Riding a bike is dangerous: Don't do it

Nils Linke memorial

Letter to the editor in today's SF Chronicle:

Dangerous to bike

Regarding Peter Hartlaub’s “Biking with Dad, 86, bolsters Slow Streets” (March 14): 

San Francisco has a long way before it is acceptable, let alone safe, for anyone ages 8 to 80 to bike routinely around the city. Generally, bike lanes are neither protected from cars nor part of a larger network facilitating everyday use. 

As both an active transportation advocate and Lyft driver, I drive around the city every day. I must negotiate streets with dangerously placed green bike paths laced between fast-moving vehicles and turn lanes, such as those in South of Market. 

The well-intentioned bike lane portion of busy Masonic Avenue is essentially unused because it lacks a barrier protecting it from traffic. 

Unfortunately, the city is stuck in the automobile paradigm of the 1950s as it begrudgingly designates piecemeal bike lanes with little more than signage and paint. 

Any cursory visit or virtual viewing of effective bike infrastructure in other rich cities like Stockholm, or in not-so-rich Buenos Aires, fleshes out the inadequacies of bike transportation here. 

Although it was heart-warming to read this story of father and son cycling across San Francisco, perhaps the dad summed it up best when he said he wouldn’t want to do it “all the time.”

Chase Berggren

San Francisco

Rob's comment:

Peter Hartlaub's dad is right. (click on the "Peter Hartlaub" label below for more on him) Riding a bike in San Francisco---or anywhere, for that matter---is unsafe not only because of the danger of getting hit by a car. 

Most cycling accidents are what bike experts call "solo falls" that don't involve other vehicles, though being hit by a car is more likely to kill a cyclist.

Berggren cites Stockholm as a safety model, but it turns out that it has the same safety problems as other cities, but a lot of people think them foreigners are smarter than us vulgar Americans.

He's also wrong about Masonic Avenue, which isn't used much by cyclists because before it created those bike lanes the city never bothered to find out whether there were many cyclists who even wanted to travel north/south in this part of town. 

Turns out there aren't, and the project is now a gaudy monument to bad city traffic planning.

But of course those 167 parking spaces on Masonic between Fell St. and Geary Blvd. eliminated to make the bike lanes are gone forever.

Why, by the way, is "signage" better than plain old "signs" that means the same thing?

See also Cycling safety in Denmark---and San Francisco and The Centers for Disease Control on bicycle safety.