Thursday afternoon near the SFist Western Branch Office, your bicycle-owning correspondent witnessed a crime: two full-grown adult men, biking two-abreast, along the sidewalk for an entire block of Divisadero Street. As you know, sidewalk biking is a real problem in this city, annoying probably dozens of people a day. More if you include adults riding adult-sized razor scooters.
Per San Francisco Transportation Code 7.2.12 it is illegal and unsafe to ride on the sidewalk if you are over the age of 13. Not to mention there have been a number of recent news articles that also seem to suggest there's a high level of meth use among people who bike on the sidewalk. That's why we're creating a city-wide sidewalk biking offender list. We won't be listing names or showing faces (we're not evil, come on), we will be taking your eyewitness accounts of people riding their bikes on the sidewalk and adding them to our offenders map below.
Please send any and all accounts of sidewalk biking to: andrew [at] sfist.com. Alternatively: Leave them in the comments, tweet us @SFist or tag us in your Instagram and we'll add it to the map. Please include: cross streets or approximate location, simple description (Tourists on rentals? Lycrahead checking his Strava stats?) Photo documentation is also encouraged, but we'll be cropping photos like the one above to protect the offenders' identities.
This is obviously a work in progress, but we'll be sure to highlight periodic updates. Together, we can make sidewalk biking a thing of the past. And then we'll move on to cars parked in the bike lane.