New Bike Lanes and Racks To Come From Stimulus Funds?
Three years after a court-ordered injunction on citywide bicycle improvement projects, an impact study by the SFMTA is expected to be adopted by the City as early as June. Just to back up, this study was demanded by a group of non-cycling citizens--and validated by a Superior Court Judge--who challenged the City's Transit First policy, asking that City Hall examine the impact of all bicycle improvement projects on everything from traffic flow to parking availability. According to Timothy Papandreou and Judson True of the SFMTA, the first of the proposed projects--including new bike lanes, a bicycle sharing program, and retiming of certain traffic signals to benefit cyclists--could now begin as soon as the new budget takes effect on July 1.
"I think we all share the irony of that when the city has set very strong environmental, health, livability and congestion-decreasing goals and still we've been held up [for three years]," says Leah Shahum, Executive Director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
Funding for some of the proposed projects is expected to come out of the same SFMTA budget that is receiving $67 million in federal stimulus money. The total budget for the projects is unclear, but $2.9 million has been set aside in transportation sales tax funds. We don't know what a bike lane costs--what, some paint, some labor?--but that number doesn't hold a candle to the $15 million budgeted for light rail door and step reconditioning or the $11 million for ticket machines... but we were also never good with accounting. So far there's no word on the budget for Critical Mass police escorts.
See the full accounting of SFMTA stimulus fund usage here.