Might be more behind this. Don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but San Jose, years ago, dug up a downtown neighborhood of small businesses, left it dug up for two years. They all folded.
Suddenly the project ended, the streets got rebuilt. Then a developer swooped in and gentrified the neighborhood.
It’s not yet a single project with residential and exciting ground floor like developers keep proposing…
The big money in California is in owning the traffic corridors and the developers who line politicians pockets are forever salivating and mucking with these areas to try to consolidate their holdings.
I don’t think gentrification is the operative word here. Mallificatipn? Private equity bundling ready?
These lanes are confusing and dangerous in my experience. I choose to bike on folsom instead now. We have great protected bike lanes elsewhere in the city (valencia between market and 15th, folsom north of division) and I don't understand why we couldn't just go with that instead of experimenting on the valencia corridor.
To be clear for anyone not familiar: Valencia already had bike lanes, and that's not the problem. The problem is that the new design is more fragile to bad driver behavior, since drivers run over the flex posts to pass stopped vehicles, and make the whole corridor a mess for everyone.
That's my bike route too, and I was surprised at the change. The previous bike lanes were familiar and fine. Cars would stop in them but that's at least a known risk.
The new system is complicated and seems less safe, because you have to cross traffic to get in and out of the lane, and it's all unclear. It also puts the opposing bike traffic right next to each other, people don't necessarily stay in their lanes, and there are visibility issues at night.
And now cars have to look in unexpected directions for bikes.
Moving parking to one side of the street, then the car lanes, then the double bike lane would have been a bit better, or as someone else said make the road one-way for cars and then you have lots of room.
By "moving parking to one side of the street", do you mean get rid of half of the parking spots? I'm having trouble visualizing this part, but it sounds like you want the road layout to be (from left to right) sidewalk, double bike lane, double car lane, parking, sidewalk.
Seems reasonable. Just because you own a car and drive to a place should not mean the there is any street parking at that place. If a place depends on parking they should rent a location that has parking not hope the citizenry supplies them with it for free.
Honestly, I wonder if the best solution is just no bike lane at all. The thing I hated about the old lane was the need to constantly move in and out of the lane to avoid parked cars which felt more unsafe than just riding with traffic (which can't go fast on Valencia anyway due to the light timing).
The idea though that Amado's closing was specifically due to the bike lane seems hard to believe unless the business was already extremely marginal (I believe the bike lane might have been the straw that broke the camel's back but it feels like a scapegoat for other issues).
Painted only bike lanes, in fact, do not really have an impact on safety. This is why it's law in the Netherlands that all bike lanes need to be protected.
New York City's solution to that was to replace some of the flex posts with anti-terrorism bollards which will stop a runaway truck. Not all of the posts. Just enough of them to get the message across.
From the images (and text) in the article, this bike path already has those bollards and _doesn't_ have flex posts. I don't live there so can't comment from a personal standpoint, but I'm confused about the discrepency between the above commenters description and the images in the article.
Yes, they are plastic and designed to be driven over. Although, many of them are noticeably damaged already, so I can't imagine they're expected to be driven over so often?
IIRC this was started because of a literal terrorist act where someone took a truck and went on a rampage mowing down people in the Hudson River bike lane. I was nearby when this happened.
It's sad and infuriating that in the United States, you can point out blatantly dangerous infrastructure and fight for safety improvements, and it won't make any difference until someone actually goes out and exploits the bad infrastructure to murder cyclists and pedestrians. Then suddenly you can get the bollards, but only in the place where the murderer killed people: NYC still has tons and tons and tons of unprotected bike lanes, but at least no one will ever again be able to murder people with their car in that specific part of the Hudson River Greenway.
Bike lane hardening is surely good, but this is a press release from almost two years ago that promised to harden half of the city's bike lanes, which still hasn't happened or even come close to happening. One thing you get used to, cycling in NYC, is that it doesn't mean much when the administration tells you about its ambitions: the thing you measure it by is how much it gets done.
The Transportation Alternatives tracker[1] tells you how much they are falling short of their promises.
And of course without bollards, cars can still enter the bike lanes at intersections[2]. I'm happy for progress where we get it, but it's hard to lean into my optimism when you know that every time the city announces it will do something, it will take 3x as long to do 1/3 of what they promised.
It is so telling that we have actual concrete or metal or otherwise tough bollards in front of things like propane refills at gas stations, but we won't do the same to protect people on foot or on bikes.
I'm cool with that if they look IDENTICAL to the flex post so random doordash driver who decides they want to park in the bike lane may or may not end up with a caved in bumper.
> Voicing a fairly widespread belief, Dickerson said he believes ride-share companies like Uber paid the city to remove parking spaces to free up room for pickups and dropoffs.
It's crazy how quickly people go to conspiracy theories.
Everyone knows what the solution is though: make the street one way, except for bikes (with a real concrete-protected barrier between cars and bikes), and everyone is happy. Everyone except those business owners who will probably be upset at any change.
The real solution is to remove cars from the street entirely and make it a pedestrian mall with a center running bike lane that can also be used by emergency vehicles. We'll get there in another 10 years.
Except for the cars trucks and busses.. you know the ones who actually pay for such infrastructure. I would be more okay with such things if they separated the costs and made the bike lanes tolled or funded by bicycle registration.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of what the displaced motor vehicle traffic does when they now have less lanes of travel on which is divert to neighboring streets which causes other problems.
> the ones who actually pay for such infrastructure
Motor vehicle user fees pay for less than half of the road infrastructure.
Everyone is paying for the roads through property taxes. (Even if indirectly through rent.)
Many people with a bicycle also have a car.
Cars require significantly more space than bicycles, cause more road wear, and car crashes tend to require more from emergency services than bike crashes, so any fees for bikes should be scaled appropriately - and remember that those without a motor vehicle are already contributing to road infrastructure.
Motor vehicle traffic isn't a fixed value. If it's harder to drive somewhere, fewer people will drive. Sometimes removing traffic lanes increases traffic capacity. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/18/mr-go
> Except for the cars trucks and busses.. you know the ones who actually pay for such infrastructure.
That is utter nonsense. Most of the infrastructure is paid for via the general funds. US gas taxes are laughably low, and the federal gas tax (supposed to pay for highways) has not been raised since 1993, so its value effectively halved since it was last raised.
The highest gas tax in the US is a combined 70c/gal.
Oh and far from paying for the infrastructure, trucks are subsidised to use it, by everybody else, very much including bikers
Trucks are the biggest source of road damage by a very long shot (3 orders of magnitude per mile driven) and don't pay anywhere near that. Trucks would have to pay at least 2 orders of magnitude higher gas taxes than cars to come anywhere near a fair share, and that's assuming an order of magnitude difference in mileage (in a linear unit, not mpg), which is not the case unless you have an extremely efficient car and a very inefficient truck.
I doubt it’s bike lanes and not specific factors for each of these businesses. There are plenty of stores that are doing fine in that corridor with those lanes. Dandilion chocolate; Taishoken; Bernal cutlery to name a few. It seems like it’s easier to scapegoat a bike lane instead of other issues. Especially this center running bike lane means there still is parking on the sides of the street. How much money is lost losing 8 parking spots a block ?
I've ridden through here and it's quite nice. The anxiety from getting doored is moved to intersection anxiety. Overall, that seems fine to me since known interaction points mean that I have less mental normalization of deviance and signaled intersections mean that interactions are more explicit.
To be honest, SF neighborhoods erupt for literally everything. In general, the protests are best ignored. I wouldn't much store in it.
If P(erupt|x) = 1 for all x, then there's no information content in erupt.
This comment reads like it was written by someone who has never biked, let alone in SF, and especially on this bike path.
This is a bike highway and you can consistently be faster than the cars in path by up to 2x the speed during rush hour.
Walk buttons don't really work in SF, all lights are automatically pedestrian enabled. Bicyclists don't have to hit any buttons to go. In fact, they have their own automatic bike specific light, or they ride with the car lights.
> Consider a bike that needs to travel 15 minutes. That trip would take a car 5 minutes.
It depends on a lot of things. Where I live, if unlucky, the closest parking space is a 5 min walk. Say you need just 3 minutes to get from the door to the road. My bicycle is parked next to my door. It takes 10 seconds, 15 including acceleration.
When at the destination things are roughly the same. You lose 6 min vs 30 seconds. We keep adding more cars to the roads, you use to be able to get around really fast, this is increasingly not the case, specially in a city.
Bicycles can do with very crappy road, a thin layer of asphalt will last a really long time. Cars destroy roads quite fast, specially the heavier ones. They deal some damage to buildings, I don't know how much. The fumes aren't very nice the noise is a problem.
Space isn't exactly cheap in cities, all those big roads consume quite a bit of it. It is kinda ironic how we use cars to get to nice places and build roads where nice places could have been.
I read something like 40% of the space in cities is consumed by parking. With housing many stories tall, smaller apartments that people cant afford the ratio is pretty weird.
Lots of pets, children and old people cant really go outside because we've turned the city into a race track.
For trips under 20 min bicycles are fantastic. Cars are clear winners beyond. In a congested area for anything under 10 min, with reasonable fitness bicycles are twice as fast.
The first 20 min of cycling actually takes 0 minutes worth of life span.
Outside the city having your own launch pad/drive way, few things within cycling distance, it seems to make perfect sense to use cars.
Assuming either bicycles or cars as a design goal, in the city the "hidden" inconvenience is much greater than the convenience of having cars all over the place. They are mostly just sitting there not moving and the rest of the time they crawl around "bothered" by countless things.
Having the lane go down the middle of the street seems like a bad idea. Where I live, the city is moving the bike lane to the inside, near the curb, and the parked cars to the outside. It's not a perfect solution either but it does provide good separation from traffic without losing a lot of parking. And you're not having dodge so many open doors or cars trying to park.
But we still have some shopowners bitching. Which just means I can take my business elsewhere.
The restaurants didn't want a "buffered bike lane" as you describe because they would lose the ability to put parklets (extra seating in a parking space) in parking spaces. I agree though, buffered bike lanes would be preferable to the current mess.
My city has recently moved to that style and I'm not a big fan. Maybe their implementation just sucked, but in practice having the bikelane closest to the sidewalk means that half of the bike lane is actually just the gutter, which is filled with broken glass, puddles, and various garbage. Because theres a solid wall of cars between you and traffic, cars making right turns don't always see you. There's also no way to pass other bikes or obstructions blocking the bike lane- you have to either hop on the sidewalk or squeeze through parked cars to merge with traffic going 40-50mph to get around
Seems like a mess, I remember the old-style arrangement from when I lived in SF, it was imperfect but adequate. In Portland we do have some protected bike lanes / cycletracks, and they're mostly good, but you couldn't sprinkle them everywhere, mainly you need a lot of extra room. I will say the best thing about the article is its link to the guerrilla signs[1] that were added to the Valencia bike lanes.
In Toronto, one of the major east west bike thoroughfares alongside eastward one way street was moved from the right side to the left, reason being “multiple loading bays on the right side of the street”. As a cyclist and a driver I hate this change - dedicated left turn lanes and signals diminished the throughput, cyclists ignoring dedicated bike signals, car drivers that do not drive through it frequently forget to check left shoulder etc. I can only imagine what kind of cluster is putting the bike lane into the center.
> I can only imagine what kind of cluster is putting the bike lane into the center.
Meh. It's basically an island between the lanes, which is common enough.
I do think fully separated bike lanes on the sides would be better from a safety and ease of use perspective, but that's a lot more work, and it looks like the businesses complained about the idea of removing their parklet option: a fully separated bike lane would be on an inside edge of the parking spots, pushing them much further from the shops.
I use it a few times every week, and I like it tbh.
I feel like a first class citizen.
I don't fear getting car doored.
The bike lane is relatively clean, unobstructed, and unweathered by heavy loads.
The contract for how cars and bikes should behave is could not be more clear. The only thing drivers don't seem to understand about it is that they are no longer prioritized.
On that note, left hand turns are no longer terrifying.
There is still loads of parking available on both sides of the road that doesn't require driving over my path.
My only real complaint is that I wish it were longer as the transition to regular lanes is whacky. Also the guard rails do seem to take a bit more space than they need to.
My impression is that everyone who rides a bicycle has this level of self-righteousness and self-importance.
From TFA: "People hate bike lanes, at least in part, because people hate cyclists. And in fairness, many cyclists give non-cyclists more than a few things to hate. They pedal against traffic. They blow red lights. They wear expensive-looking Lycra jerseys that feel like flashy overkill on city streets. The stereotype skews toward six-figure-earning, middle-aged neckbeards mansplaining about derailleurs. And there’s that eternal whiff of superiority embodied by those 'One Less Car' signs sometimes taped to the backs of bike seats, which manage to pack eco-smugness and a grammatical error into three syllables. It should read, 'One Fewer Car,' if you want to be like that."
I wouldn't say I hate bicyclers. I'm just happy that I never encounter them.
As an often pedestrian (but not a bike-rider) in a nearby city, the one that gets me is bike lanes in the middle of sidewalks. Maybe if I spent more time in the areas that have them, but I'm just not used to having to look both ways before crossing the sidewalk. (Yes, you have to be aware you're not just going to walk into someone but the speeds--and therefore the relevant distances--are a lot different.)
As a resident of this neighborhood and a user of the bike lane, I think these articles are mostly propaganda. Every article I read interviews like 1 or 2 people. I have a feeling most bicyclists and most businesses are totally okay with this because it is so heavily used and Valencia Street is THRIVING. Go there any morning, afternoon, or evening and you'll find people there all the time shopping, eating, hanging out. I find it hard to blame the bike lane for causing businesses to go under when you can look at 80% of the storefronts and find a pretty decent amount of customers in them. Of course, you can also look at the businesses that are going out of business and just see that they have terrible reviews and are just overall unappealing.
Let's look at Amado's comment that "sales dropped 80% after the bike lane was installed and created a hassle for musicians due to a lack of parking". Look at Street View, and you'll see every parking spot in front and around it's property is a parklet for themselves. Hmm, if they really needed parking so bad, why did they take it away from themselves? Same is true with Yasmin with their corner spot and their 4 parking spots converted to parklets. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Amado's/@37.7570262,-122.4...
The only thing I think could help the neighborhood more is if the city declared it an actual "Slow Street" because it is slow. You'll hit every red light and have to wait for pedestrians at every intersection. You have Ubers and doordashers and freight loaders blocking the road all day. Declaring a slow street would probably push Google Maps and friends to route users to Guerrero or South Van Ness which are 1-2 blocks away and are exclusively car friendly.
Why do I like this lane? Cars drive much slower because their lane is "narrower". It's still the standard car sized lane but they are now driving between a separated bike lane (bollards) and parked cars, rather than an unprotected painted bike lane where cars tend to just take over.
Moreover, it's pretty much the only north-south bike line in this part of town. West is too hilly, east is too car oriented.
Go to their website SF Small Business Coalition and their chief complaint is customers can't park in front of their businesses anymore. Really? This is one of the densest neighbhorhoods in SF and you're gonna complain about parking on the street? https://www.sfsbcoalition.org/save-valencia-merchants. you could build them a 6 story garage to store 400 cars and they'll complain about how it's destroying their community.
For some reason the majority of the businesses on valencia have put up the sfsbcoalition posters against the bike lane. I still don't understand it though, it doesn't seem like many or even any parking spots were removed from valencia. Do they mean people were parking in the old side bike lanes?
I think they mean freight trucks and Ubers would just park in the bike lane. Now Ubers have to drop people off in the street and the freights have to use the loading zones which might be halfway down the block.
I also feel like I mistook the signs to say "SF Bike Coalition" posters (sfbcoalition) instead of small business. It doesn't feel intentional, but it does feel weird.
Unbelievable how often this is written about without mentioning one of the primary reasons for this design: Parklets. Before the pandemic there was a finalized design for Valencia that would have done what has been done most commonly elsewhere which was to swap the car parking and the bike lanes, putting bike lanes right by the curb. But then the pandemic happened and many more parklets opened on Valencia for outdoor dining and people loved them! But parklets replace parking spaces so suddenly swapping the parking and bike lanes made a mess instead of safety. Take a look at Telegraph in Oakland, they had swapped parking and bike lanes before the pandemic, and now a ton of bars and restaurants have active bike lanes cutting through their dining areas. It's terrible! The alternative that was considered to the center lane involved weaving the bike lane around parklets, creating stretches of bike lanes that were no longer protected from cars and eating up parking spots with the weave.
As a cyclist, I love the center lanes. I feel safe. Before the change every time I biked down Valencia I had to weave in and out of the car lane b/c 100% of the time someone was parked in the bike lane. That basically doesn't happen anymore, and the one time I had an ambulance blocking my way, I went around it _in the opposing bike lane_ not exposed to cars at all.
It's always been the merchants opposing this stuff and study after study says they are wrong about it.
Did you notice most of the parklets on Valencia are actually gone now? The city forced businesses to get rid of them over the last 3 months or so. Monk's kettle, City Beer Store, and many more.
They've also stopped closing down every other block regularly and a bunch of other stuff that were actual wins from the pandemic. I'm as confused about that as anyone else but it's true that parklets were a big driver for the center lane design.
>parklets opened on Valencia for outdoor dining and people loved them!
Patrons of specific dining establishments sure, but they objectively inhibit transportation even more than parking spots do. This is painfully straightforward. Optimizing for wealthy people that frequently dine out is a expert way to undermine the collective interests of people who actually live in the city and those neighborhoods. Gentrification 101.
This was a great lightning bulb moment for me. Yeah, detached bikelanes seem semi incompatible with parkets.
Not being doored or having my bike lane taken over us probably the base of my heirarchy of needs. Not having a RL game of pedestrian frogger is also on the list.
It's not the bike lane. The price of going out has gone up and the amount paychecks that have gone up doesn't match it. Each wave of tech layoffs wipes out more customers that can absorb price increases. The city needs to continue lower permit fees and cut red tape for new business to start city-wide to get new money in.
As for the center bike lane design, I dislike it as a cyclist. The entry curbs make it difficult to pull out mid-block without someone behind me hitting me, and if I'm biking in the car lane I can't safely merge back to the bike lane with how the curbs are.
The best design is to make those blocks car free like Market St; deliveries, ADA drop offs, and local garage owners only. Ubers can drop off on the side blocks and back in parking can go in where it fits as well.
I have on several occasions seen firetrucks and police cars nearly kill bikers in this bike lane. The vehicles abruptly turn _into_ the center bike lane without warning, and use it instead of the car lane. Bikers then literally fall over trying to get out of the way in time.
As with most bike lane redesigns, it's better than it was before. I'm happy with the iterative improvements that will get us closer to even better infra. I wrote about the bike lane and more info on how to use it here: https://biketoeverything.com/2023/10/28/valencia-street-cent...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadSuddenly the project ended, the streets got rebuilt. Then a developer swooped in and gentrified the neighborhood.
The big money in California is in owning the traffic corridors and the developers who line politicians pockets are forever salivating and mucking with these areas to try to consolidate their holdings.
I don’t think gentrification is the operative word here. Mallificatipn? Private equity bundling ready?
To be clear for anyone not familiar: Valencia already had bike lanes, and that's not the problem. The problem is that the new design is more fragile to bad driver behavior, since drivers run over the flex posts to pass stopped vehicles, and make the whole corridor a mess for everyone.
The new system is complicated and seems less safe, because you have to cross traffic to get in and out of the lane, and it's all unclear. It also puts the opposing bike traffic right next to each other, people don't necessarily stay in their lanes, and there are visibility issues at night.
Moving parking to one side of the street, then the car lanes, then the double bike lane would have been a bit better, or as someone else said make the road one-way for cars and then you have lots of room.
The idea though that Amado's closing was specifically due to the bike lane seems hard to believe unless the business was already extremely marginal (I believe the bike lane might have been the straw that broke the camel's back but it feels like a scapegoat for other issues).
Painted only bike lanes, in fact, do not really have an impact on safety. This is why it's law in the Netherlands that all bike lanes need to be protected.
New York City's solution to that was to replace some of the flex posts with anti-terrorism bollards which will stop a runaway truck. Not all of the posts. Just enough of them to get the message across.
The bollards went up shortly after.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2022/begins-work-to-hard...
The Transportation Alternatives tracker[1] tells you how much they are falling short of their promises.
And of course without bollards, cars can still enter the bike lanes at intersections[2]. I'm happy for progress where we get it, but it's hard to lean into my optimism when you know that every time the city announces it will do something, it will take 3x as long to do 1/3 of what they promised.
[1]https://projects.transalt.org/bikelanes
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/MicromobilityNYC/comments/yaqfwd/pr...
It's crazy how quickly people go to conspiracy theories.
Everyone knows what the solution is though: make the street one way, except for bikes (with a real concrete-protected barrier between cars and bikes), and everyone is happy. Everyone except those business owners who will probably be upset at any change.
Except for the cars trucks and busses.. you know the ones who actually pay for such infrastructure. I would be more okay with such things if they separated the costs and made the bike lanes tolled or funded by bicycle registration.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of what the displaced motor vehicle traffic does when they now have less lanes of travel on which is divert to neighboring streets which causes other problems.
Do you have a citation or is this something that "feels true"?
> I would be more okay with such things if they separated the costs and made the bike lanes tolled or funded by bicycle registration.
That would be great to implement! I think you would be surprised at the result, though.
Motor vehicle user fees pay for less than half of the road infrastructure.
Everyone is paying for the roads through property taxes. (Even if indirectly through rent.)
Many people with a bicycle also have a car.
Cars require significantly more space than bicycles, cause more road wear, and car crashes tend to require more from emergency services than bike crashes, so any fees for bikes should be scaled appropriately - and remember that those without a motor vehicle are already contributing to road infrastructure.
Motor vehicle traffic isn't a fixed value. If it's harder to drive somewhere, fewer people will drive. Sometimes removing traffic lanes increases traffic capacity. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/18/mr-go
That is utter nonsense. Most of the infrastructure is paid for via the general funds. US gas taxes are laughably low, and the federal gas tax (supposed to pay for highways) has not been raised since 1993, so its value effectively halved since it was last raised.
The highest gas tax in the US is a combined 70c/gal.
Trucks are the biggest source of road damage by a very long shot (3 orders of magnitude per mile driven) and don't pay anywhere near that. Trucks would have to pay at least 2 orders of magnitude higher gas taxes than cars to come anywhere near a fair share, and that's assuming an order of magnitude difference in mileage (in a linear unit, not mpg), which is not the case unless you have an extremely efficient car and a very inefficient truck.
To be honest, SF neighborhoods erupt for literally everything. In general, the protests are best ignored. I wouldn't much store in it.
If P(erupt|x) = 1 for all x, then there's no information content in erupt.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a bike highway and you can consistently be faster than the cars in path by up to 2x the speed during rush hour.
Walk buttons don't really work in SF, all lights are automatically pedestrian enabled. Bicyclists don't have to hit any buttons to go. In fact, they have their own automatic bike specific light, or they ride with the car lights.
Thanks
> Consider a bike that needs to travel 15 minutes. That trip would take a car 5 minutes.
It depends on a lot of things. Where I live, if unlucky, the closest parking space is a 5 min walk. Say you need just 3 minutes to get from the door to the road. My bicycle is parked next to my door. It takes 10 seconds, 15 including acceleration.
When at the destination things are roughly the same. You lose 6 min vs 30 seconds. We keep adding more cars to the roads, you use to be able to get around really fast, this is increasingly not the case, specially in a city.
Bicycles can do with very crappy road, a thin layer of asphalt will last a really long time. Cars destroy roads quite fast, specially the heavier ones. They deal some damage to buildings, I don't know how much. The fumes aren't very nice the noise is a problem.
Space isn't exactly cheap in cities, all those big roads consume quite a bit of it. It is kinda ironic how we use cars to get to nice places and build roads where nice places could have been.
I read something like 40% of the space in cities is consumed by parking. With housing many stories tall, smaller apartments that people cant afford the ratio is pretty weird.
Lots of pets, children and old people cant really go outside because we've turned the city into a race track.
For trips under 20 min bicycles are fantastic. Cars are clear winners beyond. In a congested area for anything under 10 min, with reasonable fitness bicycles are twice as fast.
The first 20 min of cycling actually takes 0 minutes worth of life span.
Outside the city having your own launch pad/drive way, few things within cycling distance, it seems to make perfect sense to use cars.
Assuming either bicycles or cars as a design goal, in the city the "hidden" inconvenience is much greater than the convenience of having cars all over the place. They are mostly just sitting there not moving and the rest of the time they crawl around "bothered" by countless things.
But we still have some shopowners bitching. Which just means I can take my business elsewhere.
I'm pretty sure that's a first, even for SF...
1: https://missionlocal.org/2023/07/valencia-bike-lane-new-sign...
Meh. It's basically an island between the lanes, which is common enough.
I do think fully separated bike lanes on the sides would be better from a safety and ease of use perspective, but that's a lot more work, and it looks like the businesses complained about the idea of removing their parklet option: a fully separated bike lane would be on an inside edge of the parking spots, pushing them much further from the shops.
I feel like a first class citizen. I don't fear getting car doored. The bike lane is relatively clean, unobstructed, and unweathered by heavy loads. The contract for how cars and bikes should behave is could not be more clear. The only thing drivers don't seem to understand about it is that they are no longer prioritized. On that note, left hand turns are no longer terrifying. There is still loads of parking available on both sides of the road that doesn't require driving over my path.
My only real complaint is that I wish it were longer as the transition to regular lanes is whacky. Also the guard rails do seem to take a bit more space than they need to.
My impression is that everyone who rides a bicycle has this level of self-righteousness and self-importance.
From TFA: "People hate bike lanes, at least in part, because people hate cyclists. And in fairness, many cyclists give non-cyclists more than a few things to hate. They pedal against traffic. They blow red lights. They wear expensive-looking Lycra jerseys that feel like flashy overkill on city streets. The stereotype skews toward six-figure-earning, middle-aged neckbeards mansplaining about derailleurs. And there’s that eternal whiff of superiority embodied by those 'One Less Car' signs sometimes taped to the backs of bike seats, which manage to pack eco-smugness and a grammatical error into three syllables. It should read, 'One Fewer Car,' if you want to be like that."
I wouldn't say I hate bicyclers. I'm just happy that I never encounter them.
Ah yes, the righteousness and self-importance of not wanting to get doored or driven over.
Let's look at Amado's comment that "sales dropped 80% after the bike lane was installed and created a hassle for musicians due to a lack of parking". Look at Street View, and you'll see every parking spot in front and around it's property is a parklet for themselves. Hmm, if they really needed parking so bad, why did they take it away from themselves? Same is true with Yasmin with their corner spot and their 4 parking spots converted to parklets. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Amado's/@37.7570262,-122.4...
The only thing I think could help the neighborhood more is if the city declared it an actual "Slow Street" because it is slow. You'll hit every red light and have to wait for pedestrians at every intersection. You have Ubers and doordashers and freight loaders blocking the road all day. Declaring a slow street would probably push Google Maps and friends to route users to Guerrero or South Van Ness which are 1-2 blocks away and are exclusively car friendly.
Why do I like this lane? Cars drive much slower because their lane is "narrower". It's still the standard car sized lane but they are now driving between a separated bike lane (bollards) and parked cars, rather than an unprotected painted bike lane where cars tend to just take over.
Moreover, it's pretty much the only north-south bike line in this part of town. West is too hilly, east is too car oriented.
Go to their website SF Small Business Coalition and their chief complaint is customers can't park in front of their businesses anymore. Really? This is one of the densest neighbhorhoods in SF and you're gonna complain about parking on the street? https://www.sfsbcoalition.org/save-valencia-merchants. you could build them a 6 story garage to store 400 cars and they'll complain about how it's destroying their community.
I also feel like I mistook the signs to say "SF Bike Coalition" posters (sfbcoalition) instead of small business. It doesn't feel intentional, but it does feel weird.
As a cyclist, I love the center lanes. I feel safe. Before the change every time I biked down Valencia I had to weave in and out of the car lane b/c 100% of the time someone was parked in the bike lane. That basically doesn't happen anymore, and the one time I had an ambulance blocking my way, I went around it _in the opposing bike lane_ not exposed to cars at all.
It's always been the merchants opposing this stuff and study after study says they are wrong about it.
Patrons of specific dining establishments sure, but they objectively inhibit transportation even more than parking spots do. This is painfully straightforward. Optimizing for wealthy people that frequently dine out is a expert way to undermine the collective interests of people who actually live in the city and those neighborhoods. Gentrification 101.
Not being doored or having my bike lane taken over us probably the base of my heirarchy of needs. Not having a RL game of pedestrian frogger is also on the list.
As for the center bike lane design, I dislike it as a cyclist. The entry curbs make it difficult to pull out mid-block without someone behind me hitting me, and if I'm biking in the car lane I can't safely merge back to the bike lane with how the curbs are.
The best design is to make those blocks car free like Market St; deliveries, ADA drop offs, and local garage owners only. Ubers can drop off on the side blocks and back in parking can go in where it fits as well.