As gunfire rings out all over the city, it's good to know that increased police presence in the Mission is bearing fruit. This cyclist was nabbed by a vigilant officer at 22nd and Valencia. The offense? We don't know. Was it cutting in line at Boogaloos? No, the popular eatery was clearly closed at the time of the citation. Was it talking on a cell phone while riding? No, this activity--so senseless that it's... [continue]

Recently spotted on BART was this track bike with an ersatz disc rear wheel. Mismatched wheels have long been a staple of fixie style, particularly when one of the wheels is an expensive piece of racing hardware (extra points for juxtaposing the expensive and the cheap). Yet this track star thumbs his nose at the prevailing convention, choosing not a $500 racing disc wheel, but electing instead to cover a regular wheel with paper... [continue]

Show me the Legalese: Rob Anderson's latest project? Our Bike to Work Day took us down the bike lane on Alemany Boulevard -- one of the last bike lanes striped in San Francisco before the injunction against the city's Bicycle Plan. (The lanes were striped in April 2006; the injunction granted in June 2006.) So we wondered, of course: on Bike to Work Day two years later, what is procedure buff and injunction mastermind... [continue]

We were there through the bitter season--the mud, the rain, the cold, the mid-afternoon sunsets. With dripping, grime-streaked rain gear covering our heels and neckties, we rode our rusting, filthy commuter bikes to the Caltrain station all through the winter, a sweaty, soggy bunch, smelling of mildew and Tri-Flow. And now, with the arrival of the easy, sunny days of spring, you’ve joined us. And we’re happy to see you, really. It’s Bike to Work... [continue]

We gasped at the sight: the San Francisco Public Library's Bookmobile cozying up to our favorite El Tonayense truck on Harrison near 20th. Now we truly have everything we need. Well, almost. Maybe the folks at Cafe Gratitude will let us us the restroom. A recent Los Angeles Times op-ed called taco trucks "oases of meat and cheer in the night" -- an allusion, perhaps, to those famous early lines of Virgil's Aeneid: The... [continue]

SFBC's Report Card for Bicycling: Steep Grades It's the last day of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's SF Bike Survey. The survey is open to all -- you need not be a member to air your opinions about cycling in the city. Curiously absent from the survey are opportunities to assess important style-related issues: who are these people who wear their helmets tilted way back? Why do some people pedal with their knees sticking... [continue]

It's Saturday the 26th and the iPhone says we have 26 minutes to wait for the 26 Valencia bus. This is the kind of magic we have always associated with the 26 Valencia, the bus line of which we are most inordinately fond. It's not like the 14 Mission, which we need, or the 33 Stanyan, which we respect, or the 38 Geary, which we fear (in a Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit kind of way).... [continue]

Don't F*** with a Falcon Mommy San Francisco is home to the cinema's most famous falcon, but San Jose has us beat when it comes to bird-of-prey reality TV. The City of San Jose, along with the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group (motto: "Birds of Prey Know They're Cool"), has a webcam pointed at a falcon family living at San Jose's City Hall. Now we can enjoy the full nerdy-ness of birding ("why... [continue]

Pedaling to the train station this morning, we noticed a few fluorescent additions to the asphalt: bright stencils of monstrous creatures calling attention to the various pits and potholes of Townsend Street. We would have snapped our own picture of the menacing neon jaws and claws, but because we were booted from the 8:44 bike car twice last week, we preferred not to dawdle. There are more pictures on Flickr and video on NBC11's... [continue]

A Little Taste of "Hell": San Bruno Ave. and Division On Sunday the 19th, the San Francisco Bike Coalition invites cyclists to a Monster Pothole Stenciling Project, an effort "to create a visual statement of our deteriorating streets." But this Sunday, the 13th, our cycling friends across the sea are gathering to celebrate the worst roads in Europe. This annual celebration is also known as the Paris-Roubaix bike race, also known as "The Queen... [continue]

This monster pothole lurked on Townsend Street in the shade of the ramp connecting 6th Street to I-280. Under normal circumstances, we find the shrill complaints of motorists about pavement quality to be rather tedious. To motorists, we self-righteously sneer, "Why did you buy that SUV, anyway? If you want smooth roads, move to the country. Or Texas." The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition takes a broader view: poor pavement quality isn't just an inconvenience,... [continue]

Slate magazine claims to have found the "stupidest bike lane in America"... down in LoCal, of course. We here at SFist like to think that a bike lane is a bike lane, and that a short bike lane is still better than no bike lane. And no bike lane, of course, is what San Francisco has added since the City tried to short-cut environmental review and got nabbed by anti-bike gadfly Rob Anderson, whose... [continue]

Flower seller in Lucien Labaudt's 1936 mural in the Beach Chalet. A tulip's life is short enough, particularly in the far westerly reaches of our city/county. We seem to remember that in past years, the tulips at the Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden (in the shadow of the windmill in Golden Gate Park) didn't quite until the official beginning of spring. This year, though, the GG Park folks say that "tulips are expected to be... [continue]

The sudden appearance of a Smart in our neighborhood got us thinking: perhaps this parking solution will bring an end to our car-free lifestyle. We conducted a quick feasibility study in our neighborhood, with the following discouraging results: Number of Smart-friendly sub-9' parking spaces: 5 Number of these not already occupied by a 13' car: 0 Undaunted, we stopped by SmartCenterSanFrancisco, in the Mercedes dealership at 8th and Bryant (running words together seems to... [continue]

Image: Adobe Tour Tracker Pro cyclist and former San Francisco resident David Zabriskie (shown above leading the chase in today's stage of the Tour of California) has announced Yield to Life, a non-profit dedicated to making roads safer for cyclists. This is good news for San Francisco: the most recent issue of the SF Bike Coalition's newsletter, the Tube Times, revealed to us that Bay Area cyclists feel that roads should be safer! The... [continue]

Bike valet parking is great -- but what we really need is a bike valet, someone to lay out our freshly laundered cycling duds, to provide discreet, expert service and adjustments to our gleaming bicycle fleet, and to suggest the appropriate bicycle for any given occasion. The good news: today’s used-bike-tube-ribbon-cutting marked the official opening of Warm Planet Bicycles, a free bike parking service and shop specializing in commuter needs, located by the San... [continue]

According to this sign in the Powell Street station, one of the 16 posted bicycle rules has been stricken from the record. Taking a companion bicycle on BART is now 1/16th less hassle, a savings of 6.25%! After close scrutiny of the redacted rule, we thought we could make out the word "confiscated" - we are certainly not sorry to see that word disappear from BART's bicycle-rule vocabulary. That is, if it has indeed... [continue]

MUNI-related pneumonia-seekers may want to try waiting for the 14 Mission -- Mission Street is closed between 20th and 21st. It looks like something involving the former Tower Theatre -- a fire truck has a long ladder extended up to the top of the sign. A couple more pictures after the jump.... [continue]

This holiday weekend we've put aside the the more common charitable activities in favor of FreeRice.com, a web-based word game that purports to feed the world's hungry. The game is simple enough: it presents a word (supposedly an English word, but we have had our doubts on occasion) and a list of four potential synonyms. Choose correctly, and ten grains of rice appear in a wooden bowl in the developing world. Three correct answers in... [continue]

The recently-released website post-consumer.com is addressed to “anyone who has played or attended an indie rock show in Santa Cruz between 1999-2004.” We did! We were there! We remember the tall, handsome fellow with incongruous Ugg boots and a microphone on a stick who recorded shows in every bar, basement, living room and attic during the golden years of Santa Cruz indie rock! And now you can be there, too – Nicholas Taplin’s hoard... [continue]