The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) board of directors approved the Biking and Rolling Plan, which offers dozens of suggestions for improving or adding bikeways on hundreds of streets in the city.
Transportation planners have been working on the plan for two years, including holding open houses and working with community groups in neighborhoods where there have been past harms in parts of the city from past redevelopment projects or construction that have left out Indigenous, Black, and brown people.
Planners said it’s an update of the city’s bike plan, which was last updated 15 years ago.
“The biking rolling plan is different from previous plans in that it’s designed for users historically left out of bicycle planning,” said Christine Osorio, the project manager. “They are students, families, and caregivers, people who are very young and small and often making trips with multiple people on one device. They’re people with disabilities who are especially vulnerable on the road.”
Planners have called the quarter-mile goal the “north star network” in the Biking and Rolling Plan to fill gaps in the city’s bikeway network. The plan also focuses on better and safer connections near schools for students who walk, bike or roll to school.
“It serves as a reference guide for the SFMTA and the public to know where transportation improvements will happen,” said Osorio.
Supporters of the plan said the transportation agency should not take 20 years to complete the network and instead commit to timelines on completing portions of the plan, especially near school zones.
Any approval of a new bike lane in the plan will go through its own outreach and approval process. Funding is also not tied to the Biking and Rolling Plan itself, and individual projects would need to find funding and go through a technical feasibility before moving forward.
Some critics of the plan said funding should instead go to Muni operations. However, Osorio said that funding for bikeway projects is entirely funded by grants specified for these type of projects and do not compete with funding for Muni.
Planners also addressed concerns about the further closure of city streets to private vehicles and further installation of bike lanes in merchant corridors. In answering questions from board Chair Janet Tarlov, Osorio said the north star network did not close additional streets to vehicles and that no future bikeways were planned along merchant corridors.
Board Vice Chair Stephanie Cajina gave direction for planners to come back to the board within nine months to present a draft of a plan of how schools can be better connected to the city’s bikeways.
“I think that this is a really clear path forward for us and a reference point for us to help us get there,” said SFMTA board Director Dominica Henderson. “ I hope to see it before 20 years from now.”
