Bicycle plan for west side gets ready for release

by Thomas K. Pendergast

A city official pegged mid-June as the most likely time a revised Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the City's Bicycle Plan will be finalized and made public, the next step toward dramatically increasing bicycle lanes throughout San Francisco.

"We're aiming at mid-to-late June to finalize the comments and responses," said Monica Pereira, a city environmental planner working on the EIR.

Public comment for the Draft EIR began in November and was closed in January. Since then, the city Planning Department has been preparing a response which will be published in the new EIR.

"We received over 40 letters, so now we're going through those comments and we're preparing responses," said Pereira.

Also known as the Big 56, the Bicycle Plan is considering adding 56 bike paths or lanes or "sharrow" markings (which mark a lane as shared by both bikes and motor vehicles) to city streets.

According to Planning Department documents, at least 25 of the bike plans are either for the west side of town or significantly affect vehicle access to the west side of town. Kirkham Street is slated for two bike lanes, which become sharrow lanes at certain parts, running from Ninth Avenue all the way out to the Great Highway. The lanes will come at the expense of 30 parking spaces, which will be removed to make room. John F. Kennedy Drive through Golden Gate Park will also be getting a pair of bike lanes, as will Seventh, Ocean and Phelan avenues and Sagamore Street.

But from the Draft EIR comes a potential source of trouble, in the form of legal action, lurking in two projects that, while not in the west side specifically, are main arteries for traffic flow to and from the west side.

In the Portola Drive area, one option would eliminate a left turn lane from Clipper Street onto Portola Drive, while creating a bike left-turn lane, and another would eliminate a lane connecting Laguna Honda Boulevard and southbound traffic with Dewey Boulevard so it could be converted into two bicycle lanes, one of them a left turn lane.

On Masonic Avenue, between Geary Boulevard and Fell Street, one option removes a through traffic lane in both directions but adds a left-turn lane in the middle and has a small section coming off of Geary Blvd. dedicated to a bike lane but not much more. Two other plans also eliminate a lane in both directions on Masonic Avenue, however, in one option, two lanes, going in each direction, are created for bikes to share with buses, while about 95 parking spaces along Masonic Avenue will be removed.

Another option reduces the northbound lanes to one through lane and one lane shared by bicycles and buses, from Grove Street to O'Farrell Street, while also entirely eliminating a southbound lane.

"I'm worried about the traffic lanes and parking," said Rob Anderson, a former candidate for District 5 supervisor who was also a plaintiff in a 2006 lawsuit that forced the City to complete an EIR for its bicycle plan. "The mythology in San Francisco is that parking and traffic flow doesn't have an environmental impact ... It's like bicycles are sacred objects in San Francisco."

In the Draft EIR, specifically with the Portola and Masonic portions of the plan, numerous aspects are labeled as a "significant unavoidable impacts (SUI)."

An SUI label means "if an agency decides to go ahead with the project it has to adopt a statement of overriding considerations. That's the agency's explanation of why it feels the benefits of a project outweigh the adverse affects," said Christopher Calfee, special council to the California Natural Resources Agency.

"The statement would have to be adopted when the project itself is adopted."

What an agency considers to be evidence can be challenged in court, potentially ending or at least stalling the project.

"There has to be evidence that supports those benefits," said Calfee.

Anderson said he doesn't expect anything substantially new in the EIR slated for June.

"When you take away parking spaces and traffic lanes on busy streets, you're going to impact traffic," Anderson said.