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Today's Bike Plan rally was witnessed by a brace of Supervisors, including Bevan Dufty, Tom Ammiano, Gerardo Sandoval and Ross Mirkarimi, plus a representative of Senator Carole Migden.
A crowd of over 100 listened to San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum draw attention to the slow progress in implementing the city's Bicycle Plan. Here's the problem -- a while back local gadfly Rob Anderson and a few others worked to convince a judge to halt any implementation of the plan until the necessary Environmental Impact Report gets completed. Fair enough, but the EIR is taking a long time to complete. So it appears the SFBC might have a good beef.
Where's the beef? See you after the jump.
Here's the useful chart, to the left of the UDG (unidentified dapper gentleman). Larger version here.
Well that lays it all out for you. The latest revised schedule shows a completion date of around mid-2009. That basically means nothing will get done on the Bike Plan until 2010. That sounds like a long way off, non?
Full details here.
"The City is now estimating that the final Environmental Impact Report is delayed by a year, until mid-2009. Given that it may take weeks or months for the Judge to then lift the injunction & additional months or years for the actual implementation of the Bike Network projects, we are easily looking at 2010 before we see another bike lane or bike rack in San Francisco. This will be 4+ years of inaction at a time when other major cities (NYC, Chicago, Paris, London) are racing ahead of SF in making progress on improving bike transportation.
"PLEASE TAKE ACTION NOW: Write Mayor Newsom and the members of the Board of Supervisors to urge them to make the completion of the Bike Plan review a top priority for the City and to stick to the original, speedier timeline.
We need to show our City leaders that we are watching them and that they can't talk "green" while letting plans for improving the greenest form of transportation languish from inattention. Call or email the Mayor and each of the Supervisors *today*. We need hundreds of calls to make an impact.
Tell them that you're frustrated with their lack of priority to moving the Bike Plan review faster and that you want them to put all needed resources to getting bike improvements back on track. We can't wait 4 years for the next bike lane or bike rack. This is unacceptable!"
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Those Environmental Impact Plans seem to take eons and cost buckets of cash. It must be nice working with no deadlines and bottomless budgets. Just a remark from someone who lives in the real world and foots the bill for this slackerdom. Government jobs, you gotta love 'em.
Gotta love our government... it'll take years for something to even get done.
On the immediate concern, how do we get bikers to stop at red lights and stop signs? I almost hit one with my car yesterday!
That Unidentified Dapper Gentleman is none other that the SF Bicycle Coalition's program director Andy Thornley. http://www.sfbike.org/?staff
a holiday-related sign from the rally...
ah, to the LEFT of the UDG, got it, Amiano.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vsgoliath/2104639370/
Wow, EIR studies and whatnots take a long time??? Who knew?
Maybe now SFBC will find common cause with those who want to build affordable housing, but face years of red tape?
hey, it could happen!
I hope that the SFBC crew was able to get some of the higher ups to listen. The injunction has taken too long, and the city desperately needs to move forward with it's bike program.
Build it and they will come, and once there are more riders the cops will pay more attention and scofflaws that run stop signs and red lights will actually get ticketed.
the mind boggles. i honestly can't understand what there is to even study about this..what are they worried about environment wise?.. cars will have a harder time getting around so they spend more time in traffic and more exhaust fumes are spread into the city? or are they worried that we'll be overpowered by sweat and dreadlocks? i looked at rob anderson's site to get some kind of insight but it's a tome and i'm too lazy to dig through those archives.
"A brace of Supervisors"? I think perhaps a supervision of Supervisors would be the proper group name.
Didn't SF just lose a case at the Ca Supreme Court level re the city master plan and EIRs?
To circumvent the ruling, the city attorney said that the master plan now in effect is the 1990 master plan.
So does the EIR now under review have to conform to 1990?
Is all the work already done on the current EIR void?
The CEQA doesn't promote the environment, it promotes Environmental Impact Reports. The "environment" in each EIR is whatever people dream up, including the environment inside their wallets. It has only a tenuous connection to environmentalism as people generally think of it.
let me get this straight - sfbc head leah shahum is also on sf's transportation board? was she was one of the many peeps that newsom asked for a resignation from a few months ago, and now he might be asking her to leave the board when his new term begins in january? it's no secret that the sfbc hasn't been too friendly to newsom. i'm all for the bike lanes, but this seems fishy. seems like the sfbc is calling out newsom so he'll look bad if he cans shahum. sounds like sfbc members are being used as pawns in shahum's political battle with newsom.
I dunno, the bike plan IS delayed and it IS stupid.
Leah has a fixed term, per the charter. She doesn't have to resign if she doesn't want to. She was appointed in 2006, so unless she was serving out someone else's term, she's there until 2010.
I dunno, the bike plan IS delayed and it IS stupid.
Leah has a fixed term, per the charter. She doesn't have to resign if she doesn't want to. She was appointed in 2006, so unless she was serving out someone else's term, she's there until 2010.
Sorry about the duplicate comments. Damn internal server errors.
The only other comprehensive environmental review of a bicycle plan done in California was recently completed in Oakland. It took 30 months to complete. San Francisco’s process as currently scheduled would be about six months faster than what what was done in Oakland, and for a far more complex project.
The only other comprehensive environmental review of a bicycle plan done in California was recently completed in Oakland. It took 30 months to complete. San Francisco’s process as currently scheduled would be about six months faster than what what was done in Oakland, and for a far more complex project.
Go into the office of the Sierra Club, Save the Whatever, etc, and you won't find eager young environmental activists, you'll find lawyers. And what do lawyers like? They like to file injunctions. So the whole "environmental movement" is just a bunch of lawyers filing injunctions with each other. My guess is the SFBC is no different from any other organization of its type, it's just a vehicle to provide employment for MORE LAWYERS.
There's no injunction stopping me from riding my bike to BART every day, and WTF do I need a "bike plan" for? I just get my ass on a bike and ride.
I would love for them to put this up to the voters. If every member of the Bicycle Coalition (that has taken 15 years to grow to 7,500 members) lives in San Francisco, that represents just 1% of our population. I guarantee you that there are many more people that would love to vote down this anarchist fringe group that thinks traffic laws don't apply to them.
"...i honestly can't understand what there is to even study about this..what are they worried about environment wise?.. cars will have a harder time getting around so they spend more time in traffic and more exhaust fumes are spread into the city?...i looked at rob anderson's site to get some kind of insight but it's a tome and i'm too lazy to dig through those archives."
Yes, this is typical. Bike people in SF seem to think they are exempt from having to read anything---the Plan itself, the litigation documents, or my critiques---before they pronounce on this issue. After all, Bikes are Good and Cars are Bad. What else do you need to know? To see detailed postings about the Bicycle Plan, all you have to do is enter "Bicycle Plan" in the search engine on my blog, District 5 Diary.
Of course if you remove traffic lanes and/or street parking on a busy street, you will probably make traffic worse in that part of the city. And you will make it worse not only for cars but also for Muni and emergency vehicles. This is the sort of thing that has to be studied in the EIR.
If, as we urged more than two years ago, the city had simply done the EIR on the 527-page Bicycle Plan in the first place, it would probably be done by now.