San Francisco Bike Blog

The biggest problem I have with bus rapid transit (BRT) is that it elevates motorized transport - the bus - over active transport - namely, walking and biking. What this means in real terms is that bicycles will not be allowed to travel on Geary Boulevard. I mean, technically one might be legally permitted to ride one’s bicycle on this road, but perhaps it would not be wise if one wanted to remain ‘of this earth.’

We’re told that keeping bicycles off of Geary is going to cost us a total of $200 million, and $75 million of that is going to come from George Bush. When you see the picture of what the Geary BRT will look like (below), you’ll immediately notice that there is no place for bicycles to ride except in the crammed traffic lanes - where cars, trucks, and assorted motorized vehicles will be more than happy to run you over, should you be stupid enough to ride on Geary.

I have a better plan.

My plan does not treat the bicycle like a form of cancer that needs to be eradicated. On the contrary, I’ve taken the bold step of treating the bicycle in a revolutionary way - as a form of transportation. Further, I’ve gone so far as to suggest that this two-wheeled device can actually be utilized on the street, like other forms of transport. But that’s not all - I’ve gone ahead and proposed here a plan that suggests we can and should actually make room for bicycles on Geary Boulevard.

Can you believe it?! OMG! AAAAAH!

The Transbay Blog points out that riding the 38 is like being a sardine - packed in - and therefore something needs to be done - ‘pronto.’

I can’t help but be reminded of a little discussion the nation had a few years ago - remember the ‘Great Social Security Crisis of 2005′? We needed to ACTQUICKNOWNOWNOWORELSEREALLYBADSTUFFWILLHAPPEN!

Turns out it was just more shenanigans from the Bush Administration. There was no crisis - there is no crisis - the world is still turning.

I feel for my bus-riding brothers and sisters on the 38 - no doubt - but we shouldn’t ruin the future of San Francisco just for some short-term relief from a problem that will only persist and grow worse again until we again need to do something ‘pronto.’ I want to take action that is a bit more measured - a bit more thoughtful - a bit more long-term in its outlook - a bit more healthy for the city and its residents, current and future.

I do believe it is fully absurd that we bicycle people have accepted the remake of Geary Blvd without physically-separated bike lanes. If this is allowed to take place, it will rival the tragedy of losing all of our rail lines.

As I’ve mentioned before, planners the world over are astounded at how wide some of our streets are. I’m sure they would be even more astounded to learn that we’re going to keep bicycles off of one of our widest streets - one of our busiest corridors.

Alta Planning & Design has a fantastic new document called ‘Bicycle Interactions and Streetcars: Lessons Learned and Recommendations.’ (PDF) It’s about how to build light rail lines so that bikes can peacefully coexist with rail lines. I stole a diagram from their document - it shows a ‘Copenhagen-style bike lane’ as put to use in Melbourne, Australia (more) (a wonderful city we’ve profiled before). In short, this is what I would like to see happen on Geary Boulevard, and on every major corridor throughout San Francisco (and beyond).

In computer science, we have these things called ‘design patterns‘ - ‘general reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design.’ Brilliant. But what’s even more brilliant is that design patterns ‘originated as an architectural concept by Christopher Alexander (1977/79).’ If we were so inclined, we could go ask Christopher his opinion on BRT and the redesign of Geary - he lives in Berkeley, and is a professor at UCB - but we’re semi-intelligent people, and surely this Geary problem is not completely new. If I was a bettin’ man, I’d probably wager that Geary Blvd. presents a situation that might ably be addressed by applying a well known, proven design pattern - namely, the Copenhagen-style bike lane.

Bike rapid transit is not as expensive and disruptive and polluting and lucrative and deadly and city-destroying as bus rapid transit, but bike rapid transit is the wave of the future - not bus rapid transit.

Now is the time to embrace the new BRT - Bike Rapid Transit.

We start without the trams, of course. We take away one pollution lane from either direction — most if not all of the parking can remain, to start. The details of how to make the bus system more efficient don’t seem too difficult - you try some things until you find something that works - pretty straightforward - and I’ll leave that to people who know something about buses, preferably people who actually ride the bus - not that I suspect any planners actually do ride the bus. But the best part about this design is that it immediately relieves the stress on the system by giving people another viable alternative to the bus - they can now ride their bikes. The ’sardine’ condition will evaporate.

This plan has myriad other benefits. It is incremental, so it’s first step is very minor - requiring some restriping, moving the parking in towards the pollution lanes, etc. Once it’s a proven success, we start implementing some of the amenities - physical barriers to keep the car away from the bikes, etc.

Providing for bicycle access along Geary Blvd. might prove to be so fantastically effective that we don’t need to provide BRT or LRT along Geary. We’ll save gobs of money, directly and indirectly. Our tourist dollars will jump through the roof. Anyone remotely connected with the tourism trade will lavish heaps of money upon a sitting mayor who may be running for Governor soon. Bicycle advocates will relish their good fortune. Pedestrians will actually gain prominence and more safety. Streetfilms will shoot a video of our Geary Boulevard! (And Geary Boulevard will be renamed to Geary Street, because its fantastic capacity to poison our airspace will be greatly diminished.)

This plan is also very inexpensive - which should be a hit with BRT proponents, who apparently believe we can barely afford a McDonald’s Cheeseburger, much less a Big Mac.

Importantly, this design elevates the bicycle closer to its rightful position on the green transportation hierarchy. It can then be used as a model as we remake the rest of our city’s streets.

Not to be lost in the kerfuffle, however, is the importance of preventing BRT from overrunning the city - and running over pedestrians and bicyclists in the process. The ‘overrunning’ part is what Transbay Blog expects to happen:

The possibility of building light rail in a future phase is kept on the books; but what’s more likely is that Geary and Van Ness, two of the highest ridership corridors in the City, will become centerpieces of a citywide network of rapid buses, functioning as a complement to the Muni Metro light rail system that the B-Geary was not lucky enough to have already become part of.

And Transbay Blog says that Geary needs rail, but the wait is no good, apparently:

Fast-forward to the present day, and it is easy to see why not (re)building a Geary rail line has been such a missed opportunity. With roughly 55,000 daily riders flooding a route just over six miles long, Geary is the busiest bus line in the western United States. The Geary buses carry more daily passengers than any individual light rail or streetcar line that Muni currently operates, and they carry roughly double the ridership of VTA’s entire light rail system. They also carry more daily passengers than any regional rail operator in the Bay Area, except for BART. A combination of limited service and a few branches of local service means that the Geary core, between the Transbay Terminal and 33rd Avenue, achieves average headways of just a couple minutes at peak times. And yet, even at this frequent spacing, the buses fill up. That the demand on Geary exists for rail service is clear, but rail expansion is always destined to get bogged down in politics. Given our track record, one thing is virtually certain: if we start seriously planning this tomorrow afternoon, we will not be riding any trains down Geary for at least two decades, and in all likelihood, even longer than that. Conceptual regional rail proposals have classified a second Transbay Tube and new San Francisco BART line as a fifty-year goal.

I think ‘fifty-year’ goals are great - we should have more of them. This one-and two-year goal stuff is for the birds. As I’ve said before, short-term planning in how we got into this mess in the first place. That needs to stop, and we need to stop it. It ain’t gonna happen on its own.

And we don’t have to wait fifty years for something to happen - we can start tomorrow morning, by putting down cones, restriping, etc. We can have new, dedicated, physically-separated-from-moving-traffic-for-most-of-the-time bike lanes by the end of the week. The constriction of the superhighway that is Geary Blvd. will chase many car drivers from it, and move those people onto the buses or their bikes. We then set the light-rail plans in motion. People who actually ride the bus will start making efficiency and reliability changes with the cooperation of the City and merchants, who are happily seeing their businesses boom.

Done, and done.

Quoting a BRT proponent:

It’s possible! It’s possible! You can do it! You can do it! Please! Do it — now!

…I wanted to add that getting real bike facilities installed on the most important corridors of the city is absolutely critical - that is according to people who know about bike transit. If we are not interested in bicycling being a viable mode of transportation in San Francisco, then we should support BRT everywhere we can - including and especially when plans for BRT include preventing bicycles from traveling on the most-heavily-trafficked corridors of our city.

Leave comment (3)

[p.s. The Forums are open for participation.]