San Francisco Bike Blog

What is CC Puede?

CC Puede (“Cesar Chavez, Yes We Can!”) is a grassroots coalition of neighbors, merchants, parents, and transportation advocates that came together in summer 2005. We work with city officials and a growing circle of community groups and individuals through petitions, meetings, local media, public rallies, and personal outreach to achieve our goal:

CC Puede works to make Cesar Chavez Street become a livable street where all people can enjoy living, working, shopping, learning, playing, resting and traveling.

For the Spanish-impaired, ‘CC Puede’ is a play on the phrase, “Sí se puede.”

I attended a meeting tonight at 3101 Mission - the corner of Mission and Cesar Chavez. About 22 folks showed up.

The City’s Cesar Chavez Street Design page is here.

One older gentleman showed up with his cool little dog - the man would not shut up. I’m fine with speaking your mind, but with 22 people present, you have to give everyone a chance to talk. And he kept saying all this vague stuff that was very much like what we just heard during the presidential campaign, with some white people talking about Barack. When asked why they were not crazy about Barack, they’d say odd stuff like, “He’s not like us” or “I’m not sure about him” or other weird stuff. This particular gentleman at the meeting would talk about ‘different types of people’ and ‘different types of traffic being affected in different ways.’ Again and again he would repeat this while cutting people off and talking out of turn. The day laborer issue finally came up, which seemed to be one of the issues he was trying to get at without actually sounding racist. There are real issues to deal with pertaining to the day laborers that have nothing to do with racism, but it was all a bit ridiculous - the guy couldn’t bring himself to say anything about ‘those people.’ At one point someone asked the guy, “Can you be more specific? What are you talking about?” Of course, being specific with specific racist charges is not easy, so you just repeat your generic, vague comments - which is exactly what he did. Finally, one guy in the group issued a ‘STFU’ (i.e. ‘OK, give someone else a chance to talk.’) in a manner which was much more polite than I was about to do. Props to him.

Gillian Gillette Laura Norrell, an obstetrician at St. Luke’s, and organizer with The San Jose/Guerrero Neighborhood Coalition, talked about the St. Luke’s Rebuild - what seems like the biggest project I’ve heard of since the Big Dig. Gillian Laura brought her cute 5-year old daughter, who sat on mom’s lap, and was intensely embarrassed when mom told everyone that her daughter’s birthday was today. I didn’t follow anything about this part of the talk, really. There’s going to be some massive consolidation, and this all has to do with the CPMC ‘institutional master plan.’

The City’s project manager for the redesign, Andres Power, was there. He talked about some details of the plan and answered some questions. The worst rush of traffic on Cesar Chavez (CC) was in a ‘balloon’ hour - or even less than an hour - in the morning. Someone asked if ‘3400 Cesar Chavez‘ (what appears to be some demolition/new construction of mixed use housing) was ‘in on’ some detail.

One person was worried about the possible removal of the left-turn pocket from Cesar Chavez onto Mission - she said they did it before back in the day and some other intersection got crushed with spillover.

Cesar Chavez and 26th Streets can’t really be touched because of the bicycle injunction [Update: This is obviously more than a bit vague and wacky - not sure what context this was said in.].

Median starts around Guerrero.

It is incredibly expensive to widen sidewalks.

One attendee, a business owner from ‘down there’ - Cesar Chavez and 3rd Street area - said, “Don’t forget about us.”

Dustin White talked about the EIR - the draft of which is due in a couple of weeks. Details of the process surrounding the EIR from here on out probably needs a dedicated post. Don’t worry - everyone will have plenty of time to read, digest, and complain about it.

If community groups wanted to make some significant changes that were not covered in the EIR, then a new EIR for that portion of the plan could be required. EIR usually analyzes two scenarios - anything in between those two scenarios is automatically covered by the EIR, by law.

Lots of Caltrain riders use Cesar Chavez to get to the Caltrain station - presumably at the 22nd Street stop.

I had a question for Dustin, and I also wanted to get in a word of advocacy. In a roundabout way, I managed to do both at once, and caused a bit of commotion at the same time - and I don’t think I ever got an answer, or I just didn’t hear it. I basically quickly railed against ‘crappy little bike lanes,’ asked Dustin if the EIR precluded us from considering fully-separated bike lanes on Cesar Chavez, and finished off by saying something like, “because I want children to be able to ride Cesar Chavez, and older folks, and women, and everybody.” As you might imagine, the ‘women’ part didn’t go over too well. Nobody was really angry, that I could tell, but a couple of women scoffed at the misogynist in their midst — “Women can ride bikes, too?! Really?! Wow. Amazing.” It was kind of bad, and funny, and at the same time I thought, “Oh shit - I’ll never be able to make my point now.” I tried to explain what I meant, but it was already gone. The person next to me - some type of planner person, I think - murmured, “I know what you mean.” And Fran Taylor, one of the main organizers, emailed me a follow-up - I had emailed her just before the meeting to say I might stop by, even though I wasn’t a resident of the area - and she said she knew what I meant and knew about the cycling stats being tilted towards men, etc. — it was all cool. So, the point of all that, I guess, is be careful how your present that particular argument. 

I managed to also interject and say, basically, that I could care less about ‘trees in the median’ and I really wanted the physically separated bike lanes. Other suggested, ‘No - we’ll take the median and the trees because they’ve been shown to slow down cars.’ This is a 14-foot median we’re talking about. To me, that’s a lot of space to give to inanimate objects. I don’t doubt that trees have their place in this world - really - but it’s just a question of priority. If you believe, as do I, that having physically separated bike lanes on all the major arterials in the city is of utmost importance, then you probably want physically separated bike lanes on Cesar Chavez more than trees. And maybe there’s room for both. But for me, we have to have the proper bike infrastructure. Period. Without exception. No compromises on that particular aspect. I don’t care if you need to take space away from medians and cars and parking - we need the proper bike infrastructure.

More than one person said, “Well, 26th is better for bikes, anyway.” And they mentioned some other street. Of course, as I’ve argued before, I believe it’s absolutely critical that we have full bicycle access - not just safe access, but access that feels safe, which means physically separated bike lanes, on each and every major corridor in the city - especially each and every major corridor in the city.

Someone else mentioned something about constraints only allowing for some three-block segment of redesign, so they’d rather have something full and awesome instead of something ‘half-assed.’ I didn’t understand that part.

Just for the record, cycling and allowing everybody to ride is hugely important for so many reasons. Human rights, women’s rights, civil rights - you name it. On the practical level, these are also hugely important drivers for change that we have on our side. They can be made to work spectacularly for us if we’re willing to use them. I think we haven’t even scratched the surface yet on advocacy from these points of view.

On the women’s rights point, and my comment at the meeting, I’m referring of course to John Pucher’s work (PDF, video), and others, who have shown in various ways, that if we want to allow women to ride as much as men, we need much better bike infrastructure - infrastructure that feels safe. From Pucher’s ‘Making Cycling Irrisistible’ (PDF) (italics mine):

Conclusions: Policies to Make Cycling Irresistible

The most important approach to making cycling safe and convenient in Dutch, Danish and German cities is the provision of separate cycling facilities along heavily travelled roads and at intersections, combined with extensive traffic calming of residential neighbourhoods. Safe and relatively stress-free cycling routes are especially important for children, the elderly, women and for anyone with special needs due to any sort of disability. Providing such separate facilities to connect practical, utilitarian origins and destinations also promotes cycling for work, school and shopping trips, as opposed to the mainly recreational cycling in the USA, where most separate cycling facilities are along urban parks, rivers and lakes or in rural areas.

Some supporting research from Australian scientists says the following:

Objective.

Females are substantially less likely than males to cycle for transport in countries with low bicycle transport mode share. We investigated whether female commuter cyclists were more likely to use bicycle routes that provide separation from motor vehicle traffic.

…

Conclusions.

Consistent with gender differences in risk aversion, female commuter cyclists preferred to use routes with maximum separation from motorized traffic. Improved cycling infrastructure in the form of bicycle paths and lanes that provide a high degree of separation from motor traffic is likely to be important for increasing transportation cycling amongst under-represented population groups such as women.

The way I read this data is simple — if we want to allow women to ride their bikes as much as men, we have to have the proper bicycle infrastructure. Shortchanging bicycle infrastructure is shortchanging women.

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