A key problem in transportation is known as the last mile — moving people to and from systems and stations so that they don’t all pile into cars and make not just each other insufferable, but the whole planet unlivable. Transit planners tend to make it easy for people to come and go so they can have as many riders as possible.
Caltrain, the rail line that has served passengers up and down the Peninsula for 150 years, is serious about its riders using bicycles for the last mile. It boasts “the most extensive bicycle access program among passenger railroads in the nation.” Each train can accommodate between 72 and 80 bikes. Multiply that by 11 trains heading southbound from the San Francisco 4th and King station roughly between 7 and 9 am, and by 10 trains arriving around the same two-hour time frame. On the back of the envelope, that’s around 1,600 bikes, give or take a few spokes, potentially passing through the station and the surrounding streets in the morning.
Now repeat the same math for the evening commute between 5 and 7 pm. That is certainly a lot of riders, along with a lot of potential cars taken off the roads, but it is still not enough. Caltrain has been “bumping” bikes — that is, denying them from boarding because of overcrowding — for six years straight.
It’s telling that demand from cyclists to ride the rails remains strong, even as the blocks of Townsend Street near Caltrain are part of the high-injury network of streets that see most of the injuries and fatalities, and which the city has singled out for design, public health, and enforcement work. (These determinations stem from the city’s Vision Zero data. As you can see from the adjacent map, every district and neighborhood in SF has got trouble.)
But San Francisco has just decided it isn’t going to make it easier to get to and from the 4th and King Caltrain station. A little over two weeks ago, the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency said it was pulling back on planned bike-safety improvements for Townsend. Instead of separating the bike lane from traffic right up to the Caltrain station, as well as building an elongated sidewalk for pedestrian access, it’s going to look at improvements elsewhere on Townsend. (The transportation agency has updated its project page to reflect a more modest scope; here’s an archived page with the cancellation.)
MTA spokesman Paul Rose confirmed this: “The most prudent use of public funds would be to coordinate the project with the DTX which breaks ground within the next five years,” he wrote in an email. DTX refers to the Downtown Extension Project, which aims to bring Caltrain from its current terminus South of Market to the brand-new Transbay Transit Center, which was designed and built to handle trains, including high-speed rail now under construction in central California.
For Charles Deffarges, a community organizer for the SF Bike Coalition, this makes no sense. “The excuses that we’ve gotten so far really don’t cut it,” he told me on Townsend Street last week. “We’ve been pushing this project for about two years now … There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have this in the ground early next year.”
Plenty others agree. The local supervisor, Jane Kim, who came in third in our most recent mayoral election, took to Twitter to take SFMTA to task. In a Medium post, bike advocate Kyle Grochmal dug deep into the project particulars, including costs, and wrote that “The potential DTX construction on Townsend is also a terrible excuse to abandon the Townsend Safety Project.” He was prescient enough to make screen grabs, like the one below, of the improvements that the transportation agency had originally put forth.
Feeling the pinch
Let’s step back and assess the situation as it exists today. Besides bicyclists flocking to and from Caltrain, there are lots of other things going on. While the rail service uses a couple kinds of trains (known by nerds as rolling stock), each train can seat roughly 650 passengers, though the most crowded trains during peak commutes and special events (together we’re Giant!) can get packed with more than 850 passengers. We could do the math again on how many people are consistently and predictably spilling out at the San Francisco station, but take my word that it’s crowded. The southwest corner of 4th and Townsend — the last point of the last mile — becomes a pinch point, given all the uses and transport modes converging there.
There are cars and commuter shuttles fighting their way around; the white zones at the curb are for taxis and gig-economy vehicles. Two Muni trolley-bus lines, the 30 and the 45, also unload right there. A busy Ford GoBike station for shared bikes sports an actual attendant to help riders dock in and out. For those that don’t push pedals, there are e-bikes and now the so-called scourge of powered scooters zipping about. Finally, there is the ongoing and pavement-cutting Central Subway construction, which will bring street-level rail along 4th from Mission Bay to the upcoming Brannan Street station a long block up. The result is a chaotic, neglected, overwhelmed streetscape that is begging for revision in the name of safety — not in five years (a number I’ll blow up in a moment), but as soon as possible. Here’s a video posted to Streetsblog in 2015 that looks at the mess from a cyclist’s camera, with so many moving parts:
While Deffarges and I talked, we watched People Protected set up a separated bike lane on Townsend between 4th and 5th — not with cones or paint, but with human beings. Folks in bike-commuting gear as well as dress shirts and ties alike were arriving, grabbing yellow T-shirts, and placing themselves like human traffic cones on the asphalt’s white stripes. They eventually had about 70 people, enough for both sides of the street. This being San Francisco, they held up signs. They grooved to the music — ”The Safety Dance,” Toto’s “Hold the Line,” the Dead’s “Shakedown Street,” and other tracks selected for the occasion — blaring from a tailgate-party size Bluetooth speaker. They high-fived bicyclists and others cruising down the bike lane, newly separated from cars by flesh, clothes, and bone.
Some moments were tense. During the two-hour demonstration, a couple of drivers pulled illegal U-turns in the middle of the block, weaving around the yellow-shirted people standing between the car lane and the bike lane. There also was one altercation, when a ride-share car apparently tried to approach the curb close to a lane protector. The driver hopped out, and heated words and gestures were exchanged. A policeman cooled everybody off, but the point was made. Even with all these eyes and bodies on the street, you could see the problem of so many cars and cycles and scooters and skateboarders and pedestrians trying to navigate the same place, with the biggest vehicles just invading space as needed.
Fresh on the minds of People Protected organizers and volunteers that day was the death of 66-year-old Kevin Manning, the pedicab driver who was struck and killed by a car in the unprotected bike lane along the Embarcadero in late June. Turns out the Embarcadero is part of the high-injury network, and its improvements have been on the SFTMA’s plate too … for at least four years. “Yet, once again, we find a project forever stuck in study and process while dangerous conditions persist,” wrote Streetsblog after Manning was sent flying from his pedicab and to the hospital.
“It’s not a happy day,” said People Protected volunteer Paul Valdez, standing on the bike lane on the south side of Townsend Street, in reference to the news about Manning. Valdez, who rides to work in the Financial District from his home in District 9, also takes part in the annual Ride of Silence to remember those hurt and killed on their bikes in San Francisco.
So: The SFMTA doesn’t want to put up the Townsend improvements and then redo them for the Downtown Extension Project. There are two points to make. First, as we’ve already seen, the agency’s sluggish approach to street enhancements on its high-injury network is puzzling, to say the least. We’re talking bike lanes, sidewalks, and curbs here, not tunnels or thank goodness, a separated bus line, because that could take 20 years. The notion that the downtown rail extension, which includes a tunnel more than a mile long under SoMa will be ready in just five years, let’s just say that’s fanciful. I’m betting it takes a few years simply to organize meetings and gather public input, as if there could be a spectrum of views to consider on people being flattened. Why wait?
Second, the upper-end cost to run the now-postponed improvements to the Caltrain station at 4th Street would be about $6 million. That’s 0.5 percent of the SFMTA’s operating budget. Isn’t that what a budget is for?
I put these questions back to Rose at MTA, who said the agency is focusing on Townsend blocks between 5th and 7th streets farther west of Caltrain, where there won’t be a need to relocate overhead wires for the trolley buses. “The $1.2 billion operating budget is meant to operate the services and infrastructure we already have,” he added. “Projects like Townsend would be funded as part of the capital budget, which is made up of funding sources from grants, bonds, and other allocations. As far as timing, the agency would still need to secure funding, approvals, and complete detailed design of this work, as well as complete the community outreach phase.” TL;DR: We’ve been working on this and we’re still working on it. Stay tuned for more meetings.
Come Tuesday at the agency’s board meeting, the SF Bike Coalition and others will be seeking answers. We can also anticipate more People Protected bike-lane demonstrations. “The idea has exploded,” according to Maureen Persico, who had come to Townsend Street to lend her support. (Here’s a nice roundup on protected bike lanes across the country and globally.)
Persico originally came up with the the concept of people separating the bike lane from traffic. “We have to take care of our own,” she said. It was striking how personal the stakes were for Persico. When asked about her background in activism, she replied: “I have a background as a parent.”
This wasn’t meant as a curt rejoinder. Persico’s remarks were a reminder that urban infrastructure is typically understood as dry policy, which has to plod along a methodical and lengthy process, when what we’re talking about is people and their well-being — on whatever means of conveyance they choose to close out their last mile.
Mitigating the dangers to bikers, pedicabs, scooter riders, pedestrians, anybody on our streets actually helps everyone. Prioritizing travel via modes other than cars gets people where they’re going without having to drive and park — and is the linchpin of solving the last-mile problem. It helps justify the multibillion-dollar megaprojects like Transbay and Caltrain’s downtown extension. On top of that, we know all of this is right by the planet too.
To these ends and values, San Francisco has paid lots of lip service to being a “transit first” city, and to upholding safety with Vision Zero, with the goal of zero deaths in traffic on our streets. But as we’ve seen with improving Muni and now with protecting bicyclists and pedestrians, a few things of San Francisco’s own making stand in the way. Let’s move ahead with what’s feasible and necessary and build the bike lanes and walkways … now.
For more context and data on how bikes can benefit a city and its populace, here’s a great Twitter Moment on cycling, h/t @BrentToderian.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus
