San Francisco bicyclists know that bike lanes are no guarantee of safety. They have become irresistible spots for drivers who pull over, stop, and force bicyclists into car traffic. The newest tool to draw the city’s attention to the problem: Lane Breach, a homegrown app to report vehicles that are blocking a bike lane.
Launched in March, a couple of weeks after the latest death of a bicyclist on city streets, Lane Breach is the brainchild of Alex Gaesser, a former credit-union loan officer who recently made a career switch to software engineer. In 2018, Gaesser, a San Francisco bike commuter, tried out the city’s official SF311 mobile app, which citizens use to report non-emergency problems such as a broken streetlight or graffiti, after the city opened it up to report vehicles blocking bike lanes — a chronic problem exacerbated by the rise of Lyft and Uber.
Gaesser found the SF311 app unwieldy. It requires multiple steps and scrolling down a list of options. The interface is inconvenient, particularly when a bicyclist might be in a dicey situation, at odds with a hostile car driver.
He decided to reinvent the wheel — by creating a custom app for people on two wheels.
“I wanted to make it safer and easier for people to report blocked bike lanes,” he says. “It’s a very contentious issue, and it’s dangerous to call [drivers] out directly. The end goal is to encourage systemic changes like the no drop-off policy on Valencia or self-enforcing infrastructure like protected bike lanes.”
According to city data, there were 1,168 tickets written for bicycle lane violations in May, an 11 percent increase from April.
Gaesser proposed his idea for a dedicated app during last year’s Code for America’s National Day of Civic Hacking, an annual event to encourage tech folks to work on civic problems. The response was enthusiastic, and some 30 people have contributed so far to Lane Breach, which is currently available as an iPhone app. (Gaesser says a version for other devices is coming in the next few weeks.)
Lane Breach is all about photographic proof: When you click on “New Report,” it opens your phone’s camera. After you take a photo, it prompts you to enter one of 12 categories, including “Uber,” “Lyft,” and “Uber/Lyft.” The driver type is a level of information that SF311 currently does not solicit.
While Gaesser saw improvements he could make to the SF311 user interface, the city’s underlying system has a big technical advantage. Through what software developers call an open API, independent apps like Lane Breach can tap into SF311’s database of citizen-reported information, both reading data from it and submitting updates to it. All 311 reports, dating back as far as 2008, are publicly accessible.
That data-sharing ability allows Lane Breach to include a heat map of all 311 reports since its launch. Streets that light up in lurid red include Market, Valencia, Folsom, and Howard — where Tess Rothstein was killed on March 8. She swerved out of a bike lane to avoid being doored by a legally parked car, and was hit and killed by a truck.
It’s a two-way street: When you submit a Lane Breach report, it adds to the city’s storehouse. So far, based on the reports that specify a vehicle category in Lane Breach, private vehicles have accounted for 40 percent of blockages, while Lyft/Uber account for another 25 percent.
By providing better detail to SF311, Gaesser hopes city planners can build out the bike lane network more thoughtfully. He’d like to make the Lane Breach website a comprehensive tool for planners, bike activists, and anyone else who wants city bike data in one place, including ridership numbers from automated bike counters, bike theft locations, collision locations, and types of bike lanes. “Double parking and illegal loading is the top complaint from our members for safety concerns,” says Brian Wiedenmeier, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which lobbied the city to collect data and improve enforcement. “The information adds another layer to the injury and fatality data set.”
Lane Breach is catching on. Nearly 200 people have downloaded the app, with 5 to 10 daily active users (defined as someone who opens the app), according to Gaesser. Their 700 reports account for 23 percent of the nearly 3,000* reports added to SF311 since March, when Lane Breach launched.
Is the new influx of data having an impact? At the start of May, Mayor Breed called for the SFMTA, which is in charge of parking enforcement, to increase citations for blocking bike lanes by 10 percent over the next six months and to build 20 additional miles of protected bike lanes over the next two years. According to SFMTA data provided to The Frisc, there were 1,168 tickets written for bicycle lane violations in May — an 11 percent increase from April’s 1,052 citations. One month is a tiny sample size, but if the trend continues it would suggest that the data-driven message is reaching the streets.
*Correction: The story previously misstated the volume of bike-lane reports added to SF311 since March. It is 3,000, not 8,000.
Lydia Lee is a freelance writer in the Bay Area who covers urban design.
