Two Cities: Hong Kong and San Francisco

A visit with family offers a chance to report from Hong Kong. We visit the densest square kilometer on Earth then ride in bike paradise Lantau Island. Along the way, we meet Martin Turner of the Hong Kong Bicycle Alliance and stop in at the stylish RodaFixa bike shop.

Then back home in San Francisco, The Bicycle Coalition kicks off the Big 56 Campaign as the long awaited Bike Plan awakes from the court injunction.

Pictured: Brian and Woods from hkfixed

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San Francisco bike culture matures as bike plan is adopted

After nearly three years of stalemate due to a court injunction, the San Francisco Bicycle Plan has its environmental impact report unanimously certified by the Planning Department and is adopted by the Municipal Transportation Agency.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition turned out over two hundred supporters for the MTA meeting to speak in favor of the plan. Friends of Bikescape, Nancy Botkin and Mike Smith joined me and my partner Karen Franklin to discuss how the meeting went and how bike advocacy has changed over the last decade. Interspersed in this informal discussion are audio clips from the meeting.




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Photo from the sfbc flickr pool by Rhonda Winter

Activism at City Hall and in the Streets

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition leads a protest on the steps of City Hall decrying the slow pace of progress on the environmental review for the Bicycle plan as a court injunction drags on. Then we go inside City hall to knock on doors to promote the car-free Sunday Streets trial on Aug 31 and Sept 14.

Finally (at 44 mins) the SFBC hits the streets to set up a photo booth to take pictures of cyclists and their bikes to deter theft.

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San Francisco Bike Plan almost back on track

On June 26, 2009, the SFMTA Board unanimously voted to adopt the long delayed Bike Plan and gave the green light to 45 new bike lanes. This was the result of three years of intense SF Bicycle Coalition advocacy culminating with a very impressive show of grassroots support at the MTA meeting where over to hundred supporters showed up to speak.

The next step is to bring this to court and have the tree year long injunction lifted so that work can begin on doubling the number of bike lanes in the city.

Congratulations all around! Now that we're back on track let's start to think about what's next!

Its not easy being green: Judge stops San Francisco bike plan on environmental grounds

Last week San Francisco’s cyclists woke up to find out that the city’s bicycle plan, a comprehensive road map to an integrated bike network had been put on hold by a judge’s temporary injunction in response to a lawsuit by Citizens for Adequate Review. (C.A.R.)

How could we arrive a time when a healthy, sustainable, and environmentally sound plan to provide transportation choice could run aground because of lack of environmental review? Could it be because the metrics we use to arrive at a conclusion are biased toward the convenience of drivers?

We go to three experts to get some insight –

• Andy Thornley, Program director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition
• Rajiv Bhatia, Director of Occupational and Environmental Health, San Francisco Department of Public Health
  
• Josh Hart, former SFBC program director and member of Transportation Authority consulting team

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Rajiv wrote this article (PDF) about "level of service" standards.

He also mentioned Sally Cairns who wrote this article (also a pdf) about where traffic goes when capacity is reduced, sort of the inverse of "induced traffic", or the "build the roads and the cars will come" theory of traffic.

San Francisco's "transit first policy" is enshrined in the city charter.

Check out the sfbc's LOS page.

Cyclecide's Pedal Monster is coming... July 21-23