As major infrastructure projects and overlapping agencies leave relatively minor safety proposals in the lurch, cyclists have been mobilizing to demand action on life-saving street improvements.
As the pristine dusk bathed a perpetually noisy 4th & King Caltrain station in wheat-golden light, 80s pop-rock band Toto’s smash hit “Hold the Line” blared from a boombox while Matt Brezina handed out bright yellow t-shirts. He amassed over 60 volunteers last Tuesday to form a human barrier between cars and cyclists on the shoulder of Townsend Street during rush hour, high-fiving bike commuters in a widely popular direct action known as People Protected Bike Lanes.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) recently scuttled plans to build protected bike lanes, extend sidewalks, and add bus boarding islands to the chaotic stretch of Townsend between 4th & 5th Streets, citing costs rising from $4 to $6 million due to the construction of Caltrain’s Downtown Extension (DTX). Meanwhile, Townsend still sees at least 350 bike commuters per day during peak hours alone.
According to UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System, which collects data from local police department reports, there were 9 pedestrian and/or cyclist injuries reported to SFPD on the Embarcadero in 2017, and 10 within a three-block radius of the 4th & King Caltrain station.
2017 pedestrian and bicycle collision map.
The Department of Public Health collects data from hospital records, including injuries that are not reported to SFPD, but are several years behind the police report data gathered by UC Berkeley.
A Death on the Waterfront
Pedicab driver Kevin Manning passed away last week after succumbing to injuries after being struck by a hit-and-run driver on the Embarcadero. Cyclist injuries are not uncommon in San Francisco’s auto-congested downtown, but neither are long-term street safety improvement projects that never seem to materialize. Safety similarly contend that the Embarcadero Enhancement Project, pursued jointly by the SFMTA and Port of San Francisco, has been mired in inter-agency, and that the Port’s pending upgrades to the seawall—not unlike DTX on Townsend—could present competing priorities. Ultimately, both projects may require repeated construction to avoid future traffic fatalities, and People Protected Bike Lanes may very well continue until it happens.
“This death is a direct consequence of unnecessary delays and a lack of interagency cooperation,” the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition said in a scathing statement released on July 10th, hours after Manning had died. The advocacy group cites a Department of Public Health statistic listing 84 cyclist or pedestrian injuries there between 2006 and 2011, qualifying the Embarcadero as a high-injury corridor (i.e. one of the 13% of city streets that account for 75% of traffic injuries). “The SFMTA and Port of San Francisco know this, yet they have been dragging their feet on making necessary improvements to make the Embarcadero safe,” the group concluded. “We have grieved too many times.”
Speaking to the San Francisco Examiner about the pedicab collision, Supervisor Aaron Peskin said of the pedicab collision that while he was supportive of the bike lanes, he believes that the pedicab cyclist should have been wearing a helmet. That’s not enough for daily bike commuters like Andrew Davidson, who was hit by a bus on the Embarcadero in 2015, and has found little support from city leaders in his quest for improved bike safety.
The idea for protected bike lanes on the Embarcadero is nearly a decade old: after a 2009 study by the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), the SFMTA released their own study in 2014, issuing conceptual designs for rounds of open houses and community outreach. “In 2016, they basically did the same open house again, and it didn’t move past that,” Davidson lamented. “It was really stuck.”
Frustrated by the bureaucratic maze, Davidson joined forces with Brezina to organize a People Protected Bike Lane on the Embarcadero. “We did that right outside the Port Authority office,” Davidson said, “and that got them looking at what they could do in the short term.”
Long rows of cheering bodies, all clad in bright yellow, are arranged to send the SFMTA and other city agencies a simple message: do more, and do it faster. Lives are at stake.
People Protected Bike Lanes are somewhere between a protest and performance art with serious political clout. The first demonstration was organized by Maureen Perisco, a concerned parent and active cyclist, on Turk Street in the Tenderloin. After months of delay, the SFMTA finally installed a protected bike lane on the street. Brezina notes that there are now similar actions in at least 20 cities around the world, including Mexico City and Portland.
To some extent, Davidson’s strategy of making public, visible demands has worked. Their demonstrations were followed by green-painted bike lanes on the Embarcadero, though Davidson still regularly catches cars and trucks obstructing the lane on his helmet camera.
Davidson also began emailing virtually anyone in City Hall who would listen, and sought the Bike Coalition’s support for more urgent action on the project. He noted that Supervisor Peskin’s office coordinated his efforts to lobby the SFMTA and the Port Authority to plan for an Environmental Review of the project to occur this year. Indeed, emails provided to the Beacon by Peskin’s office show that legislative aide Lee Hepner, while assiduously following up with Davidson, helped organizers with the Bike Coalition navigate a design stalemate between the Port and the SFMTA.
Here’s just one nugget from the muddled process: while the SFMTA was preparing to finalize details for a two-way bike lane on the east side of the Embarcadero, that agency was waiting for the Port’s approval before moving forward; the Port, in turn, was waiting for a final design from the SFMTA before approving. Local business leaders from the Fisherman’s Wharf Community Benefits District, meanwhile, argued that the two-way design was “insane and dangerous” and would slow down nearby turn lanes. Peskin’s office convened a District 3 Transit Working Group meeting with these stakeholders. That was in 2017.
Now, we know the project will look something like this:
(source: SFMTA, April 2018 Project Update)
“Everyone likes to point the finger at someone else,” Davidson said matter-of-factly. Part of the problem he observed was the overlapping authority between two agencies, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and the Port Authority, which controls the waterfront side of the Embarcadero, where protected bike lanes are planned. Indeed, representatives from the Port emphasized the SFMTA as being the “lead” on the project.
“This fall, we’re hoping to move past the conceptual design phase and move to environmental review,” SFMTA spokesperson Ben Jose said of the Embarcadero Enhancement Project. “What this points to is the larger technical complexity of the project,” he explained.
Jose added that construction for the Seawall Resiliency Project, in anticipation of climate change-induced sea level rise, could be a complicating factor. “This is a very long corridor, around three miles. We wouldn’t want to install something to have it ripped up in the very near future.”
The Board of Supervisors recently approved a $450 million bond for voters to approve on this November’s ballot for seawall repair.
Port spokesperson Renee Dunn Martin denied that the seawall repair would irrevocably conflict with the planned bike lanes. “This is a project where various agencies have to work together. We’re working with the SFMTA, and they’re taking the lead on this project,” she said. “We just want to ensure that there isn’t any overlapping work, or conflicting efforts.”
For bureaucrats, the precarious costs of long-term infrastructure projects demands the utmost caution; for activists like the Bicycle Coalition, it’s all the more reason to avoid compromising on safety.
“We really need to be engaging in the planned bike route network as seriously as if it were Muni, or an interstate,” said Andy Thornley, a daily bike commuter from the Richmond District and member of the Bicycle Coalition.
Millions vs. Billions at 4th & Townsend
The tension between short-term improvements and longer-term overhauls is equally evident in the Townsend Corridor Improvement Project, where plans for protected bike lanes adjacent to the Caltrain station were put on hold for the upcoming DTX extension. This rail extension to the Transbay Terminal, meanwhile, has faced its own delays and mounting construction costs.
Street safety advocates were initially up in arms over the possibility that the Townsend Street bike lanes could be canceled indefinitely, but SFMTA spokespersons say the agency is receptive to their calls for a more immediate fix.
Berkeley resident Darrell Owens, who commutes to San Francisco, holds a sign on Townsend.
“For pedestrians, the corridor is really problematic because there are very few sidewalks,” said Cathy DeLuca of the nonprofit advocacy group Walk San Francisco. “To not protect people today is pretty negligent. I don’t know if there are other solutions that would be less expensive, but I know the city needs to take action now to make pedestrians safer.
“We really understand the importance that Townsend Street plays for cyclists and pedestrians,” SFMTA’s Ben Jose explained. “We share their hope for a protected bikeway on the corridor. Right now, we’re looking at what kind of near-term improvements we could make on the corridor in advance of DTX.”
Brezina and Davidson aren’t satisfied.
“The MTA should approve the project as initially proposed,” Brezina said in an interview. “Anything less is unacceptable. This needs to be a protected lane. And if that doesn’t happen, there will be deaths here.”
Davidson also shrugged off the notion that a cheaper alternative should be considered before the DTX extension was completed. “[The city] could decide tomorrow that we’re doing this, we have the money, if we have to do it twice we’ll do it,” he said.
Last Friday, outgoing District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim issued a statement that to a large extent vindicated the activists’ effort on Townsend: “Our office is committed to moving the Townsend Corridor Improvement Project forward and want to make sure the best possible plan is finalized before the end of Supervisor Kim’s term.”
Even beyond the push-and-pull politics of discrete infrastructure projects, People Protected Bike Lanes are broadening an already intense public dialogue about how city residents move around. Public and private sectors at the very least agree that the status quo is unsustainable.
Representatives of the hopeful electric scooter service Skip joined the People Protected action on Townsend incognito while the company works to obtain permits from the SFMTA. “We know that protected lanes are important for our business to flourish, so we're here to be allies to the cyclists who've been fighting for bicycle infrastructure for a very long time,” said Muriel MacDonald, Skip’s Director of Public Affairs. MacDonald noted that frequent complaints of shared electric scooters taking up space could be avoided if protected lanes were more prevalent.
Muriel MacDonald, Skip’s Director of Public Affairs, stands on Townsend between 4th & 5th.
“We can't successfully operate an electric scooter company if there's no safe place for people to ride them,” she explained. Her colleagues donned the yellow shirts and waved signs like everyone else, with no visible announcement of their brand. (Sorry-not-sorry for blowing their cover here.) Before obtaining permits, after all, they need their future customers to stay alive.
Part of the tension between advocates and city agencies, Davidson explains, stems from a dearth of visible stakeholders across the political spectrum.
“The bike commute population is pretty small; it’s mostly a bunch of white guys between the ages of 25 to 35. That’s not exactly a representative swath of the city, so the city doesn’t necessarily need to prioritize it as number one,” he said. However, Davidson added: “The bike commute population looks the way it does because we’re the only ones who feel safe biking on the street. I want safe bike infrastructure for everyone so we can all feel safe, and I can take my kids to Safeway.”
Therein lies a frustrating catch-22 for transportation and safety advocates: their constituency is constrained by the very status quo they’re fighting to improve. However narrow the current demographic of motivated cyclists and bold pedestrians may be, they all consistently believe in the universality of their vision.
“People’s lives—you can’t quantify that in dollars,” DeLuca said. “If someone loses their life, their impact on their family, on our society, is huge.”
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