Walking back the crackdown on cyclists
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| Captain Sanford and the SFBC's "communications director" |
The inevitable early end to the SFPD's "crackdown" on cyclists on the Wiggle is reported on Hoodline.
As I pointed out last month, the city and that neighborhood are now stuck with the Wiggle, since City Hall and the Bicycle Coalition collaborated in promoting it as a cool, quick way for cyclists to get to Market Street and downtown---and it's a green corridor!
Hence, crackdowns like this can only be a public relations response to complaints about cyclists from people in the neighborhood.
Interesting that Noah Budnick, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition, sent his "communications director" to talk to Captain Sanford.
Seems like the coalition is becoming a jobs program for unemployed progressives, with 19 people now on its bloated staff.
Some of them will soon step up to higher pay at the MTA.
Labels: Bicycle Coalition, Cycling and Safety, District 5, Muni, Noah Budnick, Pedestrian Safety, Punks on Bikes, The Wiggle, Traffic in SF
posted by Rob Anderson @ 11:29 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
When will the average working person in this city wake up to the MTA SFBC BS??????
Geography is the reason we're stuck with the Wiggle. Can't do anything about that.
A boneheaded SFPD and myopic SFBC is why we're about to be stuck with the same problematic behavior, too.
A lot of bicyclists think we can ride however we like as long as nobody gets hurt. The SFPD thinks that not putting your foot down at a stop sign and blowing it at 10mph are the same thing (and finds it easier to ticket people doing the former). As best I can tell, we're back to square one and nobody's grown up. Stepping off a sidewalk in the Lower Haight will continue to be a gamble, rude assholes will continue to ruin things for everybody, and eventually we'll get another enforcement sting that improves nothing.
I'd like other bicyclists to shape up their act, but absent a law that distinguishes between my behavior and theirs (instead of lumping us all in the same bucket), I'll continue to be in favor of no enforcement at all, given the SFPD's inability to apply even the smallest amount of nuance to the situation.
Surprisingly, I almost agree. Yes, of course city cops should only ticket cyclists who are flagrant violators and those who treat pedestrians as mere obstacles to be ignored and/or bullied out of the crosswalk.
But it's cyclists themselves, not pedestrians, who are the most often injured in "solo falls" that have nothing to do with other vehicles, as that UC study found that the Bicycle Coalition and City Hall are so strenuously ignoring.
City Hall was irresponsible in promoting the Wiggle at the expense of that neighborhood, and it's irresponsible to promote a transportation "mode" that is intrinsically dangerous, which all the "infrastructure" in the world can't mitigate.
City Hall likes the bike fad, since it's a low-cost way to mitigate the city's traffic congestion---at the expense of the physical well-being all those unwary folks who are eager to be with-it but have no realistic sense of the dangers of that transportation "mode."
Like all fads, the bike fad will fade away, just like disco, parachute pants and pet rocks. We'll look back and laugh at how foolish we were. I'd give it another couple of months at best.
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