Brinkman: Remove all parking on Polk St. to make bike lanes

Cheryl Brinkman

Streetsblog reports that the city's pro-bike, anti-car movement hasn't given up on the idea of taking away all the street parking on Polk Street to make bike lanes. Cheryl Brinkman, Vice Chairman of the MTA board, cyclist and long-time anti-car activist, is leading a new push to return to the original proposal that will take away 200 parking spaces on Polk Street to make protected bike lanes.

Recall that Brinkman was outraged earlier this year when a Polk Gulch neighborhood meeting hooted at that idea, along with parklets and every other anti-car "improvement" proposed by bike guy Ed Reiskin, Director of Transportation at the MTA. 

Brinkman's reaction:

I want the proposal that doesn’t minimize parking loss. I was at that (Middle Polk Neighborhood Association) meeting, and I took offense. Anyone who showed up in support of the SFMTA would have been completely 100% intimidated to speak up. That was the worst public meeting I’ve ever attended (emphasis added).

Brinkman on the latest push to remove all the parking on Polk Street:

“The safety record speaks loudly for the need to make changes to the street,” Brinkman said at the board meeting. “The five-year pedestrian and bike injury numbers are chilling. Polk Street residents and visitors deserve better."

Funny but those numbers don't appear in the city's annual collision report---or in any other city report that I know of. They only surfaced in a MTA press release just as it and the Bicycle Coalition were pushing the Polk Street bike project, like similar bogus "safety" claims the city made to justify the Fell/Oak bike project and the Masonic Avenue bike project.

Here's a classic Brinkman quotation from her 2010 comment to a now-defunct car-free living thread. This is how bike zealots talk to each other when they think the rest of us aren't listening:

With the gas prices high I'm now hoping for a short sharp supply shock---to really bring the point home to the people. I was cycling yesterday and just wished that the car drivers would all run out of gas all of a sudden and have to push their heavy hunks of steel with their bare hands to move them.

In other news: Ed Reiskin is doing such a great job screwing up city traffic on behalf of the bike lobby that City Hall has signed him up for another five years at $294,000 a year.