California biking

I've spent the past 10 days in California...Bay Area, Santa Barbara, Lake Tahoe. In each place I was surprised at the number of cyclists on the roads, the high speeds of closely-passing cars, the narrow shoulders and few bike lanes available...gave me the willies just watching them mix into traffic! Then I read this article in a San Francisco paper which told me the full story about why California has so little good biking: they haven't widened a shoulder or striped a bike lane in five years!

...On June 22, state Superior Court justice Peter Bench heard final arguments in a five-year-old lawsuit alleging that bike lanes harm the environment by causing cars to slow and produce smog....and will soon issue a ruling about whether he will lift a 2005 bike-lane injunction and allow San Francisco to paint 34 miles of new bike lanes and 75 miles of on-street bike routes...

Apparently the car lobby out there is fighting for every square inch of road space: Bike riders are the cause of smog and pollution???

By comparison, we here in Illinois are extremely fortunate. Based on my visit, I urge anyone considering moving to the "Golden State" to reconsider; despite the great weather, your biking days there might be limited.

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Permalink Reply by XV on July 3, 2010 at 7:44pm
no Davis? one of the most bike friendly towns in the country. I haven't biked in the towns you mentioned, but I lived in Sacramento briefly, they had ample bike lanes, year round (comfortably) bikeable weather, bike lockers at the train statinons, bike racks on the regional trains, and amazing trails that were in impeccable condition.
Permalink Reply by Adam "Cezar" Jenkins on July 4, 2010 at 12:39am
First, it's San Francisco that has the injunction, not California. Second, that man is a lone lunatic, not a lobbyist. :)
Permalink Reply by Anne Alt on August 7, 2010 at 9:52am
Good news from SF - the injunction was lifted, and they're about to start striping new bike lanes. Yeah!!!
Permalink Reply by David on August 7, 2010 at 12:55pm
Keep in mind that Santa Barbara is basically an outer suburb, Tahoe is a resort area (as a city it isn't even one of the 100 largest cities in the state), and SF had this injunction to deal with. California has lots of excellent bike infrastructure in many cities. As XV mentioned, Davis is generally recognized as one of the top two or three biking cities in the nation.

You're making a valid point, but talking about the state as a whole from this sample set is painting with far too broad a brush. If somebody visited just Naperville and Schaumburg, they'd come away with a pretty negative impression of biking support in Illinois as well.

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