Mayor Newsom: “Make it harder to drive and make it costlier”
Not that there’s much doubt on the subject---except for a few commenters to this blog---but Mayor Newsom, while endorsing the "concept" of congestion pricing, again announced the official policy of the City of San Francisco: “make it harder to drive and make it costlier, and then you use the money to fund public transit.”
Drivers in SF, both residents and tourists, are essentially cash cows for the city, which I’ve pointed out before.
This approach, by the way, works against the city's Bicycle Plan, wherein a number of projects described in the just-released Draft Environmental Report will, as the report shows, slow Muni down. I’ve pointed this out a number of times, but let’s go over this simple reality again: If you take away traffic lanes to make bike lanes on busy streets that also carry Muni lines, you’re going to slow Muni down even as you punish drivers of the 465,150 cars (aka "death monsters") registered in San Francisco, not to mention the many tourists who drive in the city.
The great anti-car, planet-saving bicycle movement may play well among the young, the groovy, and the ignorant masses in SF, but it’s hard to see how that issue will help Newsom get elected Governor of California, since he's already burdened with the gay marriage issue and his steadfast support for making this a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants. Hard to see how any of this will win him many votes in the state's hinterland.
Speaking of Muni and money, when is the city going to pull the plug on the Culture Bus? I see the bus almost every day when I take my daily walk through the park, and I've never seen it carrying a single passenger.
The Culture Bus is the perfect project for San Francisco, where civic narcissism is the local religion. We are oh so special and have so much “culture” we need a special bus to carry around all the culture vultures.
I’d like to see how much that crack-brained, self-congratulatory project has cost the city even as Muni is running a $40 million deficit.
Drivers in SF, both residents and tourists, are essentially cash cows for the city, which I’ve pointed out before.
This approach, by the way, works against the city's Bicycle Plan, wherein a number of projects described in the just-released Draft Environmental Report will, as the report shows, slow Muni down. I’ve pointed this out a number of times, but let’s go over this simple reality again: If you take away traffic lanes to make bike lanes on busy streets that also carry Muni lines, you’re going to slow Muni down even as you punish drivers of the 465,150 cars (aka "death monsters") registered in San Francisco, not to mention the many tourists who drive in the city.
The great anti-car, planet-saving bicycle movement may play well among the young, the groovy, and the ignorant masses in SF, but it’s hard to see how that issue will help Newsom get elected Governor of California, since he's already burdened with the gay marriage issue and his steadfast support for making this a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants. Hard to see how any of this will win him many votes in the state's hinterland.
Speaking of Muni and money, when is the city going to pull the plug on the Culture Bus? I see the bus almost every day when I take my daily walk through the park, and I've never seen it carrying a single passenger.
The Culture Bus is the perfect project for San Francisco, where civic narcissism is the local religion. We are oh so special and have so much “culture” we need a special bus to carry around all the culture vultures.
I’d like to see how much that crack-brained, self-congratulatory project has cost the city even as Muni is running a $40 million deficit.
Labels: Anti-Car, Bicycle Plan, Congestion Pricing, Gavin Newsom, Muni, Traffic in SF
posted by Rob Anderson @ 1:52 PM
24 comments
24 Comments:
This is getting really interesting.
Assuming the DEIR is certified as an appropriately detailed and accurate study, the way seems clear for Rob et al. to mount their next challenge to actual implementation.
Which I think is where LOS will really hit the fan.
Even if Judge Busch certifies the EIR on the Bicycle Plan, the problem the city will then face will be political, which will present them with this question: How far can they go to placate a small, vocal minority vis a vis the overwhelming majority of city residents who don't use bicycles?
I think both SFBC and the city have marketed the bike plan very badly. It is overwhelmingly seen as a plan to service the needs of a particular group.
The bike plan should be regarded as one element facilitating mobility of all people in the city.
The challenge remains to refocus LOS from motor vehicle congestion to people movements over the long term.
As far as I can see there has be little thought given to phasing of the implementation to minimise or perhaps even eliminate the 'SUIs' identified in the study.
I think a whole new regime of traffic measurement will need to be established to guide the implementation.
This will have traffic planners around the world generating doctoral theses by the dozen.
The Bicycle Plan is in fact designed to "service the needs" of only the city's bike people. It's just bullshit to talk about changing LOS to facilitate the "mobility of all people in the city." LOS measures the time it takes traffic to move through intersections, and people in SF overwhelmingly use cars, trucks, and buses to move around the city, not bikes. Refusing to face that present reality just fuzzes up the real alternatives the city is facing.
The reality is that traffic is a zero-sum game on city streets. If you take away traffic lanes and/or street parking to make bike lanes that serves only cyclists, not the rest of us.
My observations show that many drivers should celebrate the bike plan. Given that "BIKE LANE" means "DOUBLE PARK HERE", adding bike lanes will result in a large increase in parking citywide!
I saw this concept taken to its extreme last night. A car was parked in the bike lane with the flashers on. I don't say "Double Parked" because the car was not parked to the side of a car, it was parked in the bike lane parallel to someone's curb cut. Somehow this person considered it immoral to just park in someone's driveway, so instead they just parked in the bike lane at the same position in the road as the driveway! No problemo!
Rob said:
"LOS measures the time it takes traffic to move through intersections, and people in SF overwhelmingly use cars, trucks, and buses to move around the city, not bikes."
That's partly correct Rob. Cars trucks and buses are traffic. Bicycles, which people do use to move around the city (currently a bit under 5% of trips I believe)are also traffic, as are pedestrians.
Unfortunately LOS is currently deficient in not assessing traffic movements by all modes. By sticking your head in sand and insisting LOS can only apply to motorised road traffic is not only naive and dumb - it's also a strategy designed to generate long term traffic constipation.
Keep to that line and you will be irrelevant to the debate
Implementation of the bike plan has potential to be disruptive to current traffic conditions, so it's important that much more attention be given to managed implementation, facilitating all mode traffic movements over the longer term.
I'm going to be irrelevant because I think it's a dumb idea to screw up traffic on behalf of a small minority of cyclists? By your own reckoning,"motorized traffic" now constitutes 95% of the traffic on city streets. Other "modes"? Besides bikes what other traffic modes are there in addition to buses, trucks, and cars? The problem you bike nuts have now is to determine how far you can go in screwing up the city's traffic without a political backlash from the rest of us, the 95% of the people in SF who don't ride bikes.
Rob said:
"By your own reckoning,"motorized traffic" now constitutes 95% of the traffic on city streets."
Now that's an interesting point. I'll have to check the data. As I emphasised - all travel modes; transit, walk, bike, auto are part of the travel scene. So I should not have restricted the focus to city streets.
Damn - I hope I don't become irrelevant too.
"the problem the city will then face will be political"
You mean the one-man-army dead set upon making cycling as dangerous as possible? I'm always amused by your ridiculous justifications. Suddenly you have some concern about slowing down Muni now that you've found a document that favors your position. Last time I dropped by your site you making some claim about the 38-Geary being find the way it is. If I remember correctly it was because you were dead set against lanes dedicated to make the 38 reliable.
This may come as a surprise to you, Anon, but the bike people aren't particularly popular in SF. Leah Shahum was such a pain in the ass Mayor Newsom bounced her off the MTA board. The SFBC bluffed about putting the Bicycle Plan on the ballot some months ago, but it was pure smoke-blowing. The bike people lost on the garage in Golden Gate Park, they lost on closing the park to cars on Saturdays, and they lost on raising parking rates in SF. I've made that point about screwing up Muni many times on this blog over the past several years---that if you make it difficult for Muni and emergency vehicles to move around, too. But the bike nuts are so obsessed with making it tough for cars---aka "Death Machines"---that they forget that Muni uses the same streets that cars use. But with the bike nuts it's all about bikes; they don't really care about Muni.
The 38 Geary is reliable and runs often. I ride it all the time. You're referring to the Geary BRT, a $200 million boondoggle in the making that's going to dig up Geary for months---maybe years---for minimal gains in efficiency. And of course they will be taking away street parking wherever possible, which is bad for all the small businesses that line Geary.
"You're referring to the Geary BRT, a $200 million boondoggle in the making that's going to dig up Geary for months---maybe years---for minimal gains in efficiency. And of course they will be taking away street parking wherever possible, which is bad for all the small businesses that line Geary."
Projects only take years to implement around here because of people such as yourself that are set on making it so. Thanks for stalling progress in this wonderful city.
I think you should stand on market street at the peak hour and see what kind of people make up the "bike nuts" you speak of. they are mothers, fathers, executives, lawyers, engineers, baristas, brothers, old, young, poor, and rich. Go and watch how many more bikes than cars pass you in a given time. Call the people, your neighbors, nuts to their faces. Tell them that they have some kind of agenda other than just moving themselves from home to work. You wouldn't do that because you know that the majority of people that bike to work are not nuts, they are normal people. You like to single out a few people who ruined your day by cutting you off in the crosswalk or idiots riding on the sidewalk and apply that to the whole group. The hate that fills you is quite disturbing, and singling out a group of people and calling them nuts for choosing to ride a bike to work is just wrong in so many ways. It is obvious you have a screw or two loose.
Will you go to market and count the bikes during peak hours? Will you call your own neighbors and fellow citizens of the City nuts to their faces just because they are on a bike?
You are just as nutty as the extreme holier-than-thou bikes that you complain about. Open your eyes and you will see that those who choose the bike to get to work are normal people like you and me, well maybe not you since you have no job to commute to.
Cyclists only qualify as "bike nuts" in my book when, like you, they insist that whatever the city and the SFBC want to do to our streets is "progress." Cyclists don't have to obey the state's most important environmental law? That's typical self-righteousness from people who don't think they have to obey traffic laws, either.
I of course can't call you a nut to your face, because, like so many of your brave comrades, you're anonymous.
And it's not just "a few people" among cyclists who misbehave on city streets. At the very least, it's a significant minority that are riding on sidewalks, blowing through stop signs, and intimidating pedestrians in crosswalks.
"This may come as a surprise to you, Anon, but the bike people aren't particularly popular in SF."
As opposed to yourself? By "bike people" do you mean the SFBC or all cyclists in the city? The SFBC alone has over 9,500 members and how many people voted for you again? Less than 2,000 wasn't in?
By "bike people" I mean the SFBC and their many enablers in City Hall and all their "progressive" fellow travelers here in Progressive Land. I referred to several specific election defeats on issues the bike people supported. The membership numbers claimed by the SFBC aren't indicative of their support citywide. Of course even the bike people are more popular than I am, but I only appeal to the more sophisticated demographic, not the trendy rabble on bikes, wearing their knit caps, earphones clamped securely to their ears, tearing through intersections in the righteous knowledge that they aren't burning any fossil fuel!
I tried to reason with you, Rob. I event went to the trouble of providing links to scientific (and, necessarily, impartial) literature on the subject of LOS reform. But to you the word "reform" is, in and of itself, loaded. You talk about CEQA as if it were this perfect, immutable bible of environmental legislation, and automotive priority LOS as the holy grail of transit law. What's confounding to me is that, when forced to defend your position, you don't show even a hint of actually caring about the environment. You just point at the self-righteousness of cyclists and say, "Look at those people; they're stupid! Why in the world would anyone give up their precious parking spots and already congested streets to accommodate them?" Which is so asinine that I often wonder why I even bother responding to you in the first place.
It's all about the need to keep the city's traffic flowing, ignoring the very real necessity (not to mention the policy priority that the city's government has enacted) to reduce the number of cars on the road. This is the only way to permanently fix the congestion that you rightly decry as the reason for MUNI's abysmal performance. It's telling, though, that you write off all of the very thoroughly researched literature on multimodal assessment as "blather", even going so far as to put the word "multimodal" in quotes. Presumably you don't think that LOS should account for anything other than vehicular traffic?
"I don't defer to their judgment, because these folks are spinning out their Big Thoughts on traffic primarily on behalf of cyclists."
Please note that neither of the links that you so quickly dismissed in your previous post has anything to do with bicycle advocacy. These are not studies funded by "bike people". They're undertaken by objective, well-educated transit scientists attempting to address the problems facing cities designed (poorly, if the congestion is any indication) around motor vehicles. And if you're as serious about pedestrian safety as you say you are, then you ignore multimodal assessments at your own peril.
I'm most certainly not ignoring the fact that taking lanes away from cars will increase traffic. Rather, I'm asserting that vehicular traffic alone is not the best way to measure a particular street's level of service, especially when you consider that bicycles are a much more space-efficient and resource-hungry mode of transit than cars. Each street obviously needs to be addressed individually and carefully, and I agree that some of the areas identified for improvement by the Bicycle Plan may not be suitable for modification. But your blanket dismissal of any modification prioritizing cycling and pedestrian traffic is just plain stupid. The point is that traffic isn't the term for which we're maximizing the function; it's potential throughput for all modes and, perhaps more importantly, safety for cyclists and pedestrians alike.
For instance, how does changing LOS assessment automatically make traffic worse on 2nd or 5th streets? For that matter, can you point to any instances in which adding the bike lanes that exist today negatively impacted car traffic? I don't imagine that you can, but even if so, it's pretty clear to me that the success of even the city's existing bike lanes (increased ridership, specifically) far outweigh any of the problems they introduced.
Look, I won't be the first "bike nut" to concede that you've got some interesting points. But if you can't make a single one of them without blathering about "Death Machines" and (somehow, without a hint of irony) whining about the arrogance or self-righteousness of the city's cyclists, you're just an angry troll with an axe to grind. You think cyclists have a political problem? Take a look in the mirror, buddy. You may have succeeded in delaying the Bicycle Plan, but nobody in this city (let alone the rest of the world) takes you seriously--except, of course, the handful of other bitter curmudgeons who identify with your irrational and misguided disdain of all things two-wheeled. You say,
"The membership numbers claimed by the SFBC aren't indicative of their support citywide."
And you're absolutely right, but in the wrong way. There was plenty of public approval behind the initial thrust of the Bicycle Plan and the Board's adoption of SAR 02-3. On top of that, though, there are probably thousands of cyclists in this city who don't participate in the SFBC's political endeavors, or either don't know or give a shit about the SFBC to begin with. And yet, thanks to the city's minimal cycling accommodations, they're able to ride to work every day. What you fail to realize is that cycling infrastructure is one of those things that only works when you actually do it right. Half-assed street signage is just one of the many reasons that people perceive cycling to be too dangerous for them to even consider doing it regularly. Transportation Alternatives' Bicycle Blueprint is chock full of statistics and findings, some of which directly address your ignorance towards infrastructure availability's affects on ridership. Here are a few:
"A 1992 Harris poll commissioned by Bicycling magazine found that one-quarter of respondents would bicycle to work if safe bicycle lanes were available. Locally, the 1990 City DoT survey reported in Chapter 2 found that 49% of Manhattan business workers living within 10 miles of work would commute by bike if given “safe bike lanes” and other infrastructural improvements." - here
"Copenhagen experienced dramatic growth in commuting and other utilitarian bicycling in the years after it replaced many inner-city parking lanes with curbside bicycle lanes, to 25% of all journeys — an increase of 50% in just five years." - here
Also, your concern for local businesses losing profits due to reduced automotive access is totally unwarranted. Studies have actually found that cyclists are better shoppers than motorists. Copenhagen (where I'm teaching right now) got a lot of flak from motorists and business owners when they announced their plan to build a network of segregated cycling paths throughout the city 25 years ago. Today you'd be hard-pressed to find a city resident who doesn't own a bike and ride it regularly to the grocery store. By the way, have you checked back with those businesses that opposed the upper Market Street bike lanes to see if they've lost business as a result? And even if they have, would you say that their financial success is more important than the safety of the thousands of people who use that street to get to work every day?
Speaking of which, safety is another thing you like to talk about an awful lot, yet you say very little of substance. Sure, cycling is potentially dangerous. Of course you're going to fall every once in a while if you bike a lot. And yes, bicycle injuries are underreported; but do have you considered why? It's because most are so minor that they're not even worth reporting. I fell just a couple of weeks ago when my tire got stuck in a MUNI track on Market. Should I phone that in to DPT? It's bad enough that you overstate the dangers of cycling, but what's worse is that you fail to acknowledge any of the benefits that increased cycling brings to a city, which numerous studies have concluded far outweigh the increase in accidents. Denmark's Trafitec says it best in the brief for their comprehensive study, Road safety and perceived risk of cycle facilities in Copenhagen:
"Taken in combination, the cycle tracks and lanes which have been constructed have had positive results as far as traffic volumes and feelings of security go. They have, however, had negative effects on road safety. The radical effects on traffic volumes resulting from the construction of cycle tracks will undoubtedly result in gains in health from increased physical activity. These gains are much, much greater than the losses in health resulting from a slight decline in road safety."
Ken Kifer also has an excellent web page that explains a lot of the statistics typically used to scare people away from cycling. It's pretty clear from many of the sources he cites that, in the long run, cycling tends to be statistically much safer than driving a car or walking. Obviously not everyone can ride a bike all the time. But the point is that if you make it safer for anyone to do so, many more people will. That reduces the number of people in single occupancy vehicles and on public transit, putting less of a strain on both systems. It's just ludicrous to me that you can't see this connection and understand how increasing bike ridership actually addresses both of the issues you seem so concerned with.
I'm not asking you to take a leap of faith here. It should be quite apparent to anyone who's lived in San Francisco for a couple of years that bike ridership has increased significantly in a relatively short period of time. Is it that much of a stretch to extrapolate out another five years or so and imagine a city with twice as many people on bikes as there are now? There's no way that the minimal facilities we have right now can accommodate that many people safely. The public and political will to make things better exists in this city, and it's a lot stronger than you think. We'll see what "public backlash" comes in the wake of the EIR, but I'd hazard a guess that your angry cries won't find much more favor after this is all said and done than before the Plan was put on hold (which is to say, very little).
"I only appeal to the more sophisticated demographic" - Rob Anderson
I think I have found my new email signature. The funniest thing I have read in months.
Good for you, Murph. At least you have a sense of humor, unlike most bike nuts. On the other hand, I got 1,982 votes, though I barely campaigned at all. Why would anyone vote for me, when, if they simply wanted to vote against the Murk they had Owen O'Donnell to vote for? O'Donnell got 5,962 votes because he spent as much money as the Murk, who got 27,482 votes (I'll get the numbers from the Ethics Dept. soon, so we can see who spent what). O'Donnell ran an issue-free campaign, whereas I ran against the Murk's fuzzball progressivism emphasizing in my doorhanger---which I only distributed to a fraction of the district--- the Murks support for the bike bullshit and his aggressively pro-development votes on some awful projects that will damage the city permanently.
The idea that I have almost 2,000 supporters in District 5---people who read my blog---is very encouraging to me.
Shawn Allen:
You've cited "impartial literature"? No, you haven't. In fact you didn't identify the literature you cited.
Muni's ontime performance is mostly lacking now because of a shortage of buses and drivers, not because of "congestion."
You keep talking about "multimodal" means of transportation, but we've listed all of them: cars, trucks, buses, bikes, and pedestrians. Have we left anything out?
If you take away traffic lanes on Second and Fifth Streets---both of which are very busy streets---to make bike lanes of course you're going to make traffic worse, as the existing traffic will be forced into fewer lanes. If you take away street parking, that too is an impact on taxis, delivery trucks, and tourists.
My use of the term "death machine" is ironic, as the quotation marks indicate. I take the term from the Guardian's Steve Jones, who writes on bike issues for that publication, wherein he uses it without irony.
Could you cite some evidence of real "public approval" behind the Bicycle Plan or the SAR?
One of the reasons people see cycling as dangerous is because it is more dangerous than driving and riding Muni---and always will be. People don't need elaborate studies to convince them that this is so.
Copenhagen has "segregated"---separated from motor traffic---bike lanes, which makes cycling a lot safer there than in SF, which simply doesn't have the space to do what Copenhagen has done. To do that here, we would have to either eliminate traffic lanes or street parking, both of which have serious practical and political consequences.
Yes, cycling has apparently increased recently in SF, but so have cycling accidents, as Rachel Gordon's recent Chronicle article told us. And it's interesting that cycling has gone up even without implementing the Bicycle Plan. That leads me to conclude that riding a bike in SF is more of a political and fashion statement than anything else, which has nothing to do with the number of bike lanes painted on city streets.
You really are quite dense sometimes, Rob Anderson. Here are the links that I posted in a recent comment, to which you responded with a dedicated blog post but, apparently, didn't even bother reading:
National Cooperative Highway Research Program: Multimodal LOS Analysis for Urban Streets
This is a scientific study of multimodal LOS assessment practices. Read it yourself and see if you can find any evidence that it was funded by "bike nuts".
Victoria Transport Policy Institute: Multi-Modal Level-of-Service Indicators
This is a more general (though no less scientific) overview of multimodal LOS assessment. San Francisco's situation is mentioned toward the end.
And while I'm at it, here's a good quote from the San Francisco Program on Health, Equity and Sustainability's document titled, Environmental Health Impacts of Transportation:
Paradoxically, Auto LOS analyses may conclude that pedestrian and bicycle transportation improvements result in motor vehicle delay and thus adverse environmental impacts. Similarly, Auto LOS analysis may create significant regulatory obstacles to smart growth developments including walkable communities and higher density housing. This approach also allows traffic increases to continue until there is congestion, and leads to mitigations that reduce congestion and therefore stimulate driving and its adverse air quality, noise, greenhouse gas emission and pedestrian safety.
Funny how that works, isn't it? But hey, I guess you're just as knowledgeable as the folks who actually study this stuff for a living, so we should all just shut up and take your word for it then. "Leave those streets alone!"
And what's your point about "multimodal"? I'm simply using that as a shorthand for all of the modes you've mentioned, and the idea of a holistic approach to LOS assessment that takes more than just auto throughput into account.
You keep insisting that taking driving and parking lanes away from certain streets will result in problems, but you cite no definitive research indicating that this is the case. And that point's moot anyway, because what I'm trying to explain to you is that traffic is not the only variable for which city planners are trying to maximize the equation. The city has made it their policy to prioritize pedestrian and cyclist safety. For somebody who talks an awful lot about pedestrian safety, you sure don't seem to give a shit when it comes to weighing it against the need to keep traffic flowing. And as for the financial health of the city, has it ever occurred to you that street-side businesses tend to do much better in neighborhoods that are more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists? And how about those upper Market Street businesses? Any word on whether they've been hurt by the bike lanes?
Yes, cycling has apparently increased recently in SF, but so have cycling accidents, as Rachel Gordon's recent Chronicle article told us. And it's interesting that cycling has gone up even without implementing the Bicycle Plan. That leads me to conclude that riding a bike in SF is more of a political and fashion statement than anything else, which has nothing to do with the number of bike lanes painted on city streets.
There you go again. A big, fat duh to you, sir! Yes, more cyclists equals more accidents. (As do more cars, and more pedestrians.) But without knowing the numbers it's impossible for you to claim that cycling is inherently less safe than any other mode. And, once again, you fail to consider the benefits: less stress on MUNI and BART; better air quality from fewer motor vehicles on the road; better physical and mental health for the city's citizens, which in the long run leads to lower healthcare costs and insurance premiums. You're so obsessed with cycling as progressive fetish that you're incapable of seeing the big picture.
I don't have any "evidence" on-hand of public support for the SAR, or even the city's Transit First policy. But it's pretty clear to me that if you and your hilariously initialed Coalition for Adequate Review were the only people protesting the lack of an EIR, then it's fair to assume that most people were either fully behind it, or just didn't think it was that big of a deal. You're free to argue the Plan's merits, but to righteously claim that you represent 99% of the city's interests is just arrogant, and completely false.
The 38 Geary is reliable and runs often.
I take it you don't take it when it's packed to the gills and slow, which is during rush hour. We badly need bus-dedicated lanes to improve the 38. But I guess cars come first, right?
Gee, what a surprise: the bus is crowded during rush hour. The real question about the Geary BRT is whether the expense ($200 million or more) and the years-long construction disruption, which would be particularly damaging to all the small businesses on the street, can be justified just to get you downtown a few minutes faster.
Shawn:
You seem to have a lot of time to download your every little thought on this issue. Why don't you focus on what's now on the table for us here in SF, namely, the Draft EIR on the Bicycle Plan? It's available online for your/our perusal.
I've been glad to read Shawn Allen's mostly patient and very informative responses to Rob Anderson's animosity laden comments.
Sure, I'd also like to hear what he's got to say about the Draft EIR on the Bicycle Plan, but what about Rob Anderson's thoughts on the information enclosed in this document?
I thought that surely by now, we'd be hearing from him that according to his analysis of the document, the Draft EIR on the Bicycle Plan proves his claims all along that the proposed expansions outlined in the the Bicycle Plan will make things worse for SF.
wsbob up in the Portland area
Shawn Allen's much too lengthy comments haven't been particlularly helpful in this discussion, as he cites studies of other cities from, for example, 1990. You bike people are so sensitive; any criticism directed your way---and I'm the only consistent media critic you have here in Progressive Land--- is seen as "animosity" and even hate.
I haven't had a chance to take a close look at the 1000-page DEIR on the Bicycle Plan, but you folks needn't wait on me; it's available online through MTA's website. Of course I've only argued that the Bicycle Plan could make traffic worse if it's implemented without proper study beforehand, not that it would certainly make things worse.
And please try to focus on what the EIR actually contains: actual evaluations---that may or may not be adequate---of specific streets in SF, not of an abstract notion about the virtues, real and imagined, of bicycle lanes or Bikes versus Cars.
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