Sunday Streets

Street Threads: Look of the Day

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Ariel Soto-Suver was strolling Sunday Streets in the Mission — its home every first Sunday this summer, did you hear? — when she happened across some perfect examples of SF summer weekend chic.

Today’s look: Crystal and Libby, 24th Street and Dolores

Tell us about your look: Says Crystal, “I like color, preppy and simple.” Libby followed with: “My style is unique, artistic and locally made.”

Street Threads: Look of the Day

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Ariel Soto-Suver was strolling Sunday Streets in the Mission — its home every first Sunday this summer, did you hear? — when she happened across some perfect examples of SF summer weekend chic.

Today’s look: Ed, Mission Sunday Streets

Tell us about your look: “This is my costume for a flash mob I did this morning with my yoga studio.”

Street Threads: Look of the Day

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Ariel Soto-Suver was strolling Sunday Streets in the Mission — its home every first Sunday this summer, did you hear? — when she happened across some perfect examples of SF summer weekend chic.

Today’s look: Farnoosh, Mission Sunday Streets

Tell us about your look: “I got this dress in NYC with a gift certificate from my boyfriend’s mom.”

Bike advocates have made real progress, but there’s still a long way to go

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San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum mused on how far this influential advocacy group has come during its 20th Annual Golden Wheels Awards last night, noting that the first such award recognized the commercial landlord at 555 Montgomery Street for installing indoor bike parking.

“Back then, that would get you a Golden Wheel Award,” she said, noting that this year’s award to the Building Owners and Managers Association of San Francisco (BOMA) was for its support of legislation requiring all commercial buildings in San Francisco to provide indoor bike parking. “We’ve come a long way in 20 years, clearly.”

In addition to the majority of the Board of Supervisors who showed up to offer their support, Shahum ticked off a long list of other city and regional officials who ride bikes and understand their potential as an increasingly important transportation option during the era of peak oil, traffic gridlock, and public health problems.

“Regularly, we have these top leaders in the city who are biking because they love it, biking because they’ve always biked,” Shahum said, citing the Sunday Streets road closures and the school district going from discouraging cycling to facilitating it as signs of the pro-bike mindset that has taken hold of San Francisco.

The fact that SFBC recognized BOMA – a powerful downtown player that has progressed from seeing cyclists as enemies to embracing them as allies – was telling of the mainstream embrace of bikes.

“We get it, we’re learning,” Meade Boutwell, president of BOMA’s board, told the crowd as he accepted the award, going on to say that “less cars are good for all of us.”

It was a lovely if ungrammatical sentiment and a sign of just how far the business community has come in accepting the imperative of promoting alternatives to the automobile. But there’s still a bit of a disconnect in San Francisco about the role that bikes play in the world’s great pro-cycling cities, evidenced partly by Boutwell’s opening comment, “Under this polyester suit is lycra.”

Keynote speaker Gil Peñalosa – executive director of 8-80 Cities, a nonprofit that promotes creation of cycling infrastructure that is safe and inviting from those 8-80-years-old – mocked the MAMILs (Middle-Aged Men In Lycra) and the notion that people should be athletic or wear special equipment to be able to cycle in cities.

“We dress normally, we act normal, and so on,” Peñalosa said, later arguing that, “Cycling is for everybody.”

In Boutwell’s defense, much of mainstream San Francisco still has a hard time accepting cycling as a normal, safe option. When the San Francisco Chronicle covered Pealosa’s visit to Sunday Streets last weekend – our version of the car-free ciclovias that Peñalosa pioneered as a city official in Bogota, Columbia more than a decade ago – reporter Sam Whiting was jarred by the guest’s casual approach.

“They had come from overseas and were riding in jeans and without helmets, both rookie mistakes,” he wrote of Peñalosa and his wife (“Sunday Streets welcomes its source of inspiration,” 6/4).

But Peñalosa argues that the real mistake is when cities cater primarily to automobiles at the expense of the safety and livability of their neighborhoods, and treat cycling as a dangerous fringe activity. He argues that cities should be built primarily around pedestrians, “but very close to the pedestrians is the cyclists…I think that cycling is just a more efficient way of walking.”

Public transit is important and should be robust, he said, but it’s just not as efficient, user-friendly, economical, or environmentally beneficial as bikes. “We need to walk and bike as a part of everyday life and then we’ll be much healthier,” he said.

Peñalosa urged the crowd to be politically active and push the city to prioritize bikes over automobiles, noting that even in wealthy neighborhoods, only about a third of residents drive cars. And from a design perspective, he said city officials must choose between “Streets for cars or streets for people.”

Once we make the latter choice, Peñalosa laid out an agenda for achieving that goal, starting with slowing vehicle speeds to no more than 20 mph in residential areas.

He cited statistics showing that only about 5 percent of pedestrians hit by cars driving 20 mph will die, whereas the fatality rate shoots up to 80 percent when the vehicles are traveling 40 mph. And for streets in which cars are traveling faster than 20 mph, he said it’s imperative to have bike lanes that are separated from cars by physical barriers, rather than just lines painted on the street.

He noted that Seville, Spain drastically increased its cycling rate in just a few years by committing to building bike infrastructure, and that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel installed that city’s first physically separated bikeway within his first 30 days in office and has perhaps the US’s most ambitious program for installing new bikeways. “San Francisco should not be any less than Chicago,” he said.

In Cogenhagen, which already boasts some of the world’s highest rates of urban bicycle use, Peñalosa said the city has sought to capture more long-distance riders by building 200 miles of “cycle superhighways” – which includes two lanes in each direction to facilitate both fast and slow riders – all for the price it costs to build about a half-mile of subway.

The goal, he said, is to make cycling as “easy, fast, and convenient” as possible, and to apply the political pressure to make that a priority because “if you aren’t doing those things then someone else is and someone else is setting the agenda.”

Bikes and business, a new and evolving union in SF

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Building Owners and Managers Association of San Francisco (BOMA) is being honored by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition at next week’s annual Golden Wheel Awards, recognizing BOMA’s help earlier this year in passing a city law requiring commercial landlords to let workers bring their bikes indoors or another secure bike parking area.

It is a strange and noteworthy honor for BOMA, a downtown force that is usually at odds with SFBC and progressive political entities, including opposing an effort to pass similar bikes-in-buildings legislation a decade ago. But this time, BOMA was an early partner on legislation sponsored by progressive Sup. John Avalos, an indicator of just how much the politics surrounding urban cycling have changed in recent years, particularly in San Francisco.

In the city where Critical Mass was born 20 years ago this fall – since then exported to dozens of cities around the world, globalizing urban cyclists’ demand for the equal right to use roadways often built mainly for automobiles – the bicycle has moved from the preferred mode of rebels, children, and the poor into a mainstream transportation option recognized even by the suits in the corner offices.

“They’re responding to a market demand. They see lots of employees looking for bike access in their buildings,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Lean Shahum said BOMA.

It was a point echoed by John Bozeman, BOMA’s government and public affairs manager and a regular cyclist. “Ten years ago, our members didn’t see it as something their tenants were asking of them,” Bozeman told us. “With the rise of young workers coming into our buildings, there was a greater demand for better bike access.”

But there are different ways of looking at this switch, which could undermine the progressive movement in San Francisco as SFBC increasingly adopts a more neoliberal approach of reliance on corporate support, rather than relying primarily on the political strength of their 12,000-plus members. For example, the Sunday Streets road closures that SFBC helped initiate are sponsored by a long list of corporations looking to improve their public image, including Bank of America (whose representative recently joined SFBC and city officials at a press conference announcing an expansion of the program), California Pacific Media Center, and Clear Channel, and in the past PG&E and Lennar.

“It reflects that bicycling sells real estate, and that’s a recent trend in hip, tech-focused cities,” says Jason Henderson, a San Francisco State University geography professor now finishing up a book on the politics of transportation, which explores these shifting dynamics.

The relationship with and dependence upon the business community could diminish SFBC’s willingness to champion bold reforms to our transportation system, such as congestion pricing charges for cars entering the city core during peak hours or demanding public transit mitigation fees of downtown corporations.

“On the other hand, it’s helping legitimize the bike as a legitimate form of transportation when the power elite accept it,” Henderson said.

Whatever the case, SFBC decision to honor BOMA with an award – which will be presented on the evening of June 5 during an event at the swank War Memorial Building – represents a new and evolving political dynamic for San Francisco.

“San Francisco has become a very different place in terms of embracing bicycling,” Shahum said. “There is a strong understanding that biking is good for the economy.”

Street Threads: Sunday Streets Edition

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Valencia Street launched its monthly Sunday Streets pilot program this past weekend — several blocks of the street will be blocked off on the first Sunday of the month for the next four months, in order to see if similar programs might work across the city. Photographer Ariel Soto-Suver of Street Threads photo (and book!) fame was on the scene to snap the looks. We’ll be presenting her selections here all week. 

Today’s Look: Jonieann, Mission Sunday Streets

Tell us about your look: “I wear whatever is cheap at thrift stores.”

Sunday Streets coming to — and staying in — the Mission

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Sunday Streets – the once-controversial closure of streets to automobiles so they can be fully used by pedestrians, cyclists, and skaters, temporarily expanding the amount of open space in San Francisco – has become a popular monthly event and it rotates among neighborhoods around the city. And as the organizers prepare for this Sunday’s event in the Mission, where its biggest and best incarnations are held, city officials today announced an expansion of the program: the Mission will now host Sunday Streets on the first weekend of each month through the summer.

“Sunday Streets really comes to life and realizes its full potential when it’s in the Mission,” Ed Reiskin, executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said this morning at a press conference on the steps of City Hall.

The business community initially resisted the idea when it was proposed five years ago by Mayor Gavin Newsom and its chief sponsor, the nonprofit Livable City, concerned that customers would have a hard time getting to stores. But just the opposite has proven true as the popular events fill the streets with thousands of people.

“When Sunday Streets started, I know there was a little apprehension, we even felt it in the Mission,” Sup. David Campos, who represents the Mission. “But the neighborhood has come together to embrace the project.”

Mayor Ed Lee called the expansion of Sunday Streets “a great pilot program for San Francisco” and said that it represents “our openness to learning to use our streets differently.”

San Francisco was the third city in the country to hold these street closures – known as cicolvias in Bogota, Columbia, which pioneered the concept – following Portland, Ore. (the first, and one that we covered) and New York City. This Sunday’s event runs from 11 am to 4 pm, mostly along Valencia and 24th streets.

The Performant: Tropical nights and Pacific days

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Stepping out with Brownout and Sunday Streets

It was quite a diverse crowd bobbing and weaving out on the dance floor of the Elbo Room as local Afrolicious stalwart DJ Señor Oz spun a red-hot Latin-fusion funk mix, which belied the blustery weather outside.

The Elbo Room is good for fantasies of decadent tropical nights — it’s a small room which fills up and heats up fast — all that de rigueur protective outerwear coming off pretty quickly when there’s sweaty beats to be had. It was an energetic set, and you could almost visualize a clump of palm trees swaying against the horizon of some pristine, white sand beach, fireflies and paper lanterns to light up the starry night (there actually are paper lanterns dangling from the ceiling of the Elbo Room—which helps the fantasy along).

The vibe became less Caribbean and more Texas borderland via Miami when nine-piece Austin-based Latin-funk band Brownout (Grupo Fantasma’s alter-ego) finally swooped to the stage like the titular eagles from the title track off their second album, Aguilas and Cobras. Suddenly from every corner of the room, a torrent of Texas natives swamped the dance floor from the first strains. The band’s name might sound like a state of electrical failure, but their mostly instrumental onstage powerjam was downright electrifying, a spiraling mix of funky urban grooves, swirling desert psychedelia, and a dollop of spicy Afro-Cuban rhythms, involving three percussionists, three horn players, two guitarists, and an electric bass. Touring to support a brand-new album, Oozy (Nat Geo Music, April 2012), Brownout did not neglect to play some old favorites, including a loopy, spacey “Pole Position,” which literally raised an intergalactic sweat from band members, not to mention their jostling groupies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5a6gvc-LcU

The last buzzing traces of the tropics dissolved into the light grey cloud cover of Sunday’s staunchly NorCal climate reality check, as Sunday Streets stormed the beach and swarmed the Great Highway. Sure, Valencia Street might attract more weekend yogis and gourmet popsicle vendors, but there’s something about cruising the Great Highway with the laidback Sunset crowd that really appeals. Certainly no other Sunday Streets route has quite the same visuals — lush springtime parkland and blooming sand dunes, as opposed to the urban density that characterizes the other routes. On the Great Highway, the microclimates and windswept landscapes of Northern California take centerstage rather than the human tide, putting the focus more firmly on the participants rather than the distractions. 

But of course the usual Sunday Streets funmakers were around too. Party bikes decked out with boomboxes and bubble machines. The Sports Basement repair gang fixing flats and tightening brakes. Scattered food trucks and circulating petitioners. Dogs and rollerblades. Kites and kids. One plucky band, Please Do Not Fight,  decked out a pedal rickshaw and rode the full length of the route playing their guitars, while a backup rickshaw took the rear, passing out stickers and enjoying the ride. (Bands on bikes, it would appear, are big these days.) True, they could have maybe used a little more Afro-Cuban percussion to round out their sound, but for a lazy, gauzy Sunday, their good-natured, low-key California vibe fit right in.

Lost at sea

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cheryl@sfbg.com

AMERICA’S CUP Clear your mind, if you can, of brawls over San Francisco piers and other obscenely expensive parcels of waterfront real estate. Focus solely on the inevitability of the 34th annual America’s Cup.

Summer 2013, it’ll rip into town, offering self-described “adrenaline sailing at its best” to jet-setting yachting enthusiasts. In 2010, the 33rd contest was won in Spanish waters by Oracle Racing, headed up by billionaire Larry Ellison. In 2013, Ellison plans to defend his trophy as the competition (ironically, dealing with its own financial struggles; the San Francisco Business Times reported March 23 that America’s Cup officials laid off half their staff) makes its San Francisco Bay debut.

Of course, average San Franciscans — often found ransacking their couch cushions to scare up burrito funds — couldn’t give a rat’s ass about an event blatantly catering to the one percent. But they should, and here’s why: unless we want to see all those Top-Siders stride directly to wine country after each day of racing concludes, we need to give the visitors (estimates vary on the numbers: 10,000? 200,000?) a reason to hang out in SF, visit its neighborhoods, and spend money locally.

One idea: organize an arts festival with programming complementary to the America’s Cup races. Such an event would potentially offer a huge boost to the local arts scene.

The most passionate supporter of an America’s Cup arts festival has got to be Andrew Wood, executive director of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Last fall, he announced the 2013 SFIAF would shift its dates from May, when it usually takes place, to July through September. That way, SFIAF could coincide with the race — and be a component in what he envisions as a much larger, citywide event.

“We first contacted the America’s Cup about including an arts component before they even confirmed San Francisco as the venue,” Wood remembers. “They’ve never really had a strong arts component to the America’s Cup before, but they’ve never tried to do anything like they’re trying to do here.”

He’s referring to this particular race’s unique appeal for “a land-based audience.” Geographically speaking, some America’s Cup races are viewable only to television audiences and anyone who happens to have a boat hanging out within sight of the course; the San Francisco Bay obviously offers far more viewing opportunities for landlubbers.

“If you do either of the two largest sporting events in the world — the Olympics and the World Cup — an arts festival is mandatory. You can’t even bid on the Olympics unless you have a festival that’s going to run alongside it,” Wood explains. “[The event will then] appeal to more people. People will stay in the locale longer and spend more money — [especially important for] the America’s Cup, where there’s only racing for an hour a day.”

Money is always a factor when planning for an arts festival of any size, particularly something large enough to entertain 200,000-ish people.

“We can raise a lot of our own money, but what we need is some type of agreement that says we can go out and raise it as the name ‘America’s Cup’,” Wood says, noting that he’s already broached the subject of fundraising with some of the consulates representing countries with boats entered in the race. He’d like to bring artists from all of the participating countries (so far: Italy, Spain, France, South Korea, New Zealand, China, and Sweden) to San Francisco to perform alongside Bay Area arts groups. His grand vision includes theme weeks for each country revolving around the various holidays that happen to fall within the race dates — for example, France’s Bastille Day, July 14.

 

AN IMPOSSIBLE DREAM?

Wood was optimistic after his first meeting with Mark Bullingham, then the America’s Cup director of marketing, in April 2011.

“Then I jumped into SFIAF in May,” Wood remembers. “When I came back in June or July, he’d resigned. We were never able to get traction with the America’s Cup after that.”

As time for fundraising grows short — and the America’s Cup deal shrinks and evolves as development plans are tinkered with; the latest incarnation was presented to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors March 27 — Wood holds out hope that an arts festival will be included in the deal. A little bit of hope.

“If they let the deal be signed without including an arts component — or even just mentioning ‘Well, we’ll have a future conversation around this’ — then Larry Ellison can do what he wants. Oracle can have some entertainment if they wish, or they can cut the entertainment if they wish,” he says. “The way the actual America’s Cup legislation is written at the moment, the city is going to let the America’s Cup Event Authority escape without having to commit to any type of arts program whatsoever.”

From the city’s point of view, that’s not entirely true. San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development acknowledged the importance of having an arts component in a memo titled “America’s Cup Neighborhood Engagement Strategy” presented to the Board of Supervisors February 22, 2012 — though so far, that’s been the only official word on the subject.

“We’re still trying to get our approvals here so we haven’t really moved much beyond [what’s in the memo],” says the OEWD’s Jane Sullivan, Communications Director for the America’s Cup project. “I think what we in the mayor’s office are concentrating on is trying to make sure the economic benefits spread across the city, and probably using the neighborhoods as a focus of how to do that. But certainly that would include the arts component in the neighborhoods and maybe beyond.”

One promising idea outlined in the memo is to use a smart phone app to help alert visitors to neighborhood activities, including arts events.

“There’s an app that exists right now called Sfarts.org that is a project between the [San Francisco] Arts Commission and Grants for the Arts,” Sullivan explains, noting that working with the San Francisco Travel Association would be a way to market the app to visitors.

Though discussions are “ongoing,” Sullivan says the city is focused on “coordination and promotion, and then helping to develop or further develop a robust technology platform to support that.”

When asked if she thinks an official, large-scale arts festival would make its way into the America’s Cup deal, she’s straightforward: “I do not think that’s going to happen.”

 

X GAMES 2.0

Tony Kelly — facilities manager at Bindlestiff Studio, and a longtime participant in San Francisco’s arts and political scenes — believes that arts events are “the only way to save the America’s Cup” in terms of reaping any of the event’s promised neighborhood economic impact.

“It’s not just having arts events, it’s putting them in places to draw people to the neighborhoods,” he says. “If people go to the races in the afternoon, then you draw them out into the neighborhoods for arts events in the evening, then they actually stay in the city longer. They go to restaurants, bars, hotels, and merchants.”

However, he cautions, “If you think this many people are showing up, you better have things for them to do. If you don’t think this many people are showing up, you better create things so that people do show up. Either way.”

He’s concerned about the city’s strategy of promoting existing arts events without offering additional support to arts groups.

“If the city pretends that we have this ongoing international arts festival any weekend of the year, and therefore we’ll just promote what we already have, and that’ll be our festival during the America’s Cup, that essentially works as a budget cut,” Kelly says. “There’s a certain amount of funding that dribbles down to the arts right now. It is what it is. And then they’re like, ‘We’re gonna add this whole other thing, and we hope you guys can add capacity to handle this stuff, because here come all these people. But no, we’re not going to support it at all.’ That’s a classic unfunded mandate. ‘Oh, you can take this on too.'”

Kelly, Wood, and other members of the arts community have brainstormed a hypothetical list of festival events: an America’s Cup-themed parade, allowing Sunday Streets on Market Street throughout the weeks of racing, outdoor musical performances, an art walk along the Embarcadero, and more, tapping into publicly-owned venues around the city. A sample budget was also drafted.

“It is definitely an example of what could be done fairly quickly and efficiently in this year’s budget, if anyone at City Hall chose to do so,” Kelly says.

Unsurprisingly, Wood shares Kelly’s frustration with the city’s let’s-promote-what’s-in-place plan. “San Francisco has this enormous arts infrastructure that it isn’t using properly,” he says. “Why not hotwire the system to create a program of events that would also complement [arts events which are] already going on? There’s been no real effort to try and corral what’s going on and figure out how it fits together, so that’s what we’ve been trying to do.”

Kelly remains skeptical that the America’s Cup will even draw the promised crowds; he suspects its actual impact on the city will more resemble the X Games — which San Francisco hosted in 1999 and 2000 — than an event “as big as multiple Super Bowls.”

He also views the city’s reluctance to support an arts festival as part of a larger, long-standing problem.

“San Francisco is this great, hip, fun, creative city — why is that? It’s because of the artists. But housing prices keep going up, so more artists have to leave,” he says. “However, when there’s an event that’s counting on us to actually deliver this stuff to the neighborhoods, there’s no support for it. Push is coming to shove and has for a number of years now, and this is just one more obvious, obvious example of it.”

SF allows bikes indoors, but its cycling goal is elusive

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When the Board of Supervisors this week voted 9-2 to require commercial building owners to allow employees to bring their bicycles indoors while they work, ordinance sponsor Sup. John Avalos hailed the legislation as an important step toward meeting the city goal of having 20 percent of all vehicle trips in the city be by bike by the year 2020.

“We are removing a barrier to people getting around the city by bicycle,” Avalos said at the March 6 hearing, noting that the measure addresses cyclists’ concern about bike theft and helps keep sidewalks uncluttered and racks and poles free for other cyclists to use.

While it’s true this may help make cycling a bit more attractive, San Francisco would have to take far bolder actions to get anywhere near meeting its 20 percent by 2020 goal, a target it set in 2010 with legislation sponsored by Board President David Chiu and one regularly touted in speeches by Mayor Ed Lee.

Just last month, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency released its latest bike count survey, which showed that about 3.5 percent of vehicle trips in the city are taken by bike, a 71 percent increase in the last five years, gains the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition lauded as “impressive.” Yet to reach the city’s goal would require a 571 percent increase in the next seven years – one that would seem unattainable at this pace.

“It’s a very ambitious but realistic goal,” SFBC director Leah Shahum told us, although she acknowledged it would require a drastic change in the city’s approach. “I’ve been impressed by how much Mayor Lee has touted the 20 percent by 2020 goal, but our city agencies need to step up their sense of urgency and commitment to meet that goal.”

The SFMTA is now finalizing a report on how to hit that 2020 target, which is scheduled for release next month. But agency spokesperson Paul Rose acknowledged the difficulty in meeting that goal: “It would take funding resources which at this point we don’t have.” He can’t yet say would it would take to meet the goal, which the report will outline, but he said, “We’re exploring what can be achieved with our available funding.”

Shahum said all studies by SFBC and other groups show concerns about safety is the biggest barrier to substantially increasing cycling in the city, and that most people need bike lanes – particularly paths physically separated from cars, known as cycle tracks – to feel safe. She praised the SFMTA for installing 20 miles of new bike lanes in the last two years, its fastest pace ever, “but that pace needs to double or triple to meet that goal.”

Instead, Mayor Lee has backed off a pledge he made last year to fast-track a short segment of bike lanes on dangerous sections of Oak and Fell streets that would connect two popular east-west bikeways: the Panhandle and the Wiggle. That project was delayed by a year for more meetings and work after motorists objected to the loss of street parking spots.

“We’re talking about three blocks. It’s relatively small in scope but huge in impacts,” Shahum said of the project. “If the pace of change on these three blocks is replicated through the city, it’ll take hundreds of years to meet the goal.”

In his run for mayor last year, Chiu regularly touted the 20 percent goal he set in 2010 after returning from a fact-finding trip to the Netherlands – where about 38 percent of vehicle trips are by bike – that he took with SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin, SFBC members, and officials from other cities. Chiu says that San Francisco might be further along than the SFMTA figures show, citing an SFBC poll showing that 5 percent of San Franciscans say they ride a bike daily and another 12 percent ride more than once a week.

“Whatever the current percentage is, we have a long way to go. We have to be bolder about specific projects and strategies,” Chiu told us. He said there is a growing recognition that promoting cycling is an important way to address traffic congestion and greenhouse gas reduction and that “segregated bikes lanes are the most efficient way to move the most people through areas of urban density.”

Chiu also said that San Francisco could be poised for rapid progress on the creation of new bikes lanes, citing early opposition to replacing parking spaces with parklets and the car-free Sunday Streets (which kicks off its new season this Sunday along the Embarcadero) events, with the business community and many neighborhood groups fearing that restrictions on motorists would hurt businesses.

“The experience has turned out to be exactly the opposite,” Chiu said, noting the explosion in demand for parklets and new Sunday Streets events in the last couple years, saying that a widening embrace of more cycle tracks and other biking infrastructure could be next.

Mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey told us, “The mayor is very much committed to the aggressive goals set to get to 20 percent by 2020 and the city is moving in the right direction. He has also always supported the Oak Fell project and we’re seeing progress. It will be complete in 2013 and he has been talking to the SFMTA about the project to keep up to date. San Francisco is on its way to becoming the most bicycle friendly city in the U.S. and in this era of limited public funding, the mayor is working with the SFMTA to explore what ways we can increase trips taken by bicycle with available funding and increased public awareness.”

She cited the Avalos legislation and the current installation of cycle tracks on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park as examples of the city’s commitment to “move us toward the goal of 20 percent,” but many in the cycling community consider these efforts to be low-hanging fruit – easy, cheap, and non-controversial improvements – that won’t get the city anywhere near its stated goal.

Bike activist Marc Salomon is critical of the incremental approaches taken by SFBC and the city, saying that to make significant progress the city needs to address enforcement and the culture on the roadways, protecting cyclists from aggressive or impatient motorists and recognizing that many traffic laws don’t make sense for cyclists.

“We need to change the culture of the cops to make sure every street is a safe street,” he said. Shahum said that’s an issue SFBC is trying to address: “We are talking to them about how police could better enforce dangerous behaviors.”

Yet any efforts to promote cycling will likely be met with a backlash by motorists who resent losing space to cyclists and the fact that many cyclists routinely run stop signs and lights. Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu voted against the Avalos legislation, with Chu objecting to city staff evaluating businesses that seek waivers based on limited space or other factors, calling it a waste of precious resources.

But Avalos noted that his ordinance – which will be up for final approval on its second reading this Tuesday – has no enforcement mechanisms and “overall, this is a cost effective way to promote bicycling in the city. The costs are minimal.”

He also thanked the conservative Building Owners and Managers Association for supporting the legislation. Shahum said BOMA strongly opposed similar legislation almost 10 years ago and its embrace of it now shows how attitudes toward cyclists have changed. “There are so many more people biking now and the business community recognizes the benefits of having more of their employees biking,” she said.

Even politically moderate supervisors have been supportive of promoting cycling, with Sup. Scott Wiener saying at this week’s hearing, “It’s very important to make it as easy as possible to bike, and bike theft is a big issue in this city as well.”

Bikes and sailboats

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OPINION I’m not much of a sailor. In fact, I’ve been known to turn more than a little green when venturing out on the bay under sail. So it may seem a little odd that I am excited about the America’s Cup regatta coming to San Francisco. This high-profile international yacht race has the potential to accomplish even more impressive feats on land than on water, ultimately leaving a legacy of safer streets and more accessible neighborhoods.

An anticipated five million spectators will put the city’s transportation infrastructure to the test. It starts this summer with the qualifying races, then ramps up in summer, 2013, when upward of a half million people are expected to travel to the waterfront on peak race days.

There’s no possible way to move all of these people around this tightly packed city in cars. For proof, talk to anyone who’s been near the waterfront during Fleet Week, a traffic nightmare at a fraction of the size of the America’s Cup.

The Mayor’s Office plan for the America’s Cup wisely puts bicycle transportation front and center. Event planners and politicians know that traffic and parking constraints will preclude many from driving, and transit capacity can be stretched only so far so fast.

Event organizers propose investing in a robust bike share program, park-and-ride lots where visitors can ditch their cars on the edge of the city and pedal the last few miles, and plenty of secure valet bike parking lots.

The most important component is ensuring that the city also invests in safe, comfortable routes welcoming the wide diversity of people who will be trying out two wheels — people who are likely to continue biking long after the events if they have a good experience.

A top priority must be the Embarcadero. Already an enormously popular — and overcrowded — bike route for locals and visitors, the Embarcadero should be made more welcoming to the huge numbers of people who will be drawn there on bikes and by foot.

On big event days, the plan calls for temporarily designating an existing travel lane as bicycle-only space and freeing up the pathway for walking — a more comfortable set-up for everyone.

I urge city leaders to take advantage of this opportunity to pilot a permanent, dedicated bikeway on the waterside of the roadway — the EmBIKEadero. It’s a low-cost, easy way to reconnect people with the waterfront and offer an unparalleled biking experience.

Imagine riding on a mini-version of Sunday Streets on the Embarcadero any day of the week. Imagine a New York City-style high line for S.F.’s waterfront, from Mission Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge. Imagine a way to connect diverse neighborhoods and draw people to local businesses…long after the yachts have left the bay.

The city should also use the momentum behind the America’s Cup to test other opportunities for safe, more welcoming streets, including Polk Street, a major connector to the northern waterfront and already an important route for the growing number of people biking in San Francisco.

Market Street should continue to be a site for innovation. Recent pilot programs prioritizing biking, walking, and transit are already proving to save bus riders time and the Muni system big dollars.

The America’s Cup is our opportunity not only to stage a world-class event, but to build toward a world-class bicycling city.

Leah Shahum is executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. To learn more about the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s vision for the EmBIKEadero, see connectingthecity.org

Gear up: Trevor Traynor’s lowrider captures cruise into the Mission

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Photographer Trevor Traynor is moved by lowriders. And he says he’s not the only one.

“Lowriders move people,” he wrote to the Guardian in an email interview. “Literally and figuratively. When you’re cruising people smile, wave, they take pictures. The cars connect people of all walks of life and the clubs enjoy it as well. It keeps people productive with a strong passion in cars.”

You can tap into his love for the low on Thu/3, when Traynor’s photo show “Low Life” opens at The Summit SF in the Mission.

Though the Mac-sprouting coffeeshop might seem like an odd venue for a show that celebrates the Mission’s Latino car clubs, the San Francisco-based shutterbug’s exhibition will be hanging just a few blocks away from where his passion for lowriders was first spawned on Cinco de Mayo in 2010. 

“As a native New Yorker, seeing 30-plus lowriders cruising low and slow, hopping on three wheels down Mission Street was something new and exciting and the energy [could] not be ignored,” Traynor recalls. The sight was enough to get him in a ride. “I remember hanging out of the back of a mint 1969 yellow [author’s note: he’s also described it as “flan-colored”] Buick Skylark Convertible while Lexxx from the Padrinos Car Club drove nice and slow for me to steady my camera.”

Traynor’s body of work has tended to specialize in hip-hop culture — he’s shot everyone from Mos Def and E-40 to Lil’ B and N.E.R.D. over the years. But since that Cinco, Traynor has ridden with a score of Bay Area clubs: The Inspirations (the only cars people are stoked to see when Sunday Streets hits the Mission), Padrinos, Pachuco, Aztecas, Excandalow, Frisco’s Finest, Bay Riders, and Fo’ Fifteen Car Club among others. The images from the show come from outside the Bay, too — places like Santa Fe and Sacramento make appearances. On opening night, they’ll be accompanied by shifting motion visuals from John Coyne, and DJs bumping lowrider anthems from the Summit sound system.  

It’s clear from looking at the shots of the cars and their riders that result that he digs the aesthetic (craziest thing he’s ever seen airbrushed on a ride: “A nude angel goddess holding two smoking guns riding a fire-breathing dragon above the pits of hell”) but he insists that these are more than just pretty machines. 

“Lowriders hold history in the Chicano community. [The cars’ purpose is] a sense of pride, passion, and respect. Car clubs are a small community, a family, a group of friends that are all car-loving aficionados.” He’s even seen car clubs that do youth outreach programs and toy drives. 

“Some people wake up on a sunny Sunday and go golfing, go to the park, go to the courts, go hiking. Car clubs cruise. Lowriding is a lifestyle.”

 

“Low Life”

Through Dec. 1

Opening reception: Thu/3 7-10 p.m., free

The Summit

780 Valencia, SF

(415) 861-5330

www.thesummit-sf.com

 

Carfree crowd praises SFMTA’s choice of Reiskin

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Today’s announcement of Ed Reiskin as the new executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is being warmly welcomed by bicyclists, transit riders, and other advocates for alternatives to the automobile – and not just because Reiskin doesn’t own a car and gets around by bike and Muni.

As the head of the Department of Public Works, Reiskin transformed the agency into one that facilitated the creation of more vibrant public spaces and safer, multi-use streets, overseeing some of the Newsom Administration’s most significant progressive accomplishments.

“He really began the process of turning DPW into a complete streets agency,” says Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and an elected member of BART’s Board of Directors. He noted that Reiskin is widely respected by city staff, department heads, and a variety of community groups.

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition director Leah Shahum said she was “really pleased” with the choice – saying Reiskin has been “lights years ahead” of previous DPW administrators – and said it bodes well for an agency that faces some difficult challenges.

“I think Ed Reiskin has proven himself as a leader and someone who is really involved with San Francisco,” she said. “He will be the MTA director who most understands the real needs that San Franciscans have in terms of mobility.”

For example, she said Reiskin prioritized repaving and filling in potholes on streets that have bike lanes, where bad pavement can cause serious crashes or conflicts with drivers. “The fact is he understands that is a safety issue,” she said.

Radulovich offered two cautionary notes in his praise of the choice. The first was his hope that Reiskin will be allowed to take the bold action the MTA needs to reform Muni and create truly mulit-modal, safe streets, rather than being micromanaged and having the agency turned into a piggybank for other departments, as Mayor Newsom did with former MTA director Nat Ford.

“Is the mayor finally going to allow the MTA director to do what he needs to do to fix the agency?” Radulovich asked.

Secondly, he fears that DPW might backslide to the days before Reiskin took over, when the agency was removing public benches all over the city and making public spaces less inviting, rather than taking the lead on creating new, more inviting public spaces – from parklets to Sunday Streets – as Reiskin did.

“The worst case is you don’t gain anything at the MTA and you lose something at Public Works,” Radulovich said.

For his part, Mayor Ed Lee sounded a note of optimism that Reiskin will transform the agency. “I thank the SFMTA Board of Directors for their thoughtful, deliberative and unanimous support of Ed Reiskin as the new leader of the SFMTA,” Lee in a prepared statement. “Now is the time to focus on the future of the SFMTA and continue to make good on our promise to San Francisco transit riders and taxpayers by creating greater efficiency in our transit system, improving on-time performance, and honoring our City’s Transit First Policy.”

Everybody loves parklets

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The Chronicle’s urban design writer John King, consistently one of the paper’s best writers, today took a celebratory look at the parklets that have been springing up around town, calling them, “the most intriguing urban design innovation in today’s San Francisco.” I agree with that sentiment, and so does the crowd that showed up on Sunday to dedicate “the Deeplet,” the first such parklet in front of a residential property.

It was a collaboration between homeowner Amandeep “Deep” Jawa, his girlfriend Kimberly Conley, and designer Jane Martin, who King quotes in his piece (which only Chron subscribers and read until Sunday when it goes public). The idea is to take underutilized space from automobiles and give it back to people.

Livable City director Tom Radulovich also spoke at the event, talking about how the streets were traditionally the gathering and social spaces in cities, until transportation planners started to value the efficient movement and storage of automobiles over a more inclusive view of streets. But the parklets – along with temporary street seizures like the Sunday Streets events – are part of a movement back to a more holistic view of city spaces.

We at the Guardian have been sympathetically covering this trend for years, and it is notably one of the few areas of agreement that we’ve had with the Chronicle and former Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose administration cleared the way for the permitted creation of parklet. And on this beautiful summer day, agreeing on the importance of having places to lounge and to just be seems like a great starting point for more discussions on the future of this great city.

Pedaling out in front: Bike Music Festival 2011 shows us what it takes

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Chilling in the middle of Saturday evening traffic in the Stanyan-Kezar intersection doesn’t seem like a situation engineered to produce warm fuzzy feelings. But the aggressive honk cloud of surely confused, possibly perturbed automobiles behind me mattered little – I was digging too much on the tandems, trailers, and trees rolling past me on two (and three, holler back trikes!) wheels. 

In a way, that was all part one of the Bicycle Music Festival organizers, Paul “Fossil Fool” Freedman’s plan. Freedman (who we profiled in our recent Bike To Work issue), co-founder Gabe Dominguez, the Rock the Bike crew, and a superhuman pack of volunteers, staged the fifth year of their outdoor festival on June 18. Once again, it was completely pedal-powered, from the stage to the smoothies.

The fest started out in Golden Gate Park, in a concave field near Stowe Lake. But it was no day in the park to implement, this plan. 

At the festival’s peak, 12 in-shape attendees, pumping away on bikes hooked up to electrical generators, were needed to keep the tunes going. A flashing LED stick and a multi-colored tube holding a floating soda can were used to monitor the voltage being produced. 

When I hopped aboard for my turn to pump up the jams, I was surprised to find that the levels being generated by the bikers weren’t always enough to keep the music moving. In fact, during the second-to-last set of the night (when temperatures were dropping rapidly and a tired crowd had begun to disperse), rapper Ashel Eldrige lost power momentarily.

Periodically, a core volunteer held up a handmade “PEDAL” sign. To, you know, make people pedal harder. 

This would cause a meltdown in many event organizers — but then, Freedman’s not your typical event organizer. “I think it’s cool that it works that way,” he said in a phone interview with the Guardian.

“We’re used to things being ‘on.’ I think it’s a cool message that if you don’t show up, we’re not going to be able to have our festival.”

For Freedman, the Bicycle Music Festival is more about the journey. In fact, it was his favorite part of Saturday. After an already full day featuring female Latin rock vocalists, pedal-churned ice cream, mass instances of square-dancing, and a solid chunk of klezmer, it was time to pack it all up and head to the next location – Showplace Triangle, an intersection in Potrero Hill that has been converted into a temporary community plaza by urban sustainability group Rebar. There, the second half of the lineup would commence, including tunes from the California Honeydrops and an aerial acrobatist who’d cavort from a hoop attached to Freedman’s infamous tree-on-a-bike, El Arbol.

Around six p.m., volunteers had racked up all stage equipment (including the Ginger Ninjas, a three piece band who re-stationed itself on the stage after it had been securely affixed to the back of a three wheeled trike), all the bike-powered smoothie machines, and lineup posters. The hundreds of biking music lovers at the fest had also boarded their bikes, and we all looked on in awe at the bike mechanic flaunting of the laws of physics that was being performed. 

I had volunteered to help out as a “turn marshall” on the ride so that my fellow partiers could cruise without fear of being crushed by an impatient commuter, so I was up at the front of the pack near the more complicated endeavors. 

“This isn’t the first time that you’re… doing this, right?” I asked Mark Sullivan, the brave soul who had been selected (while he was out of the room, he told me) to tote the live music across town. “Well, we’ve done it. Maybe not with all the equipment, but yeah…” I made a mental note not to ride in front of the band bike going down a hill. 

Off we went, the music playing, and random spurts of cheering erupting as they are wont to do in such mass bike rides. I detached on Stanyan street to cork traffic and watch the parade of bikes and music and festival. It was a welcome break in my day – and gave me those aforementioned warm fuzzies to be doing something for the fun. But for reports on the rest of the ride we’ll have to turn to Freedman: 

“I was really praying for Mark when he was climbing the hill in East Mission. If he had stopped, the trailer would have fallen over. I had an amazing view because I was up high on the tree, but I couldn’t help, so I was just watching him. Then I was praying the brakes would be sound going down the hill.”

Halfway through the ride, at Duboce Park, the second act took the stage: opera singers from the San Francisco Conservatory. 

“People were leaning out of windows, it was real street theater,” says Freedman. “Opera doesn’t have a strong beat, but the audio was excellent, and the way [the sound] was echoing off of buildings – it didn’t hurt the song. One singer would give the rock sign after each track ended and everyone would cheer.”

Looking back on the day, its organizer is proud, but convinced that it’s just the beginning. “I don’t think we nailed it like we could have. I’m very grateful for where we are right now, but it can only get better.”

Even more important that the audio quality, Freedman looks forward to growing the people portion of the Bike Music Festival – partially for selfish reasons (he’d like to be able to dance more next year). 

Christopher Drellow is Freedman’s neighbor. Saturday was his first major role in one of the bike music productions – he rode a heavily loaded bike and trailer from his home in the Mission to both concert locations, and then home at the end of the day. He started out concerned about the heavy load he was toting, but as the day progressed, got sucked into the endless possibilities of bike cargo. 

“Because at that point it seemed clear that, well fuck it, it can clearly be done. I even invited passengers onto the load because suddenly [I] became interested in what can’t be done on these things — like, at what point will this fail? Or call it my hubris, that’s fine too.”  

All told, he was bike-musicking from nine a.m. to three in the morning, which gave him ample time to reflect on what it meant to power over 15 musical acts for a daylong party.

“I guess primarily what I’ve been thinking about has been BMF indicating a kind of proof that transitioning off fossil fuel driven machines will not be easy. And that it will be totally doable.”

All the hustling, all the saddle sores – these are the real cost of powering a festival. Somewhat akin to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent, much ballyhooed decision to eat only the animals that he killed personally, one has to wonder if people would party the same way if they knew what it cost in fossil fuel to bring the beat back (and back, and back).

Or maybe low-emission festivity would just mean a shift in what we think of as a celebration. “ People pitch in their different skills and talents and energy and love,” says Freedman. “We need positive examples of that to reaffirm our faith in living together in a city. There are advantages to living in a tight space, you can pull things off that you can’t do in car culture suburbia.”

Says Drellow: “It’s something of a time-honored tradition for people to cling to the assumption that something is impossible until someone else goes out and does it. Seeing the work done is something people kind of need. And okay, perhaps there are circumstances where bicycles are not the solution. But they seem to work pretty damn well beyond our common understanding of them. So I guess that’s what Paul Freedman is doing.”

 

Rock the Bike is working on the first NYC bike-powered music festival this weekend. (Freedman told us it’ll have the “most amazing” pedal-powered sound yet.) If you’re East Coastin’, check it out. The crew will be back in SF to perform at the July 10 Great Highway Sunday Streets and the July 31 SF Marathon.

 

City officials pedal and praise on Bike to Work Day

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photos by Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal

Almost every top city official pedaled up to City Hall this morning for the 17th annual Bike to Work Day, all pledging their support for expanding safe cycling opportunities in San Francisco and declaring the bike to be a vital part of the city’s transportation infrastructure that will only grow in importance in the coming years.

“We should all feel proud that we have more to celebrate than ever in the history of Bike to Work Day,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which sponsored the event and facilitated the rides by city officials, including riding Sups. Jane Kim and Carmen Chu to work on tandem bikes. Shahum praised the city for rapidly expanding the network of bike lanes and facilities over the last year.

Shahum accompanied Mayor Ed Lee on a ride along JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park (which Lee announced will soon get the city’s next separated green bikeway), along car-clogged Fell and Oak streets, through the Wiggle, and along Market Street toward City Hall.

Lee told us, “I feel good, exhilarated,” as he neared City Hall, where he and officials gave speeches praising bikes and calling for improvements to the system. “I want to experiment with ways to have detached bike lanes on Fell and Oak,” Lee said to the applause of cyclists familiar with competing with cars on those fast-moving streets.

Lee also declared his support for the goals of SFBC’s Connecting the City initiative, which calls for a system of safe, crosstown bikeways, connecting the bay to the ocean and the northern waterfront to the south side of the city. He also called for continuing the green bike lanes on Market Street all the way to the Ferry Building and said, “I’m dedicated to it.”

Board President David Chiu, who sponsored the legislation that set the goal of achieving 20 percent of all vehicle trips by bicycle by the year 2020, said he was proud to see so many bikes on the streets today. “Thank you for showing the world how we roll,” he told the crowd, also voicing his support for the crosstown bike route plan. “We have to imagine safe enough conditions for 8- and 80-year-olds to bike.”

“It makes us a healthier, happier, and more vibrant city when we bike together,” Sup. Eric Mar told the gathering.

Sup. Sean Elsbernd was the only member of the board not to bike today, but his fellow fiscal conservative Sup. Mark Farrell biked in from District 2 and told the gathering that improving the city’s bicycling infrastructure “is critical to our future.”

Chu doesn’t ride a bike, but she hoped on a tandem bike with SFBC board member Amandeep Jawa and told him, “Thanks for helping me see San Francisco in a new way,” noting her new appreciation for the sights, smells, and small details that opened up along a route to work that she usually drives.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi called his District 5 the “epicenter” for cycling in the city and declared, “It’s time that we take back Masonic Boulevard…to make sure it’s safe for bicyclists and pedestrians.”

Sup. Jane Kim told the crowd, “I grew up a city girl and I never learned how to ride a bike,” but said that former SFBC director Dave Snyder and others have been trying to teach her recently. In her ride in on the back of a tandem bike, “I got to feel how unsafe it is to have cars and buses jostle around you.”

Sup. Scott Wiener told the gathering, “This was my first Bike to Work Day and it’s not going to be my last.”

Sup. David Campos told us he really enjoyed his ride up Valencia Street, where the stoplights are timed to the pace of bicyclists. “It’s the best ride in the city. If we can make more streets like Valencia we’d be in better shape,” Campos told us.

In his speech, Campos said, “We have so much happening around bicycling, bu we also have a long way to go.”

Sup. Malia Cohen said she biked the longest way in to City Hall, all the way from 3rd Street and Thomas, and that she was happy about both the bike infrastructure improvements and carfree events like Sunday Streets. “I want to encourage you all to come out to the Bayview for Sunday Streets [on June 12],” she said.

For all the celebration and improvements to the system, Sup. John Avalos said it’s important to continue establishing respect on the roads for bicyclists. “We have to change many minds about biking in San Francisco,” he said.

To illustrate the increasingly important role that bicycling is playing in San Francisco, SFMTA Commissioner Cheryl Brinkman cited city studies showing a 58 percent increasing in the number of cyclists on the streets of San Francisco over the last four years, noting a comparable increase in Muni ridership or in motorists on the roads would have resulted in gridlock in those systems.

“It’s a good lesson for us,” Brinkman said, voicing support for the goal to creating 100 miles of dedicated bikeways throughout the city in order to promote safe cycling.

The fun side of bikes

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steve@sfbg.com

Paul Freedman, a.k.a. the Fossil Fool, is a singer-songwriter and builder of elaborate art bikes who lives in San Francisco’s Mission District. Since 2001, when he decided to apply his Harvard University education to building custom bikes, accessories, pedal-powered products, and mobile sound systems, Freedman created Fossil Fool and Rock the Bike to sell his creations and provide a platform for his performances and alternative transportation advocacy work.

But anyone who’s watched Freedman build and ride his creations — such as his latest, El Arbol, a 14-foot fiberglass tree built around a double-decker tall bike with elaborate generator, sound, and lighting systems and innovative landing gears — knows this is a serious labor of love by an individual at the forefront of Bay Area bike culture. We caught up with him recently to discuss his work and vision.

SFBG How did Rock the Bike start?

FOSSIL FUEL I was working at a shop in Berkeley and I decided to make my first bike music system, which I called Soul Cycles. So I had that other job at a bicycle nonprofit, which is cool, and that was the first impetus. I did two innovative things with my first bike music system: I put the controls on the handlebars, which I’d never seen anyone do, and I put speaker back-lighting to make the speakers look nice at night. I used a really nice CFL fluorescent lamp, and I started playing around with those and it looked great, so that was our first product for those first three or four years.

SFBG What was going on in the larger culture at the time that led you to believe your interest in bikes and technology was going to be fruitful or make an interesting statement?

FF I care deeply about biking and a lot of the people I was with did too, but I felt like the bicycle advocacy scene was not very effective when it came to actual outreach. I felt like the thing that had been really formative for me was this person-to-person interaction, in my case by hanging out with the guys who started Xtracycle, and going on quests to get ingredients for dinner and riding late at night with the music systems on the tour. I felt like those experiences were what made bicycling appealing, but the bike advocacy scene was using guilt trips and telling people you should ride a bike because you’re too fat and you should ride a bike because there’s too much traffic. And I felt like we needed to shift that mindset and really start focusing on the fun aspects of biking and the social aspects to grow the scene.

SFBG Do you feel like it has, and what effect do you think it had on those who weren’t already riding bikes?

FF I think it’s moving that direction. Even within traditional bike advocacy groups, those people are starting to really focus on their events and creating community, in a good way, and challenging themselves with doing so. And I think that’s really positive.

SFBG Your timing also dovetailed with heightened green awareness — with a push for renewable energy, concerns over peak oil, and things like that.

FF Yeah, I feel that transportation choices are the main thing people need to examine about their lives with respect to their impact on global warming. And that’s not just a feeling, that’s the consensus of the Union of Concerned Scientists. They say that if you want to have an impact on the planet, positive or negative, the first thing you should consider is your transportation habits. So that means flying, it means driving, and everything else. I don’t think it’s really beneficial to focus on what people need to do with a car, like they need to drop their kids off. It’s more important how people do the optional things with cars like the trips to Tahoe, and the flights to Mexico. It’s those optional things I want to focus on, which is why I’m so interested in Sunday Streets, which is like the antidote. It’s this thing you can do here, that you can walk and bike to, that’s as fun as driving to Tahoe.

SFBG Through your technology and design work, it also seems like you’re showing a broad range of what people can do on a bike, with lots of cargo or a whole performance stage setup. Do you think design is convincing people that bikes are more versatile that they thought they were?

FF Oh yeah, I think that would be a really beneficial outcome of this work. By riding through town with our music gear, of course people are going to look at that and think, oh yeah, I could probably go to Rainbow Grocery and buy a bunch of food for my household on a bike. So it would be a great outcome if people would make that connection.

SFBG Is there anything about San Francisco that makes people here more receptive to your message?

FF San Francisco is a very tight city geographically. It’s not like Phoenix. The blocks are pretty short here and the distances are pretty short here, and you can ride year-round here, which is not true in Boston where I grew up.

SFBG The focus on technology and design here also probably helps, right?

FF Oh, for sure. This is an awesome place to be prototyping and doing funky mechanical, electrical art. There’s a lot of support for it. There are places like Tap Plastics for learning about fiberglass. There are lots of electronics stores that serve the Silicon Valley tech developer communities. You can buy stuff there that’s helpful. You can learn about Arduino [an open source microprocessor] at Noisebridge. There are a lot of resources for doing interactive art here or for doing bicycle-related projects. There are a lot of welders here.

SFBG Where do you think we are on the arch with this stuff — the beginning, the middle? — in terms of gaining wider acceptance of biking as an imperative and an option for anyone?

FF I think there’s an important generational shift underway, and I don’t know whether it’s my focus on bikes that leads me to meet all these kinds of people, but it feels like I’m meeting more people these days that are going to pick their next city or their next neighborhood based on how it is to bike there. They’re bringing it up in conversation, it’s not me. So it seems like people are really considering what their daily life is going to be like and how the community feels, and biking is one of the symbols of a whole swath of other beneficial things. They know that if they see a bunch of bikes when they visit a place, then there’s probably a lot of other cool stuff like music, arts, farmers markets. Those kinds of things are sort of linked together, and the bike is the key indicator. So there’s been this generational change of thought. The idea that having a bigger, faster car is better, I just don’t think that’s popular with these people. They no longer believe it.

SFBG It’s having cooler bike.

FF It’s having cooler bike and being able to use it and not have to step into the stress of car culture if you can avoid it.

SFBG What’s your next step?

FF One of the really positive things for me has been the Rock the Bike community, with its roadies, performers, musicians — all types of people who are on our e-mail list. So I can just say, I need three roadies for a three-hour performance slot and there’s going to be a jam at the end, so bring your instruments. That’s an awesome thing and it’s just going to improve, so I think the community will grow as we continue do gigs where we have fun and the people have fun.

In terms of my own art, this tree [gesturing to his El Arbol bike] has been my focus for the last year or two, and it’s not done yet. It has to look undeniably like a tree. It looks like a tree, but with a light green bark that you really don’t see in nature, so that has to change. I want it to have brown bark, but I still want it to do beautiful things at night with translucency. And I want it to have a true canopy of leaves, so that when you’re far away from it at Sunday Streets and you’re wondering whether to go over there, you’ll see a tree. Not just a representation of a tree, but I want them to be like, how the hell did he ride a tree over here?

SFBG Why a tree?

FF I don’t know. You get these ideas, and you start drawing them and can’t shake them. There are all sorts of reasons why trees are interesting. They are gathering points.

SFBG And you’re doing some very innovative design work on this bike, such as the landing gear.  

FF The roots. Yeah, that’s never been done before. Through the course of doing the project, people would send me tips and interesting things, and one guy sent me a link to a photo of tall bikes being used in Chicago in the early 1900s as gas lamp lighting tools, and they were very tall. I’d say 10 to 12 feet tall, and they were tandems, so there was a guy on top and a stoker on the bottom providing extra power, and they didn’t have landing gears. So they would ride from one lamp to another and hold the lamp as they refilled it. And I just love that story because if you were growing up in Chicago, and you saw these gas lamp people coming by in the early evening to turn the lights on, and if you were a little kid trying to fall asleep or whatever, that would have an indelible mark on your childhood, and that whimsical quality is what I’m going for. That should be part of what it’s like to grow up in the Mission District in 2011.

SFBG How does that fit into the other cultural stuff that you’re also bringing to the bike movement, the music you’re writing, design work, the style, and the events that you’re creating?

FF Sometimes I wish it wasn’t so multipronged. I would clearly be a better performer and musician if it was the only thing I did, so I apologize to all my fans for not putting 100 percent into the music. But I put 100 percent into the whole thing, including creating bikes and running Rock the Bike, which is a business.

SFBG But are you doing all these things because you find a synergy among them?

FF It’s the fullest expression of who I am.

SFBG Where do you see this headed? What will Rock the Bike be like five years from now?

FF I would like to see the quality of our entertainment offerings steadily improve to the point where people genuinely look forward to it, and not just to the gee-whiz aspect of look what they’re doing, but just for the feeling of being there. So I’d like to challenge ourselves with the quality of the music, how it is to be engaged in the setup process — because I think the setup is cool, with biking to the event and engaging in the transition to a spectacle, where every step along the way is part of the show. I like that idea. I’d like to challenge ourselves to be a carbon-free Cirque du Soleil, a show that is slamming entertainment and they bike there and pedal-power everything: the lighting, the sound, the transportation. And I want the performers to be just as good.

SFBG Are there people in other cities doing similar things?

FF The Bicycle Music Festival is spreading to other cities, which is cool. I think there are going to be over a dozen bicycle music festivals this summer. In terms of people doing really inspiring work with bike culture or this kind of mobile art, you definitely see some amazing things at Burning Man. That’s probably one of the best venues for this type of art. But I can’t think of another city where people are doing all of this. I’m part of a group on Flickr called Bicycle and Skater Sound Systems, and there’s nothing on that whole group that I see as being on this level. I don’t know why.

SFBG When you ride a cool custom bike down the street, the reactions it elicits from passersby is just so strong and happy. What is that about?

FF It’s a reaction to an expression of personal freedom. People light up when they see you expressing yourself, and a part of them thinks, oh yeah, that would be fun, I’d like to express myself. And there are just so many ways to express yourself and be human — and that’s something that we need to remind ourselves because, in many ways, our personal freedoms are declining and there’s more surveillance.

SFBG And people might take that spark and do any number of things with it.

FF One of the very cool things about bicycle art is that it’s mobile. So you ride your bike and you might turn heads a couple dozen times a day. I ride this tree, and if it’s in the full mode where it’s 14-feet tall and there’s music on, and I’m going from here to Golden Gate Park, I’d estimate that 500 people see it. There’s probably no other art form you can do that with. I can’t think of any other that’s like that. So it’s a really cool art form. Those people aren’t paying you, but you shared art with them, and it’s a good way to get exposure. It’s a great way for a lot of people to see your art.

SFBG With your mobile, pedal-powered stages, you’re also demonstrating green ways of powering even stationary art.

FF It is an interesting time for pedal power. I feel like there’s a turning point that’s maybe beginning in the field of events with how they’re powered. I think there are going to be a lot more people who are going to festivals in the coming years who are looking at the diesel generators and saying, ‘My summertime festival experience is being powered by diesel.’ And I think there are going to be a lot of people seeing that and wanting to do something else.

SFBG Have the technologies for how much juice you’re able to get out of pedal power been advancing since you’ve been working on it?

FF Yes, it’s truly impressive right now, particularly if you’re putting that juice into music because we have very efficient generators where there’s no friction interface anymore, nothing rolling on the tire, it’s all just ball bearings rolling on the hub. Then we put that power into these new modified amps, and they have a DC power supply now, as opposed to an AC power supply, so we don’t have to put the power into an inverter. So the net sum of that is one person can pedal-power dance music for 200 people, which is pretty amazing and inspiring.

SFBG And the battery technology is also improving, right?

FF Yeah, the batteries are what you use for the mobile rides, and that’s getting better. If you’ve been to a bike party, it’s just incredible how many good, loud sound systems there are right now. It’s a very kinetic art form, although I wish people would focus more on the visual aspects of their system, because I feel like there’s a trend to get big and loud fast. But I wish there were more people doing the work that Jay Brummel is doing, where he doesn’t just want to ride on a bicycle, so he turned his bike into a deer and he steers by holding the antlers.

SFBG But there has been some push-back from the police. Have you gotten many tickets?

FF Well, I got tickets for riding up high on this quadracycle. There is a law against riding tall bikes in California. It says you shouldn’t ride a bicycle in such as manner as to not be able to stop safely and put your foot down. Obviously you can’t put your foot down on a tall bike.

SFBG The fact that you have landing gears on your bike didn’t make a difference?

FF Well the officer didn’t take it seriously, but the court sided in my favor. The judge was flipping through photos of the landing gear the entire trial — he couldn’t stop flipping through them. And he asked, ‘How do you get on? Where do you step?’ So I was like, ‘Well, you step here, you step there, and you swing.’ It was pretty fun. 

BICYCLE MUSIC FESTIVAL

Saturday, June 18

11 a.m.–10 p.m., free

Various locations, SF

www.rockthebike.com

www.fossilfool.com


 

The rise of bike culture

6

steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco has quickly peddled back into the front of the pack among bicycle-friendly U.S. cities, regaining the ground it lost during a four-year court injunction against new bike projects that was partially lifted in November 2009 and completely ended last June.

Since then, the streets of San Francisco have been transformed as the city completed 19 long overdue bike projects, including 11 miles of new bike lanes, 40 miles of “sharrow” shared lane markings, and hundreds of new bike racks. The city’s first physically separated green bike lanes on Market Street are now being extended, and new ones are being added on Alemany and Laguna Honda boulevards.

“The crews are out on Market Street right now filling in the new green bikeway,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Director Leah Shahum told us on May 6. “Far and away the No. 1 encouragement to getting people to bike is to make sure they feel safe.”

But it isn’t just bike lanes and other infrastructure that are causing bicycling to blossom in San Francisco. Bike culture is also exploding in myriad ways, including events such as the San Francisco Bike Party and Rock the Bike shows we profile in this issue, as well as the popularity of the monthly neighborhood street closures of Sunday Streets.

At the most recent Sunday Streets in the Mission District on May 8, Valencia and 24th streets were packed with thousands of people riding bikes, skating, and walking, or engaged with activities — in streets usually dominated by cars — such as yoga, art projects, shopping, and dancing.

“It’s a celebration. It’s not about confrontation anymore, it’s about bringing people along with a more expanded idea of how we can use public space,” Sunday Streets Coordinator Susan King told us at the event.

She said Sunday Streets has helped bridge the gap between families and the bicycling and skating communities, as well as cutting across classes, cultures, and communities. The response to the event has been phenomenal, she noted, and she hopes to see a similar momentum leading up to the next Sunday Streets event on June 12 in the Bayview.

“The Bayview event is really important to us because we have extraordinary support from the Bayview merchants and they want to get more involved with the bicycling community,” King said.

The earnest work of SFBC, SFMTA, and other entities that have helped expand the bicycling infrastructure in San Francisco, bringing safe cycling opportunities into every neighborhood, has in turn allowed organic expressions of bike culture to flourish.

From hipsters on their colorful fixies to anarchists riding tall bikes, from old-school Schwinns to cargo-laden Xtracycles, from elaborate art bikes to simple bike trailers with amazing sounds systems, from old white guys in Spandex to the young black kids on custom scraper bikes, from the hardcore bike messengers to the tourists on rental bikes, from Critical Mass defiance to Bike Party celebration, the streets of San Francisco are brimming with bike culture diversity. And the only commonality, the only one that’s really needed, is a simple appreciation for pedal power.

“We need to get the message out that biking is fun — and that’s happening,” Smith said. “We need a paradigm shift, and I think we’re really on the cusp of that.”

BIKE TO WORK DAY

Energizer commute stations open:

Thurs/12 7:30–9:30 a.m. and 5–7 p.m., free

Check map on page 28 for locations

Bike From Work party and fashion show

Thurs/12 6–10 p.m., $5 SFBC members/$10 nonmembers (or join at the door and get in free)

DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF

www.sfbike.org

Kids on bikes

0

news@sfbg.com

To meet San Francisco’s policy goal of having 20 percent of all vehicle trips made by bicycle by the year 2020, advocates and officials say the city will need to make cycling more attractive to the young and old, from age 8 to 80. But there are some built-in challenges to getting more school children on bikes, even if there has been some recent progress, as demonstrated during the Bike to School Day in April.

“I see more and more middle and high school teams out there,” Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, said of the group rides to and from school that parents have been organizing.

According to a 2009 David Binder poll, seven out of 10 residents in San Francisco use a bicycle (this includes regular commuters and once-a-year riders) and last year’s city count of bike ridership from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s annual report saw a 58 percent increase in the number of cyclists on the road. At any given time during regular business weekday hours, some 9,210 riders pedal through the streets, according to last year’s results.

Children account for some of that increase, as demonstrated by the Bike to School Day event and its 3,000 riders — the most ever. Shahum attributes some of the increase to the new separated bikeways on Market Street, Alemany Boulevard, and Laguna Honda Boulevard, which allow children and their parents to feel safer. “When the bikeway was introduced, the numbers increased — there is growing demand.”

Programs like the Department of Public Health’s Safe Routes to School and SF Unified School District’s Student Support Services Department are helping to raise awareness of the improvements to encourage more cycling by young people.

Safe Routes to School Project Coordinator Ana Validzic said cycling is often more convenient than driving to school, particularly given the difficult parking situations at schools. Martha Adriasola, a committee member for the program, said parents and students also are attracted by the increased physical activity from cycling.

But a large portion of San Francisco’s grade school-bound population has yet to join the pedal revolution. Adriasola mentioned several reasons that prevent children from biking, including getting to schools on hills or far from home as well as the lack of bike storage at schools.

“There used to be a lot of concern about where to keep the bicycles,” Adriasola told the Guardian. But that’s changing thanks to a recent grant from the Department of Sustainability will provide bike racks for students at all schools in the district.

“That was one of the missing pieces,” Shahum said of the bike racks. “The district understands that it is good for the city for folks to ride their bikes.”

With new racks lining the campuses, the question remains whether there will be enough riders to fill them. Efforts to improve diversity in the school system and parent preferences for certain schools mean many kids travel across town to school.

Gentle Blythe, SFUSD’s executive director of public outreach and communications, said that last year the school board modified its school selection system to encourage more students to attend their local schools by resolving ties between applicants based on whether the applicant lives in the school’s attendance area. Currently, Blythe said, three out of every four applicants list a school that is not the one closest to their home as their first choice.

According to SFUSD’s 2010 fall enrollment maps, which show all the district’s elementary schools and compares them to the students’ residences, most of the 72 schools have as many students traveling from across the district as those living within a mile of the campus. Parker Elementary in North Beach is such an example, with an almost equal number living inside and outside the neighborhood, including some who live as far away as Visitacion Valley.

With such a long way to ride, it’s difficult for parents and those concerned with safety to feel comfortable allowing children to ride. But Shahum believes it’s still possible. SFBC’s Connecting the City project advocates for safe, cross-town bikeways throughout the city, which could draw more children onto the streets.

Shahum noted that bicycling increased dramatically even when there was a court injunction barring new bike projects. “Imagine the change we can expect when the changes do come,” she said.

She also said that events such as Sunday Streets, the monthly carfree streets events, are attracting families and encouraging them to start cycling together. So the answer to encouraging more youth cycling may be to make the streets safer and more inviting for everyone.

“We hope, through the Connecting the City vision, to see people riding on cross-town bikeways — for everyone from 8 to 80.” she said.