San Francisco Bike Blog

If you want to see the results from the day - they will be presented at 6:30 PM - so get your butt on down there (6655 Mission St., Daly City — the massive, new, awesome-ish civic building). What these folks come up with will presumably go into the next Daly City Master Plan. The City has a Master Bicycle Plan, but I’m not sure if it, too, is being held up by the bicycle injunction.

At least part of the mission of this event is to generate ideas for the new Daly City Master Plan - which might include building up a downtown/core area. So the question of the day is - where do we put downtown?

The ride out to the meeting location from SF, was a long, steady, uphill piece of work. It was just over the other (south) side of the hill - technically, what is Daly City (’DC’ for the locals). Me and my single speed had to put in some effort to get here. It’s on the mild side today - 60s - and things got pretty rainy/misty as I continued to head south. Dodging traffic on Mission, oddly, was not as tough as usual. I guess things are moving a bit slower in the rain, and on a weekend. [I reworded this graph a bit -- too confusing.]

I’d guess there are about 55 people in attendance - most wearing t-shirts that are branded for the occasion –  they look like the design in the main picture shown in the original post. I commented that I thought the design was really nice, and someone told me it was done professionally.

So this project is definitely more of a Daly City project. It may only technically touch the south edge of San Francisco - but, of course, we want easy bicycle access to and from the city, and Mission St., in my view, is ripe for a road diet. Once you get into Daly City, Mission St. turns into Route 82 - aka El Camino Real (aka ‘The Worst Road In America, ‘ according to one knowledgeable source)- so it’s run by Caltrans, and they hate bikes and livable cities, so they hate road diets.

Most folks had broken into one of four main groups - each group having chosen one particular section of Mission St./Daly City to look at. There are real architect-types here, and a few scattered homeowners, business and property owners, and me - non-resident bike advocate. There are massive printouts of maps, and all sorts of crazy pencils and markers and people drawing and computers with Google Sketchup on them.

One person I talked to is a planner for Daly City who lives in Berkeley. I guess I never really thought of it before, but wouldn’t it make more sense for planners to live in the places they plan for? Maybe that’s unrealistic in this day and age, but it seems to make sense to me. Is there a more important job for any city than to have top-notch planners who know the local landscape, and hopefully, the locals. This seems like it could make pushing valuable changes through a lot easier. When someone says they don’t want X change to the city, planner Y says, “Listen Mr. Lawrence, I live here, too - you know me - you know I would never do anything to this city that wouldn’t make it a lot better - I’m raising my kids, here - this is important to me and my family - to my kids’ future - I want them to be able to stay here if they want to - we need more density if we’re going to allow that to happen - density can be a very very good thing if done right - and we’re doing it right.”

If you know my tirades against BRT, you’ll know that I’m fairly confident that the people building and advocating for BRT systems will never ride them. If they thought they would ride the bus, they would advocate for rail instead.

Cities should have strong incentives to move and/or keep planners local - home-buying plans, whatever. They’re planners - they’re boring - they pay their bills on time - help them move to the city they’re (re)building. It’ll help you get stuff done.

After shuffling around the room and talking to a few people and listening in on a few conversations, it seemed that most of the conversation that could be related to bicycles centered on a few things:

• how to move more cars through the area more quickly,
• how to facilitate the flow of cars while allowing for more cars,
• and how to build more density while allowing for more car parking.

So I got out of there. I’ll return at 6:30 to hear about the car-centric future plans for Daly City.

I walked all around the part of Daly City within about a mile radius of the meeting. There are lots of roads and cars. And lots of fat people in cars. Sorry - it’s just something I always notice when I get out of the city. People are fatter, and the bigger the car, the fatter the person driving it, and the person that might be sitting next to the person driving it, too. Part of the reason they’re fat, of course, is that they can’t walk or bike around their neighborhoods - they have to drive - this leads to the massive influx of fat people to doctors offices all over Daly City. Don’t ask me for scientific proof - I’ve never seen a report - but I’ve seen the cars, I’ve seen the drivers, I’ve seen the landscape - it would be almost impossible to stay healthy in such a car-centric environment. It amounts to a monumental human tragedy on a massive scale, and a catastrophic public health crisis - this is suffering, but it’s not just that - it is also financially devastating for families, and for society. We’re only now starting to get the first hint of kids raised in and on cars. Maybe we can still change course.

In Daly City, there are a couple of pedestrians here and there. Bikers stay on the sidewalks.

I ended up back on the San Francisco side of Mission, where i found Tselogs, and filipino-type restaurant with awesome food and hot tea and canned coca-cola, and a friendly staff - and unadvertised wifi. I’m gonna chill here for a bit longer and then head back to the meeting with my game face on. I knew things weren’t going to be pretty when I saw that the only bike parked outside, including mine, was mine.

There was at least one biker/planner at the meeting, and I went up to him and said, “Hi - I’m a bike guy, I thought I heard you talking about bike lanes or something…?” Maybe my cynicism had taken over by this point, but I thought he said, “Mission doesn’t need bike lanes,” and he went on to say something about him being fine riding on Alemany and San Jose. I could definitely have misheard him, but needless to say I would disagree with him strongly - and disagree with anyone - who suggested we didn’t need at least bike lanes on the most major corridors of the city.

Below are a few pictures with some descriptions.

The organizers did a good job of putting up lots of signs in and around the meeting site:

This is the lovely new Civic Center/Library:

New condos right next to the new library. I like the website - total bullshit - as usual. The images on the site make it look like a walk/bike paradise. Go for a visit if you’re interested in reality:

The new library (close-up):

Foyer of the library, with another sign:

Leftover food - yummmmmmaybe not:

People working together:

More people working together - lots of those black and red and white t-shirts:

I guess these are from brainstorming ‘observations’ sessions earlier in the day. Someone did note the lack of bike facilities - maybe there’s still hope! Lots of people were talking about hills in the area, but the hills on Mission are very doable. I had a tough time on my single speed, but presumably a bike with gears could handle the 7% grade (guess?) pretty handily [The 'Smile w/ Missing Teeth' was being used to describe what Mission Street looked like - some empty lots, etc.]:

Incline of about 200 feet over this stretch of road. One gentleman suggesting making Mission St. one-way through here, and routing traffic going the other way to a parallel street, which is currently residential. He thinks development at the bottom of the hill (south) would be best, because it is flat there, whereas this section of Mission is on an incline, and it’s basically dug into the side of a mountain - not easy for builders:

Very cool, colorful, large zoning map:

Scribbled notes and ideas:

Zoning map key:

The folks who printed these gargantuan maps were actually there - some Peninsula printing company. I’ll try to figure out who they are.

…Mission St. & E Market St. intersection is a good indication of how anti-pedestrian and anti-bike Daly City is. It reminds one of the latest Streetfilms video on diagnoal crosswalks. I’m really not sure if this intersection can be fixed. They might just need to start over. Here’s a few seconds of what it looks like:

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