An advocate-on-advocate battle brewing in Golden Gate Park threatens to throw another wrench in the spokes of the city's bike plan if it can't be resolved quickly: The recently approved parking-protected bikeway on John F. Kennedy Drive, which places bike traffic in a 6.5-foot wide bike lane between parked cars and the curb, has the potential to be the safest bike lane in the city. But disabled advocates claim it leaves wheelchair users stuck in the middle of traffic. The Examiner explains the rolling dispute:
...because cars will now have to park several feet from the curb, crossing the bike lane — full of swift-moving cyclists — will be very difficult for persons with limited mobility, said Byron Yan of the Independent Living Resources Center, an advocacy organization for the disabled.A separate problem is that the buffer zones — off-limit spaces to both cyclists and motorists — are not wide enough for wheelchair users who get unloaded from paratransit vehicle lifts, said Howard Chabner, a wheelchair user.
Instead of being dropped off in the buffer zones, wheelchair users will be placed down in bike traffic.
And we've seen how swift-moving bike traffic can be.
Anyhow, Team Wheelchair believes the there was no outreach to the disabled community while the bike lane proposal was being reviewed. “It comes down to a civil right to safety for disabled people," Chabner told the Ex, "versus the interest — an important one, but not a civil right — of bicyclists.” The Bike Coalition, for their part, maintains that they received "extensive feedback" from the Mayor's Office of Disability while designing the proposal.
Meanwhile, the SFMTA is keeping a cool head about the whole thing: Spokesman Paul Rose told the Examiner the design could easily be tweaked because, "there are no major infrastructure changes." So, hopefully there's room for all of the city's mobile, wheeled folks.
[Streetsblog]
[SFEx]
