Streetfilms: A Bounty of Bay Area Best Practices
If you have ever wondered just how much transportation tourism can be accomplished in a city excursion by Streetfilms, well here’s some proof! In mid-July, I visited the Bay Area with a goal to highlight some good transportation. Some destinations, I already knew about and scheduled prior to arrival. But I also went there with an open agenda and a mission to discover and highlight other things that sparked my interest along the way.
One thing I certainly wanted to do was ride with John Bauters, the popular bike-riding mayor of Emeryville, California. I got to bike with him around Manhattan last year with a nice posse of admirers, but I was excited to hang with him in his own city and see some of the stuff that he and the council have accomplished in a relatively short period of time. We took a quick,nice morning loop!
Of course the Bay Area is an sprawling region filled with many cities and neighborhoods. And there are a lot of best practices to take in no matter where you are. This trip, I was very lucky to have StreetsblogSF editor Roger Rudick as a resource. He connected me with many folks in the area. But one day I had a vision to create a video version of a cool article he penned “Eyes on the Street: Alameda Point Development First in Bay Area to Do Bike Lanes Right.” It became easily the most popular Streetfilm of the trip!
Staying in downtown San Francisco, it was hard not to see how intentional the city was about bus & transit lane priority. Painted bus red lanes were common, and drivers seemed to obey. SFMTA director Jeff Tumlin put me in touch with Michael Rhodes, the MTA’s Transit Priority Manager. Michael took me around downtown for an hour, showing off their sparkly new-ish Van Ness BRT corridor and so many other street tweaks that make buses faster and more reliable for customers.
Riding along the Great Highway was just so amazingly special for me – cathartic and a ride I will never forget. It’s definitely one of the top five biking experiences I’ve ever had and it was made even more special by the couple dozen people I did it with. Many of those local activists and volunteers worked tirelessly to establish car-free JFK Drive; we have them to thank for why that corridor was voted on by the public to be retained as a people-only space after it was pedestrianized during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Much thanks to Luke Bornheimer for arranging the tour.
And finally, one day while riding around with Roger, we glided down Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, which has been (mostly) fantastically transformed from the dangerous four-lane speedway it was when I was a frequent visitor to the Bay Area in the late 2000s. And some of it has gone radically in the other direction, with what I termed on Twitter “Fortress Style” protected bike lanes. Really! The width and removal of parking is almost unheard of on this stretch!
I’ll need to end there. I posted various other clips and photos on social media while I was traveling. And believe it or not: I’m still not done. I have two more possible shorts that may be delivered by year’s end!
