City Hall's new lie about Masonic Avenue
City Hall has long tried to use Masonic Avenue to demonstrate its anti-car credentials.
When she was District 5 Supervisor, Mayor Breed endorsed that misguided attempt back in 2013. That resulted in removing all the street parking---167 spaces---on Masonic Avenue between Fell Street and Geary Boulevard to make bike lanes. That only happened after a long disinformation campaign by the Bicycle Coalition and its enablers in City Hall based on the Big Lie about safety.
As I've pointed out, few cyclists are using the bright green bike lanes. The city never had any information that many cyclists used---or even wanted to use---that north/south part of Masonic (Masonic Avenue bike lanes: Gaudy monument to wishful thinking).
The latest City Hall lie about Masonic Avenue is its use of a bogus emergency to illegally turn San Francisco into some kind of anti-car paradise, even though most people in the city use cars to get around:
Temporary transit lanes were also approved by the SFMTA Board on June 30, 2020 for Masonic and Presidio avenues to improve transit travel times for the 43 Masonic.These locations were chosen because they have shown up to 25% travel time savings during the shelter-in-place when there has been significantly less car traffic, and they can be installed with no impacts to parking. As with other locations, temporary transit lanes here will provide a benefit to customers along the entire 43 route.Temporary emergency transit lanes will generally convert the curbside general-purpose lanes in both directions to bus/taxi only lanes on...Masonic Avenue: southbound Geary Boulevard to Haight Street, northbound Haight to O’Farrell streets; to accommodate lanes, left turns will be restricted between Turk and Haight streets.
Not clear what a "transit lane" means, since the city can't screw up Masonic any more than it already has. But you must understand: this is an "emergency"!
Masonic now has two traffic lanes in each direction. Hard to believe that even City Hall is dumb enough to remove another traffic lane with this project, which would leave a street that carries more than 32,000 vehicles a day with a single lane in each direction!
Of course this project will have "no impacts on parking," since all the parking on Masonic between Fell Street and Geary Blvd. has already been removed to make the little-used bike lanes.
I ride the #43 several times a week, and it now moves surprisingly well between Haight and Geary even though there are stop lights or stop signs at every intersection.
Our present supervisor is another political lemming on Masonic and everything else in spite of his political pretensions.
SF Streetsblog also supported the "improvements" to Masonic. Here's a post on Masonic from days of yore before I was banned from commenting for disturbing the site's monolithic anti-car GroupThink.
Labels: Anti-Car, Bicycle Coalition, City Government, Dean Preston, District 5, History, London Breed, Masonic Avenue, Neighborhoods, Pandemic, Streetsblog, Traffic in SF
posted by Rob Anderson @ 3:27 PM
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