By Steven T. Jones
City officials finally released the Draft Environmental Impact Report for the San Francisco Bicycle Plan, and while I’m still working my way through this 1,353-page tome, the pre-ordained conclusion seems painfully obvious: bicycling is good for the environment, and facilitating more bicycling is even better for the environment.
Why exactly did we need to spend two and a half years and over $1 million on this again? Oh yeah, because anti-bike zealot and occasional also-ran supervisorial candidate Rob Anderson sued the city for not adequately studying bicycling before proposing to complete the bicycle network and almost double the city’s current 45 miles in lanes, leading the courts to impose an injunction against any new bike projects until we can get this EIR certified.
“So far, it’s just a black hole for money, time, frustration… and cyclists are paying the price,” Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told me.
But the good news is that by next year at this time, the city’s burgeoning population of regular cyclists — which an SFBC-commissioned study placed at about 16 percent of the city’s population and growing rapidly — could start seeing new lanes, bike racks, and safety markings known as “sharrows,” assuming that Anderson and his ilk don’t stall this process further after the public hearings for the DEIR begin in January.
Meanwhile, activists and city officials have been quietly working on reforming how the city analyzes traffic impacts (known as LOS reform, which I wrote about here and which we’ll have another story on in our next issue), which could spare bicycle and pedestrians projects from this expensive, ridiculous EIR process. And I’ve heard from people inside both the Mayor’s Office and Board of Supervisors that they’re excited about moving it forward, so perhaps our creation of a more sustainable transportation system could soon move into high gear.