One Fewer Car with the Essefficist
I'm checkin' e-mails, I'm checkin' e-mails, hey hey! I'm checkin' e-mails, I'm checkin' e-mails, hey hey! Our question this week comes from Rita, a frequent contributor and fellow SFist staffer:
Hey Essefficist,
I have a new question for you. How come bikers can run red lights? And are they actually allowed on sidewalks?
-Rita
Funny you should ask, Rita. A good friend just showed up at the Essefficist's offices with a freshly minted $370 vehicle citation from a motorcycle cop for running a red light on his bicycle. $370! Three hundred and seventy dollars! And the cop said it goes on his DMV record! And he's a cab driver! Ouch! Did I mention, $370? And did I mention, ouch?
Let's here about it straight from Paul, the offending cyclist:
The offending cyclist here. This has to be the most expensive ride to work...ever. There I was at 24th and Harrison, riding like the crazy man, turning left into the on-coming lane of traffic (so as to make myself more visible). And, lo and behold, here comes one of San Francisco's finest, protecting the public order, pulling me over and writing me a BIG FAT TICKET for, according to him, $371. Now, off to work. Wonderful! I love doing my part to balance the city budget.
Ouch? $370? Very ouch? We had been planning to contact the SF Bicycle Coalition or maybe SFPD about this question, but we figured that Paul's ticket was good enough proof that bicyclists aren't allowed to run red lights in San Francisco. However, in tracking down those links back there, we poked around a bit and, lo and behold, there was plenty of useful information that showed us maybe things ain't looking quite so dark for Paul.
But first, in short, to answer your question, Rita: bicyclists are not allowed to run red lights (but they do it all the time since they almost always get away with it) or do anything else that cars aren't generally allowed to do, and no, bicyclists over twelve years of age are not allowed on sidewalks.
So back to the Perils of Paulie . It sounds like maybe the cop who nabbed Paul didn't have his facts quite straight. It turns out that, at least according to the bike Coalition's Got a Ticket? page,
the price of running a red light on your bike (or, at least, the price of getting caught doing it) isn't actually $371 (or $271, as the site says), but something closer to $115 because bike fines are assessed according to a different bail schedule than other moving violations. Also, unlike what Officer Bikecop said, a bicycle ticket doesn't go on your DMV record. According to the Got a Ticket? page, there's a moral to all this: "most cops are not experts on the vehicle code as it relates to bike violations."
As you can imagine, there's plenty of handy info at the SFBC website, including Bike Law 101, Urban Bike Training, and lots of useful bike links.
And as for the SFPD site, that got us rooting around the City's site where we found a pretty good pdf called Safe Bicycling in San Francisco that will tell you most of what you need to know about bicycling rules and regulations, and a general bike information page with, among many other things, a pdf map of bike routes in the City.
Okay, before we go, we'd like to give a shout out to all our Dogfood Gangstas. Canned or Dry, We Neva Die.
And remember, quality reader questions equals quality Essefficist answers.
And also, next week, probably, Hasidic Jews in San Francisco?