San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Biking with Dad, 86, bolsters Slow Streets
Biking through the middle of San Francisco with an octogenarian is not something anyone would have tried five years ago, unless they were looking to collect an inheritance.
Most bicyclists making this trip used to be daredevils or people who really knew what they were doing. The dream of a city where 8 and 80yearold cyclists could bisect the center with confidence seemed a hundred years away.
It turns out the missing ingredient wasn’t time, but a worldwide pandemic. Waiting for the reopened city is a network of bike lanes and Slow Streets, locked together at odd angles like a marathon game of dominoes across San Francisco. It’s now possible to complete a biking Bay to
Breakers, from the Ferry Building through SoMa, up to Market Street, zigzagging through Lower Haight up the Wiggle bike route, west to the Panhandle, on John F. Kennedy Drive through the park to the museums, and down the coast at Ocean Beach.
Unless the city is pressured to take it back for cars again.
Late last month, I took my 86yearold father on this route to get some exercise, reintroduce him to the city and hammer home two central truths: (1) We’re very close to being able to safely cross the city on two wheels. (2) To preserve this gift for future generations, JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park needs to prioritize bikers and walkers — forever.
This was a city for cars first, second and third when my father, Philip A. Hartlaub, arrived, already in his 30s, in the 1960s. He took a job as a Gray Line bus driver, shuttling tourists on sanitized paths in San Francisco, entering Chinatown, across the Golden Gate Bridge, into Muir Woods.
During my childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, he did a lot more driving to and through San Francisco, from a new home on the Peninsula. Even when nature was involved — roller skating through Golden Gate Park was my favorite — we spared no carbon emissions.
Unbeknownst to us, in May 1971 a group of citizens successfully lobbied for the city’s first bike lane. The Chronicle story, way back on Page 38, was comically short and cynical. “Jubilant Lake Street residents will parade Sunday to celebrate a partial victory over the automobile,” the fourparagraph story started. “The committee also prevailed upon the city to paint bike route paths on either side of Lake Street.”
While I was driving into the city from the Peninsula and East Bay as a teen and adult — first in a 1982 Peugeot diesel station wagon, then a 1987 Taurus, 1996 Saturn and a string of Hondas — the battle that started on that lane was continuing. In 1997, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition helped citizens craft a Bicycle Plan to aggressively add lanes throughout the city, and in 2006, a coalition led in part by a group of roller skaters persuaded the city to keep much of John F. Kennedy Drive carfree on Saturdays.
Those developments have continued and hit hyper speed over the past year. With the pandemic additions of bike lanes on Howard and Folsom streets, Fell Street, more than 45 miles of Slow Streets and especially JFK Drive, it’s now possible to cross the city through the middle on bike lanes or carfree streets. ( JFK Drive, carfree on Saturdays before last year, fully closed to vehicles last April; billed as a temporary move for distanced outdoor activity during the pandemic.)
So my father and I hopped on our bikes at my Alameda home two weeks ago, taking our first completely carfree trip to San Francisco together, with aid of a ferry ride, on bike lanes or Slow Streets 97% of the way.
With no cars involved and no hurry, talk turned to San Francisco.
Living in Healdsburg now, my father has read about the homeless problem in the city, but it’s a different conversationstarter when you’re biking by tent cities in front of the Warfield Theatre at the edge of the Tenderloin, or watching Lululemonclad residents taking exercise classes 50 feet away from a woman spreading out clothes and camping gear, taking inventory of her belongings.
I got to be the tour guide, trying to remember tidbits from John King columns as we passed the Transbay and Rincon Hill transformation. And I repeated all the bike safety advice I had, frustrated with each Uber driver or moving van that parked in our bike lane.
“I wouldn’t want to make this trip all the time,” he said later. “But I’m very glad we did it.”
It was a view into the kind of winwinwin situation that can transform a city. More people biking and walking and having conversations about the rights and wrongs of San Francisco, leaving the parking spots for those who need them. But it only works with clear, safe paths through the city. And a vital piece of that path is a carfree JFK Drive.
My father is not the typical 86yearold. (His eldest sister, 102, got COVID19 and survived.) But he’s proof that the potential for carfree travel in San Francisco can defy the actuary tables. Especially if we make the temporary permanent, then work on a few stilltreacherous moments in the route, including a confusing rollofthedice intersection at JFK Drive and Kezar where a bicyclist was seriously injured Monday night.
For those who can’t or won’t ride bikes, it’s a big leap of faith to assume that a growth in biking culture will open up enough parking to compensate for what’s missing when a main park artery permanently closes to all but shuttles, buses or other essential vehicle traffic.
And for Golden Gate Park museum directors who have been fighting for parking on JFK Drive so long and reflexively they may not know another way, it’s scary to take a risk that paying customers will want to walk, bike or bus to institutions struggling to come back from long closures.
So here’s my personal commitment: After getting home safely, I renewed my membership to Cal Academy of Sciences and bought my first membership to the de Young Museum. As long as there’s a safe biking route to and through Golden Gate Park, I’ll keep those memberships active. And I urge others to do the same.
I’ll stop driving to Golden Gate Park museums during busy hours altogether, to leave the parking garage to people unable to ride bikes, or coming from far away.
And I’ll celebrate the institutions that get behind this plan, as not just historically significant art and science centers in the city, but vanguards that are helping lead us into a better, safer, more social, more climatefriendly way forward.
We’ve spent enough time in our cars in San Francisco. It’s time to make up for lost time, and pedal on to a better future.