Social media cyclists call out San Francisco as cars keep driving in new center bike lanes

More than four months ago, the city of San Francisco took a surprising turn and created a protected bike lane down the center of busy Valencia Street much to the chagrin of many local cycling advocates.

Now, according to some recent posts on social media, including by cycling advocate Luke Bornheimer, things are going pretty much according to plan — in a bad way.

“It’s been 4+ months since people started using the Valencia center bikeway and over a month since SFMTA started its ‘pilot,'” Bornheimer wrote on a recent post. “Let’s see how effective the center bikeway is at keeping cars and trucks out of it.”

Videos that followed show multiple cars driving in the center lane, doing u-turns in front of the bike lane across the path of cyclists and more. The situation, at least according to these videos, is making Valencia more unsafe for cyclists.

As one commenter on the videos astutely noted: “There’s a big difference between a bike lane where car’s *shouldn’t* go and one where cars *can’t* go.”

Seconds later and one block down Valencia, drivers did sudden U-turns in front of people on bikes, took illegal left turns, and drove through the bikeway, forcing people to stop and swerve 😔

The center bikeway is failing as expected.

Curbside lanes now: https://t.co/j5jBzWsuvX pic.twitter.com/B2npOY31RU

— Luke Bornheimer (LukeBornheimer@sfba.social) (@LukeBornheimer) September 11, 2023

Biked the center Valencia bike lane today for the first time. Perfect. No notes. @sfbike @SFMTA_Muni pic.twitter.com/GnK1Pvnyeu

— Brad Kayal (@withayou) September 9, 2023

On April 4, 2023, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Board of Directors approved the mid-Valencia pilot proposal, which is a 12-month pilot on Valencia Street between 15th to 23rd streets.

Luke Bornheimer is a sustainable transportation advocate and the organizer behind Better Valencia. He says, the center cycle track was originally proposed as a “potential design alternative” in July 2018 and received overwhelmingly negative feedback.

“The center cycle track idea was reintroduced in 2022 and, despite overwhelmingly negative feedback (13% support for the design), SFMTA moved forward with the design regardless,” Bornheimer told Momentum earlier this year. “I have also heard that Director Tumlin rode a center cycle track or two in other cities, thought they were a good idea, and has been promoting the center cycle track design from within SFMTA and with City officials.”

It’s not like there are no center-running bike lanes anywhere. There are a few, perhaps best known in the cycling hotbed of Bogota, Colombia. Here, center bike lanes are effective thanks to a wide and solid buffer between the active vehicle lanes and the bike lanes. The theory goes that the center bike lanes means there is no conflict between bike lane users and pedestrians as well as street parking and deliveries — see two examples below.

According to a European Cycling Federation report, one of the main danger points of center bike lanes occur at intersections when vehicles in the right-hand lane perform left turns across the bike lanes. The solution is extra large obstacles for those turning left to slow cars right down, or special turn signals for left-hand turning vehicles. The onus should not be on cyclists to protect themselves.

The key takeaway from the ECF report is that “in cities with grid structures like Bogotá it reduces the number of side road crossings for the cyclists,” as well as “Once you’re on a center bike lane, the driving task becomes easier and safer compared to seggregated on footpath level.”

One of the outstanding issues with the Valencia center lane project is the widely spaced and flimsy plastic bollards and low curbs used to separate the live vehicle traffic lanes from the bike lanes — see photos to show how little buffer exists. This design clearly allows for vehicles to enter the bike lanes to get around obstructions such as when emergency vehicles or other vehicles block a vehicle lane, which, according to Janelle Wong, of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, is what was happening in Bornheimer’s video.

“I would like to point out that the video that Luke Bornheimer is taking has two fire trucks in the car lane of travel. The MTA does need to figure out a safe way for cars to get around the fire trucks that are doing their jobs,” she wrote, in an email to Momentum. “We are in conversations with them about solutions to these particular moments. One of our concerns was about emergency vehicles getting access to the street in the event of an emergency. The emergency vehicle is allowed to drive in the center of the bike lane in the event of an emergency. In this case, they blocked the car travel lane to assist.”

Wong also explained that Valencia is a “pilot project,” which is running until April 2024.

“There are things about this pilot that need to be figured out to make the street safe and usable by all users of the street,” Wong added.

While one of the videos does show emergency vehicles blocking lanes, another does not.

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the largest cycling advocacy organization in the city, supported the Valencia center bikes, because something had to be done along a very dangerous roadway.

To people who aren’t fans of our stance on Valencia, here’s what we say: Putting infrastructure in the ground immediately is going to save lives on Valencia Street. 🧵👀

— SF Bicycle Coalition (@sfbike) March 24, 2023

According to Bornheimer, Valencia as a critical route for people on bikes, both for getting around San Francisco — transporting children, going to work, visiting friends — and for shopping at local businesses, including on Valencia.

“A great deal — if not the majority — of commercial activity on and around Valencia is done by people who walk, bike or take public transit to shop at businesses there,” he told Momentum. “Valencia has numerous adjacent arterial streets for cut-through car traffic, but the City (SFMTA) has continued to prioritize through traffic, parking, and food-delivery and ride-hailing companies over the safety of people and climate action.”