This was the the cause of a lot of the problems the other day – the light at Sloat and Great Highway flashing red. So traffic backed up into Lake Merced:
In most towns, the cops would care about something like this, but in SF it’s up to the SFMTA to care, and it doesn’t really care, so bike riders heading north didn’t know where to go – they went all over, on the sand, on vegetation, on the sidewalks. and lane-splitting was an option as well:
These guys heading south had to pick up their road bikes and carry them for a while after being forced into the sand:
Speaking of which, this MUNI bus looked abandoned in the dunes. I think operators park them here to allow car drivers to use the traffic circle to get back to the intersection, cause, you know, its wheels are to big to get caught in a little sand, right? Well…
…this ride here got totally stuck in a just a little sand. It was sad. (Photos altered to protect the embarrassed.) Help seemed to be far far away as cars behind got blocked in the circle:
Do you need to hang a left to get a nice free parking space? Sure, what’s a few lanes of stalled traffic?
And then there’s just your normal Great Highway, with horrible pedestrians in between crosswalks…
…and improperly in crosswalks:
And there’s the sand again, always the sand:
Or no sand – I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t dream of ever being on this side of the line, but perhaps that’s a quarter century of SF County living talking, IDK. So really, you don’t want to use that bike lane up there, or that other one to the right of you, huh? OK
And the live aboard RVs – they’ll get hidden away come nighttime of course.
That’s life out west, where every day is Do What You Feel Day.
SPUR, the Urban Renewal people, have a plan to “renew” this area. IDK, they’ve had a pretty bad record over the years and decades, right? And they seem to love SFGov’s current Willie Brown orientation.
Anyway, they have a roadshow to sell people on their ideas. You should check it out sometime to see the promised Bright New Future, the promised New Gold Dream.
