Masonic Avenue, Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and the bike fantasy
Dick Spotswood in the Marin Independent Journal:
We’ll soon find out if cycling activists’ contentions that flocks of commuters will bike across the windy 5.5-mile long bridge is realistic or a pipedream. Caltrans maintains 24/7 cameras on all parts of the span. Two months after the cycleway opens, I’ll be hiring high school seniors to monitor those cameras. We’ll then report the exact count of bikes and pedestrians during a typical peak period weekday. Then we’ll learn how useful a $25 million bikeway is in the real world.
The "real world" has nothing to do with the bike fantasy. San Francisco just spent $26 million on bike lanes on Masonic Avenue that few cyclists are using.
Like the project Spotswood is writing about, the city never had any information that many cyclists wanted to go North/South in this part of the city, but the Bicycle Coalition and its enablers in City Hall pushed the project through anyhow.
The SF Bicycle Coalition is okay with spending hundreds of millions for a bike lane on the Western end of the Bay Bridge. Fortunately, no one else seems to think that's a good investment.
See also Billion dollar bike path for the Bay Bridge? and Big Lie on safety to justify screwing up Masonic.
Labels: Anti-Car, Bay Area, Bay Bridge Bike Path, Bicycle Coalition, Marin, Masonic Avenue
posted by Rob Anderson @ 1:15 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
4 people will bike during the week and maybe 10 people on the weekends. $25 million was not for a bike lane project. This was a $25 million auto lane removal project. Part of the anti-auto crusade. Calling the project a "bike project" only helps them justify the project. Calling for the removal of an auto lane would not sound great publically.
No, it's a bike project and unjustified one at that, since it's being done without any information that cyclists want to ride across that bridge.
Yes it is a "bike project". But "bike projects/bike safety" is just the excuse. The goat you could say.. There has yet to be a bike project that does not cost so much including the removal of parking or any lanes. Because a parked car is such a threat to bike safety? It's equivalent to them using the homeless as the excuse for more development. The whole world knows a person living in a tent shooting up herion that can't afford toilet paper to wipe their ass so they shit on the sidewalk can afford $3600 a month rent.
This was the point I was trying to make.
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