I’ve been a huge fan of Ruff since “Sewer, Gas, and Electric" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71846.Sewer_Gas_and_Electric) and of course the Lovecraft Country show was also p good (although a bit scary for my tastes), so, picking this up after Novel Explosions was a great call.
the new valencia bicycle lane design is effectively an upside down muni track painted green down the center. I expect cyclists to eat shit when they try to enter or exit it mid-block just like we already eat shit when we have to ride parallel to them.
I immediately take the car lane for the full block as soon as I see a car in the current bike lanes. “I got us a lane, come on in fellow riders, I think to myself”, and maybe I’m imaging it but I usually get a vibe of relief when the see another cyclist stuck in the bike lane realize that they can join me safely
(while on bad days I’ll also mentally add, to myself, ”the people in cars will never respect you for following their rules, look out for yourself first”)
so anyway, with an upside down muni track painted green, I’ll have to pretty much stop my bike to enter an unobstructed travel lane mid-block when the curbed bike lane is obstructed, so I will probably try to look farther up ahead and do it at intersections. it’s gonna be dumb but I’ll cope #BicyclingInSanFrancisco
what really grinds my gears about the design is the repeated references to paint, signs, and enforcement: no left turn, no turn on red, and so on: imaginary safe places to be next to actually unsafe places to be
maybe it’s my stupid vulgar marxism, or engineer-brain but that smacks of liberal metaphysics to me: deeply unserious magical thinking that inherently tolerates failure for the insanely shitty reason that its credulous to other unserious critics
if your goal is zero deaths, this ain’t it. if your goal is zero injuries, this definitely ain’t it.
We already have this pattern northbound on Valencia at 14th (at Zeitgeist). I always assume I’m going to be killed here and take the car lane before the intersection if I can, I’ve seen too many rights on red bearing down on other cyclists here
it isn’t the driver’s fault, it’s simply a design failure with band-aides. it relies on signs, paint, and enforcement.
Figure 1. google street view of valenca northbound at 14th in the car right-turn-lane, the bike lane to it’s right.Figure 2. google street view of valenca northbound at 14th in the car right-turn-lane, the bike lane to it’s right, close up of Zeitgeit and the multiple redundant signs SFMTA put up, after I assume the first few failed?.Figure 3. ECU the signs, google street view of valenca northbound at 14th in the car right-turn-lane, the bike lane to it’s rightleft most, a standard reflective paint metal sign on a light post over the street: no right turn on red except for bikescenter: a stoplight with a red arrow indicating that cars need to stop and wait for the green signalright: a back-lit LED version of same sign on the leftright-most a green/red stoplight for bicyclists that you should definitely ignore if you are one, and instead assume a car is about to turn right on red into you.
so clearly the goal isn’t zero deaths, and the city should drop the vision zero pretense, it is absolutely stollen valor at this point
I’m also pretty unsatisfied w/ the SF Bike Coalition line on this. They’ve never, in the history of the organization, been radical, but c’mon y’all “centering merchants voices?” sounds like something london breed would say.
Another one! “Death and the Gardener” by Jean Cocteau, fits in two posts:
A young gardener said to his prince, “Save me! I met Death in the garden this morning and he made a menacing gesture. Tonight I wish by some miracle I could be far away, in Ispahan”. The prince lent him his swiftest horse.
That afternoon, walking in the garden, the prince came face to face with Death. “Why,” he asked, “did you make a threatening gesture at my gardener this morning?” “It wasn’t a threatening gesture,” answered Death. “It was a gesture of surprise. I saw him far from Ispahan this morning and I knew I must take him in Ispahan tonight.”
I’m sitting here watching this old jacques pepin video, he’s making a risotto milanese (with american brown rice), and he gets to the saffron and just whips out a tin that has an ounce of god damned saffron in it, lmao ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5vUuLh3ASQ)
(if you haven’t made risotto m. recently, that’s about a hundred bucks worth of saffron. when I buy it at the grocery store I can get a hundredth of an ounce in a weird little bag for seven bucks)
“centering" “voices” “communities” “most vulnerable” “advocates”, etc, while maybe not originally liberal nonsense, is now definitely liberal nonsense. Stop the nonsense!
