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Bike plan yes, jail for cop no
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This was a bittersweet week for bay area cyclists. On Friday, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency voted to approve 45 of the 46 bike projects that were before it. This green light paves the way for 34 miles of new bikes lanes at a cost of $14 million. Blogger Rob Anderson, who had stalled the plan for several years, said he intends to appeal the decision, but the agency expects to get past this last legal technicality and begin work this fall. Construction will take three years.
The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has a very helpful page showing the status of all 56 projects that make up the city's bike plan here.
That was the good news. But earlier in the week in San Jose, Deputy James Council, who killed two cyclists in Cupertino when he fell asleep at the wheel of his patrol car in 2008, escaped prison and remains on the job. Instead, Superior Court Judge David Cena sentenced Council to four months of house arrest (described here as a "jail term") and 20 weeks of community service. As for his employment, Council has been reassigned to a desk job, stripped of his gun, and taken a pay cut from $82,168 to $55,600.
Even assuming that Council is telling the truth when he says that he is sorry, "Truly and from the bottom of my heart," 55-grand a year and no jail time seems like a pretty light punishment for killing two people. It reminds me of the award-winning article published last year by Bicycling magazine about the limits of current laws to prosecute motorists who hit cyclists.
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