Wall St. Journal Weighs In On San Francisco's Bike Plan
Who's the polluter?
San Francisco's bike lanes were on the front page of The Wall St. Journal today, as reporter Phred Dvorak asks, "Could Bike Lanes Cause Pollution?"
The story is mostly a profile of Rob Anderson, and includes one of those portraits that the Journal is famous for, we love those -- they look just like money. Anderson is, of course, a litigious San Francisco blogger, supervisorial candidate and nemesis of San Francisco bike activists. According to the Journal, "the 65-year-old local gadfly has stymied cycling-support efforts here by arguing that urban bicycle boosting could actually be bad for the environment."
This isn't exactly true: Mr. Anderson et al. argued that the City had improperly skirted environmental review of the San Francisco Bicycle Plan. A judge agreed and granted an injunction, pending full environmental review (here's the Chronicle's coverage of the 2006 decision).
Why did the City try an end run around environmental review? Find out after the jump.
Noxiousness: Is it because cyclist belch noxious fumes? No, although we fully admit to gas emission while astride our birotate chariot.
Obnoxiousness: Is it because many bicyclists are annoying, self-righteous scofflaws? No, although this claim -- forwarded by Mr. Anderson -- is empirically true, thanks to the vagueness of the word "many." We could certainly say the same thing about motorists and even pedestrians. Ultimately, we might simply observe that:
a) many human beings are annoying, self-righteous scofflaws
b) many bicyclists are human beings
c) therefore, many bicyclists are annoying, self-righteous scofflaws
Steelboxiousness: But the real reason the City tried to get around environmental review is that the State's rules for measuring environmental impact are heavily skewed toward promoting individual auto use. That's right: under current rules, if we took out the bike lanes on Valencia and restriped it to be a four-lane freeway like Guerrero, that would be a positive environmental impact.
Think it over.
You can read more about these wacky rules (usually called "Automobile Level of Service") on Rob Anderson's blog, District 5 Diary, or take a look at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's analysis.
Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, of the City's Department of Public Health, has also prepared a report on the issue, entitled Automobile Level of Service: A Liability for Health and Enviromental Quality, available in PDF form here.
And of course, SFist has looked into the issue: