Sunday, July 26, 2015

City Hall on the Wiggle: Having it both ways

A Wiggle sign

A comment to the previous post:

Have you heard that there will be a "protest" at the Wiggle where bike riders will show their anger at being issued traffic citations for not stopping at stop signs? "We want to make the point that, in fact, requiring cyclists to come to full stops at every stop sign is a really terrible idea for everyone on the road." The whole protest idea reminds me of children who are upset for being caught breaking the rules so they just sit down and cry. (SFCitizen has a great story about this)

City Hall is trying to have it both ways: It promotes the Wiggle as a cool, only-in-San Francisco thing, while occasionally doing a crackdown on cyclists running stop signs as they use what the city itself promotes as the quickest route downtown. 

How can the Wiggle be the best, quickest bike route if cyclists have to stop at stop signs?

And how can the city promote pedestrian safety when cyclists using the Wiggle routinely pose a hazard to pedestrians in that densely-populated neighborhood?

It can't, which means that in practice the interests of cyclists continue to trump pedestrian safety on the Wiggle. If you live on the Wiggle, you have to be extra careful crossing the street, like pedestrians crossing the north path on the Panhandle have to look out for speeding cyclists.

The city tries to muddy that safety issue by putting a green patina on the Wiggle. Hey, if you're a "progressive" you can't complain about cyclists because the Wiggle is now a "Green Corridor"!

What do people living on the Wiggle think about it? See this. Nothing has changed there since C.W. Nevius wrote about it three years ago.

The demo next week is another Morgan Fitzgibbons stunt.

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