myself: even the old man in a bus driver's jacket idling in his car was shockingly violent in his reply. Delivery drivers don't give you the light of day. There's a tow company on this stretch of the Wiggle that frequently has trucks blocking the path. I noticed someone had parked to deliberately keep the path clear one day and earnestly thanked him for doing so. Even he threatened me.
San Francisco politicians respond with platitudes everytime once of us dies, but they do fuck-all to actually protect us. Our local transportation board reimagined one neighborhood street as a promenade, prioritizing pedestrians and cyclists and creating a destination for people from all over the city to come patronize local businesses. A handful of shop owners who came of age when the car was the dominant form of transportation raised concerns about parking. Rather than pointing out the plentiful parking on literally every nearby street, offering to construct a garage, or pointing out that users of all forms of transportation would flock to a human-scale shopping district in numbers that more-than made up for the lost parking, the city caved with the mayor scuttling the whole project.
- toomanybeersies 10y agoWe're just starting to get separated bike lines in New Zealand, where the bike lane is on the other side of the parked cars, so the parked cars essentially make a barrier. It's not perfect, you can still get doored by the parked cars, but at least you aren't going to get run over at the same time.
- bsimpson 10y agoWe have those in the Park here. Passengers seem to be less trained to watch for bicycles than drivers, so I wonder if it's actually safer overall. But that's not the problem I'm pointing out above. So long as cars park in garages under houses and need to cross the sidewalk and cycletrack to get to the street, it will need to be physically possible for a car to cross the cycletrack. So long as that's true (without frequent police intervention) San Francisco drivers will pull into the cycletrack and idle there, trapping cyclists in the path or forcing them into traffic that has even less room for them than it did before the protected path.
- toomanybeersies 10y agoI think it's a bit different here because most of the places where we have separated cycle lanes tend to have driveways with enough space to park a car without sitting in the cycle lane. I think that it is safer overall in that when you do get doored, it's a lot safer. Sort of like how red light cameras reduce fatal accidents, but increase fender benders.
- oska 10y agoHow about a bollard in the cycle path just past every driveway? Expensive, but would prevent access to the cycletrack by vehicles.
- Symbiote 10y ago> Passengers seem to be less trained to watch for bicycles than drivers, so I wonder if it's actually safer overall. It's the driver's responsibility to remind the passenger — or for children, use the child lock function. As an obvious foreigner in Denmark, I've been reminded by taxi drivers in Copenhagen to check for bicycles before opening the door. A colleague told me his children are taught to open the car door with their opposite hand, which means you look through the window naturally.
- zodiac 10y ago> I've tried getting off my bike and asking people (as kindly as possible) to move, explaining how parking in the bike path puts me life at risk. The nicest response I've gotten was being told to go fuck myself Wow, this makes me so angry. Is it possible to call the cops on them?
- bsimpson 10y agoI think I've done it once or twice - usually not until after I get home though. Letting unhinged people know I'm threatening their anonymity is something I try to avoid.
- prawn 10y agoCan you wear a camera and publicly shame those that act like that? Or are there legal issues?
- xapata 10y agoI take photos and send them to 311. Sometimes the report gets marked as "car tagged", but I've never got an answer as whether that's a traffic ticket.