December 05, 2008
Tricycle Program Gets Rolling like anything tricycle-related needs further description. Pah!
Tricycles ROCK.
*wobbles slowly down post*
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*tips over*
I don't know what traffic's like in San Francisco, but hereabouts they'd be run off the road.
But a San Francisco Superior Court injunction prevents the city from making any bicycle-related improvements without special permission from the court.
Wuh?
"Wuh?"
Yeah. SF is a completely schizophrenic bike town. On the one hand
it's almost perfect bike weather almost every day of the year. On
the other hand, there's always a monster hill between where you
are and where you want to go. For eight years, the mayor did everything
he possibly could to eliminate bikes from the city, including demonizing
them and (never explicitly of course) encouraging cars to run them
off the road. But on the fourth hand, we have a giant bike ride which
shuts down a nice section of the business district after work the last
friday of the month. Plus, the SF bicycle coalition is a remarkably
powerful group with some determined and smart and politically adept
people in it. So bikes in the city is a barrel of fun.
This injunction is a result of a detailed and extensive plan developed
by the city to set up bike lanes across the city, fix some extremely
dangerous intersections, and generally improve life for the thousands
of people who ride to work and stuff. Some local asshole decided that
the environmental impact report prepared for this was inadequate. Since
after all, losing some parking spaces could destroy the ozone layer or
something. So he sued. And won a preliminary injunction in 2006.
Things are looking up. There's been some encouraging news lately.
SF is a completely schizophrenic bike town.San Diego is pretty much the same, though we have less hills. Our current mayor is a former cop and a good Republican who wants everyone to be scared all the time, stay home, and watch their televisions like good little consumers. The latest thing is that the Streets department has directed the street sweepers to avoid brushing against the curbs so as to lessen the need for repainting them. Of course, the result of that is that all the crap in the street gets brushed into the bike lanes, which were pretty messed up already. Oh yeah, and the cops won't enforce the bike lane ROWs downtown any more, too busy, you know. Lots of donut shop crime these days, and all.
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