Fresno County Bicycle Coalition

One idea: Move the bike lanes between parked cars and the sidewalk so the cars buffer cyclists from traffic.

The city of San Francisco also launched a series of Market Street trials last week. The goal is to make the city more inviting to cyclists and pedestrians, and to promote street-side activities that become more accessible when one doesn’t first need to find a place to park a car.

This article appeared on page E – 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The growing threat of climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions means we can’t continue building like it’s 1949. But the ubiquity of cars in our lives and our urban environments makes it unlikely that the automobile will disappear any time soon.

One solution to this dilemma can be found in a number of great American neighborhoods, including Shaker Heights in Ohio and the Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland. These places have room for cars. But they’re not structured around them. By striking a delicate balance in their street design and overall layout, these places accommodate cars within attractive, walkable and bikable environments. The key point is coexistence.

What can we do to create and reinforce environments that allow cars, bikes and pedestrians to coexist?

We can figure out ways to safely mix them. There already are a number of useful models for safely accommodating bikes, pedestrians and cars in one system – some of them in the Bay Area. For instance, Berkeley’s Bike Boulevard network incorporates uninterrupted routes that encourage bikes to use the whole road, giving them the same road rights as cars. It’s safe enough that I use it to take my daughter to school.

Many European cities take transport integration to a higher level. In the Netherlands, a popular street design known as the woonerf dramatically reduces speed limits for motor vehicles and opens up the entire street to pedestrians and cyclists, creating a friendly and interactive environment. The boulevards of Paris are another classic example of successful integration. Because there are access lanes at the side of the road in which cars move more slowly, and bikes and pedestrians have equal right of use, it’s not uncommon to see a 6-year-old on a scooter on the same roadway that carries tens of thousands of cars and buses daily.

The commonality in all these systems is that they accommodate cars without becoming defined by their presence. Unfortunately, a combination of car-centric parking requirements and one-way circulation in a number of U.S. cities has created unattractive, dysfunctional places that are intimidating for pedestrians and cyclists to navigate. In order to correct this imbalance, we need to start thinking of streets as the roots of communities, not just conduits for vehicles. Every city and town needs to rethink its street standards, its parking requirements and its goals and policies. It’s not a small task.

It’s very possible for cars, bicycles and pedestrians to coexist in a vibrant urban environment. What’s more, it makes economic sense: More and more people across the United States are expressing a desire to live in walkable communities. For the good of our cities, our environment and our quality of life, it’s important that regulatory barriers to the creation of these places be removed. We need to redefine streets as important public spaces, give bicycles and pedestrians equal priority and prevent cars from driving the character of the places where we live and work.

Daniel Parolek is the founder of Opticos Design Inc., an architecture and urban design firm committed to creating and reinforcing walkable, sustainable places. He is the co-author of “Form-Based Codes: A Guide for Planners, Urban Designers, Municipalities, and Developers.” Contact us at forum@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E – 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Even bicycling – whether for sport, relaxation or commuting – is influencing the ways people shop and dress, especially in the Bay Area, where it’s easier to hop on a two-wheeler than it is in soggier, wintry climes most of the year.

The big fashion spin-off from bike culture, though, is more conceptual than literal.

You won’t see ordinary folks wearing neon Tour de France jerseys for fun, but some bicycle recreationists and commuters make a point of wearing locally made products to be socially conscious at the same time they’re reducing their carbon footprints.

At Mission Bicycle, pants by two California companies, Cordarounds and Swrve, are stylish enough to be worn by noncyclists. Cordarounds add flair to the khaki pants with reflective tape that shows when the cuff is turned up. Swrve makes modern slim knickers that end at the shin (not 1920s newsboy knickers that puff out at the knees.)

The biggest crossover into the mainstream is the bike messenger bag: Practical and stylish, it lends an air of sportiness and environmental consciousness – and has less bulk than a backpack.

The Timbuk2 brand, founded in San Francisco, has fallen in popularity in some circles because it opened manufacturing sites in Asia. Customers at Mission Bicycle tend to favor bags by San Francisco’s Rickshaw and Chrome, said bike shop employee Sal Alioto, 23.

“Personally, I shop those brands,” he said, “because if you don’t support the local companies and businesses, sooner or later they’re not going to be there anymore.”

Sustainability as a fashion statement, hitting the mainstream.

Carolyn Zinko is a Chronicle staff writer.

This article appeared on page E – 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Over the past two decades, first hundreds and then thousands of San Franciscans have chosen to bicycle as a common means of transportation. This has generated a fair amount of heat and noise, whether during the monthly Critical Mass rides (17 years old and still going strong) or during the episodic controversies over bike lanes, parking, Octavia Boulevard planning and other bike-oriented changes. But what gets less notice is the way the simple choice to bicycle by ever more San Francisco residents is gradually reshaping a sense of public space and a sense of a shared city.

Nowadays, we take for granted that our waterfront is open to walkers and bicyclists and is not an industrial port hidden by a double-deck concrete freeway that was rejected by San Franciscans in the great Freeway Revolt, the 1959-1965 clash of two planning approaches – urban renewal directed out of City Hall vs. neighborhood-directed land use decisions.

Thirty years ago, radical ecologists helped define a new approach to urban living, emphasizing the urban environment and the many nonhuman species that share this space. Their early efforts often were ridiculed, but over the years they have resulted in public commitments to open space, parklands and a healthy San Francisco Bay.

In San Francisco, the Recreation and Park Department has joined the effort to reconnect inhabitants with the landscape via a robust effort to preserve natural areas around the city. Groups such as Nature in the City, the Mission Greenbelt Project, California Native Plant Society, the Audubon Society Golden Gate chapter and many others have contributed to an important ecology of activism.

Bicyclists are not a unified group leading the charge for a larger cultural embrace of public life, but as often as not bicyclists are at the heart of many of these efforts. To improve conditions for cycling is to improve conditions for walking, for all kinds of public life. Thus San Franciscans have enjoyed a renaissance of street fairs and public festivals, too, in a healthy cycle of first opening space, then using it, then clamoring for more. This year’s Sunday Streets, which opened miles of San Francisco streets to pedestrians and cyclists, allowing up-close-and-personal examination of neighborhoods, is a spectacular example of this phenomenon.

Bicyclists automatically become more attuned to where they are, to the rise and fall of the landscape as it traverses historic waterways, wetlands, sand dunes and rocky outcroppings. As more people share that experience, the population as a whole is learning to understand better the natural environment that we all depend on, no matter how much it is obscured by pavement and buildings.

A new appreciation for urban nature, in turn, leads more people to embrace bicycling, to breathing in the fresh air as well as experiencing the tumult of city life.

People are curious to learn more about the relationship between city and nature. This passion is visible in the flourishing community gardens all over town, in the sight of many volunteers working on restoration efforts in our open spaces and in the enthusiastic use of our shorelines and public parks.

Cycling through San Francisco introduces the rider to new sights and sounds, whetting the appetite for further stimulation, but not the kind of stimulation that requires buying products – this is a free experience, the best that a beautiful city has to offer.

Public demand for traffic calming (strategies to slow and reroute traffic), wider sidewalks and public orchards and urban agriculture, dedicated bikeways and bike boulevards, are all examples of a new urbanism that seeks to integrate a complex city life with an equally complex (and neglected) natural life.

Opening up the space around Mission Creek, with a dedicated bike lane along one side and a long, narrow parkland on the other, is but one example of how we can think about a very different future city. As streets disappear beneath the rising waters of a warming planet, we might regret that we didn’t start a serious effort sooner, while we could, to restore wetlands and think about how to improve the urban/bayshore connection.

Looking back at old photographs of the city from as recently as the 1960s, we see there were few trees then, streets were wide to accommodate as many private cars as possible, and asphalt and concrete defined the streetscape. We’ve already come a long way from the car-centric 20th century, but we have a long way to go.

Chris Carlsson, a co-founder of Critical Mass, co-directs an online history of San Francisco, where you can see those old photos of a treeless San Francisco at foundsf.org. His most recent book is “Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today!” Contact us at forum@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E – 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle