BIKE PLAN ON HOLD — LAWSUIT FREEZES BIKE IMPROVEMENTS

New Alemany Blvd bike lanes, one of the top 20 projects identified in the 2005 Bike Plan.

Superior Court Gives OK to Some Bike Improvements

November 25, 2009: The SF Superior Court has partially lifted the three-year-old Bike Plan injunction that has prevented all physical improvements for bicycles in San Francisco. This ruling allows the City to move forward with striping ten bike lanes and painting shared-lane bike stencils ("sharrows") and colored bike lanes and installing hundreds of bike parking racks all across San Francisco. This ruling come on the heels of a city report that bicycle ridership has increased a whopping 53% since 2006.

With the huge demand for biking improvements, we’re disappointed that the Court didn’t completely remove the handcuffs, but we’re pleased that many streets can now be improved for biking. A three-year backlog means San Francisco has some serious catching up to and we are eager for this dark cloud over sustainable transportation to be completely lifted. The City expects that the SF Superior Court will hear the lawsuit which brought about the Bike Plan injunction in June, at which point the lawsuit could be dissolved and bring about a full lifting of the injunction. Download our press release (PDF).

June 26, 2009: The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) voted YES to adopt the 2009 San Francisco Bicycle Plan, an ambitious roadmap meant to boost an already-impressive transportation mode to new heights of safety, convenience, and ubiquity. Adoption of the Bike Plan, accompanied by the full environmental review (EIR) of it, are keys to unlocking the injunction. See our Bike Plan page for the latest information. Read more about the injunction's current state and history on the City Attorney's website

November 2006: Superior Court Judge Peter Busch handed down his verdict on the lawsuit against the San Francisco Bicycle Plan, and it's tough — the preliminary injunction in effect since June 2006 continues in force, forbidding the city from physical streetscape changes for the sake of bike improvements (such as parking removal and lane re-allocation, even shared-lane "sharrows" and U-rack bike parking racks) until the city has completed a full environmental review on the Bike Plan.

read the Bike Plan lawsuit ruling here (PDF, 982 Kb)

SFBC Press Release on the ruling (11/8/06)

Mayor Newsom reaffirms commitment to City's Bike Plan (11/8/06)

SF Chronicle (11/9/06) | SF Examiner (11/9/06) | Bay City News (11/9/06)

CEQA at a glance

Bike Plan EIR at a glance

SF Bike Plan timeline

Judge Busch acknowledged that the suit was not a matter of "bikes vs. cars" but rather a narrow question of process under CEQA (the state environmental review law) — whether the Bike Plan, adopted unanimously last June by the Board of Supervisors and Mayor Newsom, has the potential to cause significant environmental impacts in and of itself, or is (as the city argued) a set of guiding principles and recommendations to steer San Francisco's progress toward a more bike-friendly city, leaving the specific change-making projects to another process of review and legislation. Under the court's ruling, the city will have to carry out a full-scale CEQA review on the 2005 Bike Plan as a single thing, and it remains to be seen how long this will take.

We certainly need big changes for better everyday bicycling in this city, but the Bike Plan alone won't make them — to make a real Citywide Bike Network happen we need an Implementation Plan with firm dates and dollars and deliverables, and we look to the Board and Mayor to commit in earnest to an aggressive program to move the plan forward, towards the official goal of 10% of trips in SF by bike by 2010 (about 36 months from now, as Mayor Newsom noted in his Oct. 26 State of the City Address ).

9/19/06 Press Release - City Urged to Step Up Committment to Better Bicycling in Face of Lawsuit

Media accounts of the 9/19/06 hearing:

ABC 7 News
KTVU 2 News
KCBS News

Matt Smith tells an interesting tale of some of the Bike Plan lawsuit characters in an earlier adventure (SF Weekly, 9/27/06)

SF City Attorney files opposition brief in defense of Bike Plan (8/21/06)

the City's brief (arguments in defense of the City, 8/21/06)