A Day With Bike Lane Vigilantes

In a city addicted to cars, a renegade band of bike activists takes safety into their own hands.

The bag of white plastic poles hanging from the side of a bike gave them away. At the corner of Market & Turk, I met two cyclists who shall remain nameless, and spent the next several hours watching them install a bike lane. For nearly a year now, the city has seen unsanctioned bike lanes appear at busy intersections - courtesy a shadowy group calling themselves the San Francisco Transformation Agency (SFMTrA, a nod to the SF Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which their guerrilla tactics aim to improve).

“The main goal here is visibility,” one of the volunteers told me. “We expect the MTA to take these down in a few days, but they will know that people want this work done, and hopefully, they’ll move faster.”

At first glance, they look like abundantly ordinary white male San Franciscans: cargo shorts, hoodies, beards, sunglasses. Perhaps only their bulging calf muscles betrayed their unconventional civic engagement.

“These are just soft-hit poles,” the other man said. “A car could plow straight through them if they wanted to. Mostly this is to make drivers aware, and to give drivers space.”

In 2014, the city adopted a “Vision Zero” policy in an effort to reduce traffic deaths to, well, zero. But on June 23rd, 2016, two cyclists were killed by reckless drivers; one in Golden Gate Park, one in SoMa. Two deaths in a single day was too much for some critics to bear. The organizers behind the Transformation Agency decided to take matters into their own hands.

“I just decided that if the city wasn’t going to move quickly enough, I could get started,” the activist said. “We all connected through Twitter, set up the account, and we got donations for these poles. We don’t solicit, but there’s a link [on the Twitter profile] and that pays for our materials.”

There is already a significant public investment planned for bike infrastructure in San Francisco. With an estimated 82,000 bike trips occurring per day—an increase of 184% from the previous decade—the SFMTA’s latest bike plan calls for a $112.6 million to be spent creating 92 miles of new bikeways.

For many cyclists, the process for installing bike lanes, whether protected or just visibly separated, is too slow. Just last week, the SFMTA Board approved expanded bike infrastructure in the Upper Market area, which had been in process for nearly two years. Last year, SFMTrA activists installed soft-hit poles to designate a bike lane at the entrance to Golden Gate Park, only to have SFMTA remove them and, several days later, replace the poles with their own.

“That was an instance where we saw their work and said, ‘hey, that’s actually a pretty good idea—how can we improve on that?’” said SFMTA representative Jamie Parks. “So we put in poles that can be removed for events like marathons.” Still, Mr. Parks says the MTA generally discourages citizens from taking matters into their own hands.

“One of the reasons we don’t like people doing this is that we have a process in place to make sure everything is in the public record. We do extensive community outreach to get input from all local stakeholders, and projects are approved at public hearings by the SFMTA board. We’re here to provide accountability to the public.”

Though mostly innocuous, DIY transportation upgrades could set a bad precedent: “Imagine if people just started installing stop signs wherever they wanted to,” said SFMTA spokesperson Ben Jose. “We couldn’t have that.” Mr. Jose added that the SFMTA has spoken with Transformation Agency activists several times to hear their concerns.

The Transformation Agency claimed that their lane on Turk Street is one of many outlined in SFMTA’s bike plan, most recently updated in 2009. Mr. Parks refuted this claim, noting that the SFMTA board had postponed any decision on the corridor. Still, the activists saw their work as more of a warning or a wakeup call than actively interfering with SFMTA’s plans.

“We know from the MTA’s own data that 59% of San Franciscans support protected space for bikes,” one of the activists said. He also noted that 71% of respondents in a survey by SFMTA cited safety concerns as impacting their decision whether or not to ride a bike.

“One of the reasons they take so long is that the Fire Department is opposed to losing any sidewalk access,” he continued. “Though we know from personal conversations with Fire Department workers that they’ve never had any problem with bike lanes, the approval process can take years to overcome their resistance.”

For Mr. Parks, this came as a gross overstatement. “We work with many agencies, not just the Fire Department, to ensure our work meets everyone’s needs. We fully acknowledge we’re not experts on everything.” In his view, no one agency bore an overdue burden of the public process.

To my untrained eyes, the Transformation Agency’s work appeared as thorough and meticulous as one could expect from a public agency. After donning neon mesh vests to appear semi-official, one volunteer placed white duct tape at the entrance to Turk Street while the other measured out three feet of separation from the curb. After marking off the distance, the two men placed duct tape along Turk Street’s southern edge to equally space apart the poles.

The base for each pole needed to be glued to an adhesive strip. After we stood on each base for about a minute each to ensure strong adhesion, one volunteer stripped the wax paper off the bottom of each base and plopped them down on the tape markings.

Once each pole was in, the activists affixed each one to their base with thick plastic dowels. This took quite a bit of patience and elbow grease. All the while, some cyclists passed us in the opposite direction of traffic on the one-way street, oblivious to us and any passing cars. Kitty-corner from where the activists’ bikes stood, several SFPD officers stood around their car, clearing up an unruly crowd. I briefly made eye contact with one cop: he turned, looked at me with a puzzled frown, and then turned back again.

I asked if they should stop work for a while, just to be safe, and the activists shrugged. “They’ve got more important things to do, I’m sure.”

And that was that. Their work done, the activists mounted their bikes and pedaled away, without even passing through their finished project. I crossed Turk and stayed a moment longer, eyeing the brewpub down the street as dusk approached, until I finally saw what I had come to see: a lone teenager, pedaling a dirt-bike far too small for him, turned off Market onto Turk Street. He saw the white strip of tape, adjusted slightly, and zoomed through the new bike lane as though it had always been there.