The lifting of a 4-year-old injunction by a judge has freed the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to begin planning an extensive bike network around the city.
The transit agency has already made some improvements, according to Streetsblog San Francisco, such as adding protected bike lanes on Mid-Market Street, striping 10 miles of new bike lanes and placing hundreds of new bike racks around the city.
But the nonprofit San Francisco Bike Coalition hopes to radically change the scene with their "Connecting the City" plan. Acting director Renee Rivera said part of the plan is to take the city’s existing bike routes crosstown and improve them up to an "8 to 80" standard, which seeks to make roads accessible and inviting for people from eight to 80 years of age, according to BikePortland.org.
The three crosstown routes would be from the Ferry Building to Ocean Beach, Park Merced to Downtown and Mission Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge. The planned routes are not new, since bicycle advocates have been talking about similar concepts for years. But the bike coalition is focusing all its resources into the plan and working on luring some of the Bay Area’s most talented transportation planners, designers and architects to help create a plan that will be approved by the city.
Currently, six percent of trips in the city are by bicycle. The new plan would help San Francisco get closer to achieving the SFMTA’s 2030 mode split goal of 20 percent of trips by bike.
