PUBLIC POLICY

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance on Feb. 24, 2014 to expand the City’s program to reuse unclaimed bikes. It’s hard to underestimate how dramatically a bicycle can transform the life of a young person. Over the past year, community groups have been working with the Human Services Agency and Police Department to take recovered bikes from the SFPD property room and make them available to low-income youth.

Here’s how these “bike convivios,” or community bike builds work:

• The City makes available recovered bikes that have not been claimed by their original owner.
• The Bike Coalition arranges for mechanics from great organizations like the SF Yellow Bike Project, Pedal Revolution and the Bike Kitchen to fix up the bikes.
• Community groups like PODER, POWER, and the Chinatown Community Development Center recruit low-income youth who need bicycles to participate.
• At the bike convivios, the youth are shown how to ride safety and do basic maintenance, and then given a bike with lights, a helmet, and a lock.

The new ordinance will ensure that unclaimed bikes continue to be made available for these programs. The ordinance will also expand the program so that larger bikes can be made available to transit-dependent adults, with the goal of providing bikes to entire families. Here are two great videos on the program:

• Video on PODER’s bike convivios
• Board of Supervisors hearing on the ordinance (Jump to 12:30 for compelling public comment from people who participated in the bike builds.)

Panel Investigation and prosecution of bicycle crashes: Problems and solutions at the statewide Summit of the California Bicycle Coalition 11/9/13 in Oakland.

A well-known issue in creating safer streets is ensuring fair law enforcement and thorough investigations of crashes involving vulnerable users. This panel was organized by Steve Bingham, lawyer and father of Sylvia Bingham, killed in a truck/bicycle in 2009. Joining him as panelists were Miles Cooper, personal injury lawyer; Lois Heaney, President, National Jury Project; Leah Shahum, Exec.Director, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition; Ken Theisen, paralegal at Bay Area Legal Aid. For CBC’s summary of this panel, see Summary

Steve’s motivation to organize this panel arose from the tragic death of Amelie Le Moullac on Folsom St. in San Francisco in August 2013. She was killed in the same way as Sylvia, a right hook by a commercial box truck. The police conducted no serious investigation and concluded there were no security video cameras in the area. Amelie was immediately blamed by police for her own death. Nearly a week later, a SF Bicycle Coalition member found a video tape in ten minutes that conclusively showed the truck driver was to blame. (The video images would have been recorded over and lost the next day). The driver was then prosecuted. For information about the entire two-day CBC Summit, see http://www.calbike.org/ca-by-bike-2013-program-and-presentations-wrap-up

(Adapted from California Bicycle Coalition website)

Since 1993, cities in California have been free to lower the fines given to bike riders. This past October, the City of Davis became one of the few cities to take advantage of that power. Now, bicycle advocates are watching Davis closely to see how cheaper fines will affect how police officers and people who ride bikes interact — and if that will impact ridership.

Davis has recently chosen to reduce the fines given to bicyclists from $202 to $50 for the first offense, $100 for the second, and $250 for any subsequent tickets. As flat fines, there are no associated court costs.

Some expect that these fines will compel bicyclists to better comply with traffic laws. According to the Davis police department, officers have been hesitant to slap bicyclists with California’s high traffic fines, “fearing a significant level of animosity from the public because of the perception that the fines are excessive.” Many local judges will also dismiss bicycle-related fines for the same reason. Considering the fact that a car crash is so much more destructive than a bicycle crash, penalizing the two activities differently makes sense.

If police officers use these fines sparingly, by penalizing bicyclists who are putting themselves or others at risk, it could increase safety while not decreasing ridership. The way that people ride their bikes is generally different than how they drive a car, because of how bikes are less destructive, more agile, and more dependent on momentum. Police officers won’t be able to change this, but they may be able to decrease the most dangerous behaviors, like riding on the sidewalk and riding in the wrong direction. With that said, police officers need to be educated about which types of bicycling are dangerous.

As Davis’ mayor Joe Krovoza said, “The goal is education and promotion of cycling. Overly onerous penalties don’t meet that goal.” We’ll see if these penalties will.