Recently I went for a bike ride with an attorney I know. To get from a meeting at Van Ness and Clay to another one downtown, this busy lawyer—his name is David—told me, we’d ride down Polk Street and cut over on O’Farrell.
“This is not a cool bike,” he admitted, unlocking a maroon Schwinn Voyageur from an inverted steel U set in the sidewalk. “It’s just a cheap beater, but it gets me where I want to go and hopefully nobody wants to steal it.” David has had “3.8” bikes stolen in the 15 years he has lived in San Francisco. “Half of one was stolen when I was eating at a restaurant in the Mission,” he explained. “It was stripped to the frame. Then, a couple of weeks ago, my seat got ripped off.”
The weirdest and most symbolic heist happened while David was preparing for a trial: “My bike was locked up literally in front of the Hall of Justice, 50 feet from the door.”
David is proud that, despite such travails, he doesn’t own a car. He had one for only six months, in 2000, when he was commuting to the Peninsula. “It was incredibly unpleasant. It would take me 20 or 30 minutes to find parking on Russian Hill, and I was still getting enough parking tickets to fund certain Muni lines. It’s far more efficient to be on a bike; whenever my colleagues and I are going from Point A to Point B, I suggest that we race—and I’ve never lost.”
This was illuminating, as David is anything but a speed demon. I was trying to ride next to him to keep up the conversation, but as he pedaled along in his tight-fitting business suit, helmet positioned toward the back of his skull, revealing his forehead, he kept slowing down and looking over his shoulder. “Sorry,” he said when I stopped to wait for him. “I’m checking to see if this is truly a two-abreast situation.”
Polk is an officially designated bike route, but the part we were riding has no formal bike lanes. We were following “sharrows”—stenciled images of bikes with arrows, indicating where cyclists should ride, especially to avoid car doors. To make room for these, 11 years ago two southbound lanes on Polk were reduced to one, following the example of Valencia Street, ground zero for the bike explosion now engulfing the city.
At O’Farrell, David continued straight through the intersection and stopped at the far corner—a pretty cautious way to turn left. Then, when the light turned green, we found ourselves jockeying for position with the pachyderms of Muni. “We’re actually in the bus zone here,” David said, lamenting the lack of official bike lane. “But cars are in it all the time.” Maybe that made him feel better about breaking the rules.
After riding for only 10 minutes, we coasted to a stop at the Hotel Nikko on Mason. “I’m late,” David announced, locking his Schwinn to a parking meter. “I was supposed to be introduced four minutes ago. This is the story of my life.” His tardiness wasn’t attributable to his choice of transportation, however; rather, a brainstorming session with clean-tech companies at his campaign headquarters had run long. Now he was scheduled to discuss immigration—one of many speeches he’s been making lately. David Chiu, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, is running for mayor. On a bike-advocacy platform
Fourteen years ago, this would have been unimaginable. In 1997, when mayor Willie Brown authorized the arrest of riders in Critical Mass—the infamous monthly bike mob that had been blocking intersections, tying up rush-hour traffic, enraging drivers, and creating a serious cultural flash point—supervisor Michael Yaki declared that “no proposal may be deemed too extreme in controlling bicycles in San Francisco.”
Critical Mass still takes place on the last Friday of each month, but around city hall nowadays, the only noise you hear about bikes is “Kumbaya.” In San Francisco, where cyclists once had the status of unruly outlaws, almost all of the current candidates for mayor seem to want their town to unseat Portland—or Minneapolis or even New York—as America’s premier bicycling city. Among them, David Chiu has assumed the most public profile, but supervisor John Avalos has been cycling the city longer. Leland Yee, who never learned how to ride as a kid, has recently mastered the art (surprise, surprise). Dennis Herrera has hinted that Market Street—reportedly the busiest bicycle thoroughfare west of the Mississippi—should be permanently closed to cars from Van Ness to the Ferry Plaza. “Cars don’t create economic activity,” Herrera wrote, responding to a survey of the candidates by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “People do.”
Even onetime Willie Brown appointee Ed Lee has gotten into the act. Within a week of entering the race last August, the interim mayor issued a press release trumpeting the city’s pro-cycling achievements over the previous year: 14 miles of new bike lanes; 2,800 sharrows; 500 bike racks; and, on Market Street, a separate “bikeway” protected from cars. Between 2006 and 2010, the city had found, cycling trips were up 58 percent, and the proportion of all trips made by bike had grown to 6 percent. “Whether commuting to work, running errands, or taking a family outing, more and more San Franciscans are choosing to bicycle,” Lee proclaimed.
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