More Bike Debate: "Rob, you are a very very small person"

Anonymous wrote:

I believe you should do some research before you ask how the Bike Coalition can possibly know that people want bike lanes on San Jose. They know that people want it because they go into each neighborhood multiple times and conduct both bicycle and pedestrian/car/public-transit meetings for people to give their opinions and vote on multiple different versions of street designs for their neighborhood before the plans are submitted to be voted on by the city. It takes months to implement even small aspects of the bike plan. 

If the true problem is that residents deserve to know what is happening to their streets, a thousand-page environmental impact report filed with the city is not going to fill that void. By bringing this lawsuit on, not only have you cost the city money on the case, but the city and the SFBC will now have to divert time and money to producing something that does not alleviate the so-called main problem with the bike plan. 

To decide on one exact street design in order to comply with the review takes away the opportunity to be flexible during the planning and implementation process. The bike plan needs to be flexible in order to accommodate individual neighborhoods and situations, and you have taken that away. You have essentially shot yourself in the foot. Congratulations.

Despite the hole in his foot, Rob Anderson bravely wrote:
I believe you should also do some research before you post comments to this blog---on the law and CEQA, for example, which you don't even mention. The CEQA process provides more than doorstop-like documents; it also provides the public a chance to provide the city with input on the Bicycle Plan project, which didn't happen in this instance. Besides, allowing the SF Bicycle Coalition to perform the public outreach function is highly improper, since they are an advocacy group that has a stake in the outcome of the process. The SF Bicycle Coalition is not a public agency.

"The bike plan needs to be flexible in order to accommodate individual neighborhoods and situations, and you have taken that away." This statement nicely epitomizes how the city and the SFBC have been proceeding thus far: They are deciding what happens to the streets in city neighborhoods without a proper legal process. 

And there's this: under the law, you either have a specific project that people can respond to or you don't. The approach you outline gives the city and SFBC way too much authority to do what they will to city streets. Given the anti-car policies already in effect in the city, I don't trust either of those entities to do the right thing, and I suspect that a lot of people agree with me. In short, CEQA already contains a system of steps and procedures that govern the review of projects like the Bicycle Plan.

Two Superior Court judges now agree that the city has not complied with that law. The implication of your comment is that the city and the SFBC are somehow not obligated to do so, which is the kind of arrogance that got SF into its present fix. San Francisco would have saved a lot of everybody's time and money if they had just done the right and legal thing in the first place by doing an environmental review of the whole Bicycle Plan before they began implementing it.

Suisun Salman wrote:

Rob - you really are a very very small person. Poor little fellah. I say we circle your block in Bike Lanes about 8 times and install a permanent critcal mass there... how bout that?Funny thing is I only bike a couple days a month! But at least I believe in reality! Pathetic, small, lesser: Rob Anderson.

A Much Diminished Rob Anderson wrote:

You've witlessly expressed your anger and contempt twice now, but you still haven't discussed the issues, like the Bicycle Plan or the litigation that convinced Judge Busch to order the city to comply with state law. Depends on what you mean by "reality." 

Here's the reality I believe in: There are 452,813 motor vehicles registered in SF, along with 1000 Muni vehicles, and 25,000 motorists commuting into the city every weekday. On the other hand, only 1-2% of the city's population commutes by bicycle, which tells me that redesigning city streets on behalf of cyclists without the proper study is, well, a little crazy. You bike fanatics seem to think you are great visionaries, but you're really in the grip of an ideology, which, like all ideologies, is not reality-based.