The SFBC’s Second Annual Family Day was well-attended this past (Healthy) Saturday in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
People enjoyed a bicycle road-eo, games, a safety clinic, a scavenger hunt, a parade and some free bike maintenance.
But best of all, some children gained their Freedom From Training Wheels. (Four wheels bad, two wheels good, right kids?)
Click to expand.
See you next year!
Now you might think this fellow zooming down Golden Gate Avenue (not too far from where Patty Hearst spent a few terrifying months) is standing on a California Chariot, but you’d be wrong because this backwards tricycle appears to have pedals and a drivetrain.
Complete with his “Wild Kid” T-shirt, this man has got it going on, leaning this way and that down Ignatius Heights.
For those about to trike, we salute you.
Whatever you do, don’t strip it down and take off the paint. You look good in pink.
Get your Schwinn steel cruiser frame with steel springer fork and Shimano 7-speed rear derailleur with SRAM grip shift right here at Target. Some assembly reqd.
Pee-Wee Herman’s rather baroque red bicycle, stripped down to its essence, would look something like this Schwinn beach cruiser avec springer fork seen on Valencia. Click to expand:
Whitewalls, gratuitous spokes, kickstand and chrome, chrome, chrome.
That’s quite a look.
Only in Marin! That’s right, Marin County, the birthplace of mountain biking, and home to nuclear-tipped missiles, endangered deer, and marauding mountain lions (nee cougars), can’t abide you people building your own single-track MTB trails.
Michael Philip More is getting a ten-day jail sentence for illegally building a quarter-mile trail at the end of Robinhood Drive in San Rafael.
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Possible path of the trail, the white line is a quarter-mile long
Does Michael More wish there were more singletrack MTB trails in Marin? Given that MTBers are mostly confined to fire roads in Marin County, signs point to yes.
Here’s the situation. This recent photo shows an interstate bus parked in the westbound bike lane of John F. Kennedy Drive in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Of course the curb is painted red so people shouldn’t park there, but they do.
So where should a bike rider go? Well, around the bus of course, but that seems a tad on the dangerous side. For some odd reason, somebody decided that JFK should have the widest bike lanes in all of Christendom. And there’s an old tunnel under the road so it has a little kink, as seen here, right in front of the Conservatory of Flowers.
When you’re mapping things out in an ivory tower (ala the abysmal Octavia Boulevard) it’s a little tough to see how things will work out in real life.
In real life, pugnacious-looking, Norman Maileresque bus drivers will park their 8.5 foot wide rigs wherever the Hell they want.
So, is there another way to handle the striping on this piece of road? Maybe compromise on bike lane width? Maybe take out parking on the eastbound side of the street? Anything?
Here was the scene this morning during the A.M. drive - a cyclist getting ticketed by a motorcycle officer. Don’t know the details of this particular incident, but it wouldn’t be hard for you to find cyclists blowing stop signs or red lights at any intersection in San Francisco.
Individual officers sometimes get on a kick and issue tickets for the same type of infraction over and over all day. If you get cops acting together, as sometimes happens, then you’d call it an enforcement action. They could go after drivers who roll through stop signs, or pedestrians who jaywalk - you never know.
Harley Davidson of a bitch! Yet another ticket from a Dudley Perkins-motosickle-riding buckethead.
Some would like to see Page become the Page St. Bicycle Boulevard - this would allow cyclists to maintain speed. Traffic circles were tried before, but those things proved unpopular.
Leave us turn to Idaho for the answer - stop signs mean “stop” for drivers but mean “yield” for cyclists:
TITLE 49
MOTOR VEHICLES
CHAPTER 7
PEDESTRIANS AND BICYCLES
49-720. STOPPING — TURN AND STOP SIGNALS. (1) A person operating a
bicycle or human-powered vehicle approaching a stop sign shall slow down and,
if required for safety, stop before entering the intersection.
What’s wrong with California having a similar law?