Right after the SFMTA’s embarrassing need for a do-over on the Valencia Street bike lane, the agency is now pushing for a bike lane in Chinatown. But Chinatown community groups don’t want it, and say the idea “just doesn’t make sense.”
Is there some great demand out there for bike lanes in Chinatown? The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) both seem to think so, and are in the early stages of developing a plan to add bike lanes to one of Chinatown’s main thoroughfares. But the SFMTA is also still has a big black eye over the controversial center-running bike lane they put on Valencia Street, followed by an about-face ten months later when they decided to backtrack to something more resembling the old curbside bike lane design.
Well, the agency had a community meeting on the idea last week, and the Examiner reports that Chinatown community leaders are largely against the proposed Chinatown bike lane. “I just think having a bike lane run through a neighborhood like that just doesn’t make sense,” Chinatown Community Development Center planning director Rosa Chen told the Examiner.
Chinatown Transportation Research and Improvement Project co-chair Jon Hee was a little more blunt with his language.
“Their outreach on this one really sucked,” Hee said to the Examiner. “As a major advocate for Chinatown and North Beach transportation and pedestrian safety, they didn’t send us an email straight. Usually, when they’ve had big projects, they’ve kept us up to date — I don’t know what happened this time.”
The SFMTA has not chosen what street the bike lane might be placed on, and they may not even go through with the idea. Last week, Mission Local had some details of the possible Chinatown bike lane locations: one option is for the bike lanes on Broadway, another is to place them on Pacific Avenue and Jackson Street. A third option is to add no bike lanes, but to lower some neighborhood streets’ speed limits down to 15 miles per hour.
SFMTA Biking and Rolling Plan project manager told the Examiner that “This is very much going to be driven by the public input that we get around these scenarios, and I hope that in conversations with communities who are really concerned, they see that we are listening.”
And so to that end, there will still be ten more community meetings on these proposed bike lanes (one meeting in each supervisorial district), including one tonight at the Southeast Community Center in Hunters Point.
But consider the backdrop that there’s a mayoral election going on right now, with one of the candidates being the supervisor of Chinatown’s district, and all of the candidates are lobbying hard for the Chinese American vote. So if Chinatown voter sentiment is running against the bike lanes, you pretty much figure all of the candidates will come out against these bike lanes too.
So this could be the beginning of the end for those bike lanes before they’re even approved, and possibly also for embattled SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin, who’s already had candidate Mark Farrell publicly declare he would fire Tumlin if elected mayor.
Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
