Cyclists: Roll out the bike plan

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July 24, 11:29 PM

by , Fault Lines

 

 

And that would explain why members of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition have been huffing and puffing their way around City Hall in recent weeks. When you consider yourself one of the main cogs driving local transportation policy, you can’t deal with hitting a road block — especially one partly of your own making.

The reason bike activists have been spinning their wheels is that they feel not enough has been done to come up with an adequate response to an existing court order that says San Francisco’s bike plan can’t be put into effect until an environmental impact report is completed. And they might have a legitimate gripe that the consultants were not driving hard enough — but that’s like saying Muni should be better because The City has had decades to improve it.

The bikers’ unhappiness generally has been directed at the city transportation agency overseeing the EIR, the City Attorney’s Office, which fought the lawsuit — and lost, twice — as well at the Mayor’s Office, which is the main repository for all gripes about city government. The City Attorney’s Office decided not to appeal the court’s ruling, in part because it lost twice, but mostly because it had a lousy case, since it was obvious that San Francisco officials were making wholesale changes to the streets on behalf of bike riders without considering the impacts it was having on cars, pedestrians, traffic and businesses.

It may seem counterintuitive that eco-friendly commuting could be in violation of state environmental laws, but city officials didn’t write them. And challenging them through appeal — as some bike advocates have suggested — could have had the effect of making case law and possibly restricting bike plans from Sacramento to San Diego, something that might not endear them to their two-wheeling friends around the Golden State.

Underscoring the whole debate is that bicycle activists haven’t received much sympathy because they’ve been a little less than friendly to all those not-quite-pure citizens called drivers throughout the years through actions like the Critical Mass rides (including another downtown whirl tonight).

The legal interruption to the bike group’s expansion plans should be a reminder that it only takes a few irate people to slow the wheels of progress, be it from the left or right.

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