7 ms·

A bike lane moved, and this San Francisco neighborhood erupted

23 points by mikhael 3y ago

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Might be more behind this. Don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but San Jose, years ago, dug up a downtown neighborhood of small businesses, left it dug up for two years. They all folded. Suddenly the project ended, the streets got rebuilt. Then a developer swooped in and gentrified the neighborhood.
- neveracool 3y ago
  Valencia is already pretty gentrified
  - happytiger 3y ago
    It’s not yet a single project with residential and exciting ground floor like developers keep proposing… 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?
okasaki 3y ago
Maybe the decline in customers is self-inflicted: I wouldn't shop in a shop that posted signs blaming bike lanes for their problems.
xvedejas 3y ago
These lanes are confusing and dangerous in my experience. I choose to bike on folsom instead now. We have great protected bike lanes elsewhere in the city (valencia between market and 15th, folsom north of division) and I don't understand why we couldn't just go with that instead of experimenting on the valencia corridor. 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.
- dang 3y ago
  That's my bike route too, and I was surprised at the change. The previous bike lanes were familiar and fine. Cars would stop in them but that's at least a known risk. 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.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    And now cars have to look in unexpected directions for bikes. 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.
    - markerz 3y ago
      By "moving parking to one side of the street", do you mean get rid of half of the parking spots? I'm having trouble visualizing this part, but it sounds like you want the road layout to be (from left to right) sidewalk, double bike lane, double car lane, parking, sidewalk.
      - sleepybrett 3y ago
        Seems reasonable. Just because you own a car and drive to a place should not mean the there is any street parking at that place. If a place depends on parking they should rent a location that has parking not hope the citizenry supplies them with it for free.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        You could also have room if you went one-way for sidewalk, parking, car lane, parking, door space, double bike lane, sidewalk.
  - thefaux 3y ago
    Honestly, I wonder if the best solution is just no bike lane at all. The thing I hated about the old lane was the need to constantly move in and out of the lane to avoid parked cars which felt more unsafe than just riding with traffic (which can't go fast on Valencia anyway due to the light timing). 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).
thatfrenchguy 3y ago
> Voicing a fairly widespread belief, Dickerson said he believes ride-share companies like Uber paid the city to remove parking spaces to free up room for pickups and dropoffs. 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.
- jonahhorowitz 3y ago
  The real solution is to remove cars from the street entirely and make it a pedestrian mall with a center running bike lane that can also be used by emergency vehicles. We'll get there in another 10 years.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    Remove cars from the city entirely. Cars are for suburbs, trucks for the sticks.
  - plorkyeran 3y ago
    We've even already seen what the street is like without cars, and it was amazing. The decision to discontinue the car-free days was utterly baffling.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      I'm guessing the politicians all drive cars and don't ride bikes or hang out in car-free areas.
      - tomowatanabe 3y ago
        they all ride bikes to work on bike to work day so they can get their pictures in the papers and be on the news.
- roamerz 3y ago
sleepybrett 3y ago
Oh they mean the doordash parking lane? that's for bikes?
forthwall 3y ago
I doubt it’s bike lanes and not specific factors for each of these businesses. There are plenty of stores that are doing fine in that corridor with those lanes. Dandilion chocolate; Taishoken; Bernal cutlery to name a few. It seems like it’s easier to scapegoat a bike lane instead of other issues. Especially this center running bike lane means there still is parking on the sides of the street. How much money is lost losing 8 parking spots a block ?
- plagiarist 3y ago
  After getting to the description of the bar's $500k in flood damage, I'm assuming the same thing.
- lokar 3y ago
  Especially when there is a large parking structure a 3 min walk away
thequadehunter 3y ago
Business dropped 80% because of a bike lane? Lol. I'm sure it did, chief.
- celdon25 3y ago
  For real, the cognitive dissonance is at critical mass in wackyville.
renewiltord 3y ago
I've ridden through here and it's quite nice. The anxiety from getting doored is moved to intersection anxiety. Overall, that seems fine to me since known interaction points mean that I have less mental normalization of deviance and signaled intersections mean that interactions are more explicit. 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.
zelon88 3y ago
[flagged]
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Is this missing a /s?
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't start flamewars on HN. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - zelon88 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - markerz 3y ago
      This comment reads like it was written by someone who has never biked, let alone in SF, and especially on this bike path. This is a bike highway and you can consistently be faster than the cars in path by up to 2x the speed during rush hour. Walk buttons don't really work in SF, all lights are automatically pedestrian enabled. Bicyclists don't have to hit any buttons to go. In fact, they have their own automatic bike specific light, or they ride with the car lights.
      - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - 6510 3y ago
      > I usually don't but I truly believe this. Thanks > Consider a bike that needs to travel 15 minutes. That trip would take a car 5 minutes. It depends on a lot of things. Where I live, if unlucky, the closest parking space is a 5 min walk. Say you need just 3 minutes to get from the door to the road. My bicycle is parked next to my door. It takes 10 seconds, 15 including acceleration. When at the destination things are roughly the same. You lose 6 min vs 30 seconds. We keep adding more cars to the roads, you use to be able to get around really fast, this is increasingly not the case, specially in a city. Bicycles can do with very crappy road, a thin layer of asphalt will last a really long time. Cars destroy roads quite fast, specially the heavier ones. They deal some damage to buildings, I don't know how much. The fumes aren't very nice the noise is a problem. Space isn't exactly cheap in cities, all those big roads consume quite a bit of it. It is kinda ironic how we use cars to get to nice places and build roads where nice places could have been. I read something like 40% of the space in cities is consumed by parking. With housing many stories tall, smaller apartments that people cant afford the ratio is pretty weird. Lots of pets, children and old people cant really go outside because we've turned the city into a race track. For trips under 20 min bicycles are fantastic. Cars are clear winners beyond. In a congested area for anything under 10 min, with reasonable fitness bicycles are twice as fast. The first 20 min of cycling actually takes 0 minutes worth of life span. Outside the city having your own launch pad/drive way, few things within cycling distance, it seems to make perfect sense to use cars. Assuming either bicycles or cars as a design goal, in the city the "hidden" inconvenience is much greater than the convenience of having cars all over the place. They are mostly just sitting there not moving and the rest of the time they crawl around "bothered" by countless things.
Finnucane 3y ago
Having the lane go down the middle of the street seems like a bad idea. Where I live, the city is moving the bike lane to the inside, near the curb, and the parked cars to the outside. It's not a perfect solution either but it does provide good separation from traffic without losing a lot of parking. And you're not having dodge so many open doors or cars trying to park. But we still have some shopowners bitching. Which just means I can take my business elsewhere.
- jonahhorowitz 3y ago
  The restaurants didn't want a "buffered bike lane" as you describe because they would lose the ability to put parklets (extra seating in a parking space) in parking spaces. I agree though, buffered bike lanes would be preferable to the current mess.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  My city has recently moved to that style and I'm not a big fan. Maybe their implementation just sucked, but in practice having the bikelane closest to the sidewalk means that half of the bike lane is actually just the gutter, which is filled with broken glass, puddles, and various garbage. Because theres a solid wall of cars between you and traffic, cars making right turns don't always see you. There's also no way to pass other bikes or obstructions blocking the bike lane- you have to either hop on the sidewalk or squeeze through parked cars to merge with traffic going 40-50mph to get around
johnea 3y ago
The neighborhood "erupted"? I'm pretty sure that's a first, even for SF...
blacksmith_tb 3y ago
Seems like a mess, I remember the old-style arrangement from when I lived in SF, it was imperfect but adequate. In Portland we do have some protected bike lanes / cycletracks, and they're mostly good, but you couldn't sprinkle them everywhere, mainly you need a lot of extra room. I will say the best thing about the article is its link to the guerrilla signs[1] that were added to the Valencia bike lanes. 1: https://missionlocal.org/2023/07/valencia-bike-lane-new-signage-we-regret/ https://missionlocal.org/2023/07/valencia-bike-lane-new-sign...
mynegation 3y ago
In Toronto, one of the major east west bike thoroughfares alongside eastward one way street was moved from the right side to the left, reason being “multiple loading bays on the right side of the street”. As a cyclist and a driver I hate this change - dedicated left turn lanes and signals diminished the throughput, cyclists ignoring dedicated bike signals, car drivers that do not drive through it frequently forget to check left shoulder etc. I can only imagine what kind of cluster is putting the bike lane into the center.
- masklinn 3y ago
  > I can only imagine what kind of cluster is putting the bike lane into the center. 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.
CephalopodMD 3y ago
I use it a few times every week, and I like it tbh. 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.
- PuissantSheep 3y ago
  > I feel like a first class citizen. 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.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    > My impression is that everyone who rides a bicycle has this level of self-righteousness and self-importance. Ah yes, the righteousness and self-importance of not wanting to get doored or driven over.
  - beej71 3y ago
    Unlike car drivers who want to feel like second-class citizens...? What?
ghaff 3y ago
As an often pedestrian (but not a bike-rider) in a nearby city, the one that gets me is bike lanes in the middle of sidewalks. Maybe if I spent more time in the areas that have them, but I'm just not used to having to look both ways before crossing the sidewalk. (Yes, you have to be aware you're not just going to walk into someone but the speeds--and therefore the relevant distances--are a lot different.)
markerz 3y ago
As a resident of this neighborhood and a user of the bike lane, I think these articles are mostly propaganda. Every article I read interviews like 1 or 2 people. I have a feeling most bicyclists and most businesses are totally okay with this because it is so heavily used and Valencia Street is THRIVING. Go there any morning, afternoon, or evening and you'll find people there all the time shopping, eating, hanging out. I find it hard to blame the bike lane for causing businesses to go under when you can look at 80% of the storefronts and find a pretty decent amount of customers in them. Of course, you can also look at the businesses that are going out of business and just see that they have terrible reviews and are just overall unappealing. 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,-122.4210191,3a,29.8y,264.73h,91.49t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssxIlgy9J14pxOXYPgZd7uQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m16!1m8!3m7!1s0x808f7e3e7e0046d3:0xd314e46467f002b2!2sAmado's!8m2!3d37.757027!4d-122.4213731!10e5!16s%2Fg%2F11c6084qbm!3m6!1s0x808f7e3e7e0046d3:0xd314e46467f002b2!8m2!3d37.757027!4d-122.4213731!10e5!16s%2Fg%2F11c6084qbm?entry=ttu 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 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.
macrael 3y ago
Unbelievable how often this is written about without mentioning one of the primary reasons for this design: Parklets. Before the pandemic there was a finalized design for Valencia that would have done what has been done most commonly elsewhere which was to swap the car parking and the bike lanes, putting bike lanes right by the curb. But then the pandemic happened and many more parklets opened on Valencia for outdoor dining and people loved them! But parklets replace parking spaces so suddenly swapping the parking and bike lanes made a mess instead of safety. Take a look at Telegraph in Oakland, they had swapped parking and bike lanes before the pandemic, and now a ton of bars and restaurants have active bike lanes cutting through their dining areas. It's terrible! The alternative that was considered to the center lane involved weaving the bike lane around parklets, creating stretches of bike lanes that were no longer protected from cars and eating up parking spots with the weave. 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.
- usmannk 3y ago
  Did you notice most of the parklets on Valencia are actually gone now? The city forced businesses to get rid of them over the last 3 months or so. Monk's kettle, City Beer Store, and many more.
  - macrael 3y ago
    They've also stopped closing down every other block regularly and a bunch of other stuff that were actual wins from the pandemic. I'm as confused about that as anyone else but it's true that parklets were a big driver for the center lane design.
    - usmannk 3y ago
      Yeah I was sad when they stopped closing the street on Saturday :/
pdx6 3y ago
It's not the bike lane. The price of going out has gone up and the amount paychecks that have gone up doesn't match it. Each wave of tech layoffs wipes out more customers that can absorb price increases. The city needs to continue lower permit fees and cut red tape for new business to start city-wide to get new money in. 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.
usmannk 3y ago
I have on several occasions seen firetrucks and police cars nearly kill bikers in this bike lane. The vehicles abruptly turn _into_ the center bike lane without warning, and use it instead of the car lane. Bikers then literally fall over trying to get out of the way in time.
xkekjrktllss 3y ago
[flagged]
sottol 3y ago
1.5M$ sounds like a lot but in SF it's probably close to the cost of a single subsidized rental unit vs making Valencia more (or less) bike friendly.
teradyl 3y ago
As with most bike lane redesigns, it's better than it was before. I'm happy with the iterative improvements that will get us closer to even better infra. I wrote about the bike lane and more info on how to use it here: https://biketoeverything.com/2023/10/28/valencia-street-center-bike-lane/ https://biketoeverything.com/2023/10/28/valencia-street-cent...

23 points by mikhael 3y ago

Might be more behind this. Don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but San Jose, years ago, dug up a downtown neighborhood of small businesses, left it dug up for two years. They all folded. Suddenly the project ended, the streets got rebuilt. Then a developer swooped in and gentrified the neighborhood.

neveracool 3y ago
Valencia is already pretty gentrified
- happytiger 3y ago
  It’s not yet a single project with residential and exciting ground floor like developers keep proposing… 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?

okasaki 3y ago

Maybe the decline in customers is self-inflicted: I wouldn't shop in a shop that posted signs blaming bike lanes for their problems.

xvedejas 3y ago

These lanes are confusing and dangerous in my experience. I choose to bike on folsom instead now. We have great protected bike lanes elsewhere in the city (valencia between market and 15th, folsom north of division) and I don't understand why we couldn't just go with that instead of experimenting on the valencia corridor. 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.

dang 3y ago
That's my bike route too, and I was surprised at the change. The previous bike lanes were familiar and fine. Cars would stop in them but that's at least a known risk. 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.
- bombcar 3y ago
  And now cars have to look in unexpected directions for bikes. 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.
  - markerz 3y ago
    By "moving parking to one side of the street", do you mean get rid of half of the parking spots? I'm having trouble visualizing this part, but it sounds like you want the road layout to be (from left to right) sidewalk, double bike lane, double car lane, parking, sidewalk.
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      Seems reasonable. Just because you own a car and drive to a place should not mean the there is any street parking at that place. If a place depends on parking they should rent a location that has parking not hope the citizenry supplies them with it for free.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      You could also have room if you went one-way for sidewalk, parking, car lane, parking, door space, double bike lane, sidewalk.
- thefaux 3y ago
  Honestly, I wonder if the best solution is just no bike lane at all. The thing I hated about the old lane was the need to constantly move in and out of the lane to avoid parked cars which felt more unsafe than just riding with traffic (which can't go fast on Valencia anyway due to the light timing). 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).

thatfrenchguy 3y ago

> Voicing a fairly widespread belief, Dickerson said he believes ride-share companies like Uber paid the city to remove parking spaces to free up room for pickups and dropoffs. 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.

jonahhorowitz 3y ago
The real solution is to remove cars from the street entirely and make it a pedestrian mall with a center running bike lane that can also be used by emergency vehicles. We'll get there in another 10 years.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Remove cars from the city entirely. Cars are for suburbs, trucks for the sticks.
- plorkyeran 3y ago
  We've even already seen what the street is like without cars, and it was amazing. The decision to discontinue the car-free days was utterly baffling.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    I'm guessing the politicians all drive cars and don't ride bikes or hang out in car-free areas.
    - tomowatanabe 3y ago
      they all ride bikes to work on bike to work day so they can get their pictures in the papers and be on the news.
roamerz 3y ago

sleepybrett 3y ago

Oh they mean the doordash parking lane? that's for bikes?

forthwall 3y ago

I doubt it’s bike lanes and not specific factors for each of these businesses. There are plenty of stores that are doing fine in that corridor with those lanes. Dandilion chocolate; Taishoken; Bernal cutlery to name a few. It seems like it’s easier to scapegoat a bike lane instead of other issues. Especially this center running bike lane means there still is parking on the sides of the street. How much money is lost losing 8 parking spots a block ?

plagiarist 3y ago
After getting to the description of the bar's $500k in flood damage, I'm assuming the same thing.
lokar 3y ago
Especially when there is a large parking structure a 3 min walk away

thequadehunter 3y ago

Business dropped 80% because of a bike lane? Lol. I'm sure it did, chief.

celdon25 3y ago
For real, the cognitive dissonance is at critical mass in wackyville.

renewiltord 3y ago

I've ridden through here and it's quite nice. The anxiety from getting doored is moved to intersection anxiety. Overall, that seems fine to me since known interaction points mean that I have less mental normalization of deviance and signaled intersections mean that interactions are more explicit. 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.

zelon88 3y ago

[flagged]

barbazoo 3y ago
Is this missing a /s?
dang 3y ago
Please don't start flamewars on HN. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zelon88 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - markerz 3y ago
    This comment reads like it was written by someone who has never biked, let alone in SF, and especially on this bike path. This is a bike highway and you can consistently be faster than the cars in path by up to 2x the speed during rush hour. Walk buttons don't really work in SF, all lights are automatically pedestrian enabled. Bicyclists don't have to hit any buttons to go. In fact, they have their own automatic bike specific light, or they ride with the car lights.
    - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - 6510 3y ago
    > I usually don't but I truly believe this. Thanks > Consider a bike that needs to travel 15 minutes. That trip would take a car 5 minutes. It depends on a lot of things. Where I live, if unlucky, the closest parking space is a 5 min walk. Say you need just 3 minutes to get from the door to the road. My bicycle is parked next to my door. It takes 10 seconds, 15 including acceleration. When at the destination things are roughly the same. You lose 6 min vs 30 seconds. We keep adding more cars to the roads, you use to be able to get around really fast, this is increasingly not the case, specially in a city. Bicycles can do with very crappy road, a thin layer of asphalt will last a really long time. Cars destroy roads quite fast, specially the heavier ones. They deal some damage to buildings, I don't know how much. The fumes aren't very nice the noise is a problem. Space isn't exactly cheap in cities, all those big roads consume quite a bit of it. It is kinda ironic how we use cars to get to nice places and build roads where nice places could have been. I read something like 40% of the space in cities is consumed by parking. With housing many stories tall, smaller apartments that people cant afford the ratio is pretty weird. Lots of pets, children and old people cant really go outside because we've turned the city into a race track. For trips under 20 min bicycles are fantastic. Cars are clear winners beyond. In a congested area for anything under 10 min, with reasonable fitness bicycles are twice as fast. The first 20 min of cycling actually takes 0 minutes worth of life span. Outside the city having your own launch pad/drive way, few things within cycling distance, it seems to make perfect sense to use cars. Assuming either bicycles or cars as a design goal, in the city the "hidden" inconvenience is much greater than the convenience of having cars all over the place. They are mostly just sitting there not moving and the rest of the time they crawl around "bothered" by countless things.

Finnucane 3y ago

Having the lane go down the middle of the street seems like a bad idea. Where I live, the city is moving the bike lane to the inside, near the curb, and the parked cars to the outside. It's not a perfect solution either but it does provide good separation from traffic without losing a lot of parking. And you're not having dodge so many open doors or cars trying to park. But we still have some shopowners bitching. Which just means I can take my business elsewhere.

jonahhorowitz 3y ago
The restaurants didn't want a "buffered bike lane" as you describe because they would lose the ability to put parklets (extra seating in a parking space) in parking spaces. I agree though, buffered bike lanes would be preferable to the current mess.
Rebelgecko 3y ago
My city has recently moved to that style and I'm not a big fan. Maybe their implementation just sucked, but in practice having the bikelane closest to the sidewalk means that half of the bike lane is actually just the gutter, which is filled with broken glass, puddles, and various garbage. Because theres a solid wall of cars between you and traffic, cars making right turns don't always see you. There's also no way to pass other bikes or obstructions blocking the bike lane- you have to either hop on the sidewalk or squeeze through parked cars to merge with traffic going 40-50mph to get around

johnea 3y ago

The neighborhood "erupted"? I'm pretty sure that's a first, even for SF...

blacksmith_tb 3y ago

Seems like a mess, I remember the old-style arrangement from when I lived in SF, it was imperfect but adequate. In Portland we do have some protected bike lanes / cycletracks, and they're mostly good, but you couldn't sprinkle them everywhere, mainly you need a lot of extra room. I will say the best thing about the article is its link to the guerrilla signs[1] that were added to the Valencia bike lanes. 1: https://missionlocal.org/2023/07/valencia-bike-lane-new-signage-we-regret/ https://missionlocal.org/2023/07/valencia-bike-lane-new-sign...

mynegation 3y ago

In Toronto, one of the major east west bike thoroughfares alongside eastward one way street was moved from the right side to the left, reason being “multiple loading bays on the right side of the street”. As a cyclist and a driver I hate this change - dedicated left turn lanes and signals diminished the throughput, cyclists ignoring dedicated bike signals, car drivers that do not drive through it frequently forget to check left shoulder etc. I can only imagine what kind of cluster is putting the bike lane into the center.

masklinn 3y ago
> I can only imagine what kind of cluster is putting the bike lane into the center. 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.

CephalopodMD 3y ago

I use it a few times every week, and I like it tbh. 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.

PuissantSheep 3y ago
> I feel like a first class citizen. 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.
- masklinn 3y ago
  > My impression is that everyone who rides a bicycle has this level of self-righteousness and self-importance. Ah yes, the righteousness and self-importance of not wanting to get doored or driven over.
- beej71 3y ago
  Unlike car drivers who want to feel like second-class citizens...? What?

ghaff 3y ago

As an often pedestrian (but not a bike-rider) in a nearby city, the one that gets me is bike lanes in the middle of sidewalks. Maybe if I spent more time in the areas that have them, but I'm just not used to having to look both ways before crossing the sidewalk. (Yes, you have to be aware you're not just going to walk into someone but the speeds--and therefore the relevant distances--are a lot different.)

markerz 3y ago

As a resident of this neighborhood and a user of the bike lane, I think these articles are mostly propaganda. Every article I read interviews like 1 or 2 people. I have a feeling most bicyclists and most businesses are totally okay with this because it is so heavily used and Valencia Street is THRIVING. Go there any morning, afternoon, or evening and you'll find people there all the time shopping, eating, hanging out. I find it hard to blame the bike lane for causing businesses to go under when you can look at 80% of the storefronts and find a pretty decent amount of customers in them. Of course, you can also look at the businesses that are going out of business and just see that they have terrible reviews and are just overall unappealing. 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,-122.4210191,3a,29.8y,264.73h,91.49t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssxIlgy9J14pxOXYPgZd7uQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m16!1m8!3m7!1s0x808f7e3e7e0046d3:0xd314e46467f002b2!2sAmado's!8m2!3d37.757027!4d-122.4213731!10e5!16s%2Fg%2F11c6084qbm!3m6!1s0x808f7e3e7e0046d3:0xd314e46467f002b2!8m2!3d37.757027!4d-122.4213731!10e5!16s%2Fg%2F11c6084qbm?entry=ttu 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 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.

macrael 3y ago

Unbelievable how often this is written about without mentioning one of the primary reasons for this design: Parklets. Before the pandemic there was a finalized design for Valencia that would have done what has been done most commonly elsewhere which was to swap the car parking and the bike lanes, putting bike lanes right by the curb. But then the pandemic happened and many more parklets opened on Valencia for outdoor dining and people loved them! But parklets replace parking spaces so suddenly swapping the parking and bike lanes made a mess instead of safety. Take a look at Telegraph in Oakland, they had swapped parking and bike lanes before the pandemic, and now a ton of bars and restaurants have active bike lanes cutting through their dining areas. It's terrible! The alternative that was considered to the center lane involved weaving the bike lane around parklets, creating stretches of bike lanes that were no longer protected from cars and eating up parking spots with the weave. 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.

usmannk 3y ago
Did you notice most of the parklets on Valencia are actually gone now? The city forced businesses to get rid of them over the last 3 months or so. Monk's kettle, City Beer Store, and many more.
- macrael 3y ago
  They've also stopped closing down every other block regularly and a bunch of other stuff that were actual wins from the pandemic. I'm as confused about that as anyone else but it's true that parklets were a big driver for the center lane design.
  - usmannk 3y ago
    Yeah I was sad when they stopped closing the street on Saturday :/

pdx6 3y ago

It's not the bike lane. The price of going out has gone up and the amount paychecks that have gone up doesn't match it. Each wave of tech layoffs wipes out more customers that can absorb price increases. The city needs to continue lower permit fees and cut red tape for new business to start city-wide to get new money in. 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.

usmannk 3y ago

I have on several occasions seen firetrucks and police cars nearly kill bikers in this bike lane. The vehicles abruptly turn _into_ the center bike lane without warning, and use it instead of the car lane. Bikers then literally fall over trying to get out of the way in time.

xkekjrktllss 3y ago

[flagged]

sottol 3y ago

1.5M$ sounds like a lot but in SF it's probably close to the cost of a single subsidized rental unit vs making Valencia more (or less) bike friendly.

teradyl 3y ago

As with most bike lane redesigns, it's better than it was before. I'm happy with the iterative improvements that will get us closer to even better infra. I wrote about the bike lane and more info on how to use it here: https://biketoeverything.com/2023/10/28/valencia-street-center-bike-lane/ https://biketoeverything.com/2023/10/28/valencia-street-cent...