Home | Mobile | E-Mail Us | Privacy | Mtn Bike | Ride Director Login | Add Century/Benefit Rides
Home

Adventure Velo


Additional Info

Cyclists decry Golden Gate Bridge speed limit plan

Golden Gate Bridge Tables Consideration of Bicycle Speed Limits For Now

Decision postponed on Golden Gate Bridge bicycle speed limit

GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE SIDEWALK BIKE SAFETY MEETINGS & OPEN HOUSES


About Bill
Past Columns

 

Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  5/1/2011

Golden Gate Bridge Speed Limit

There has been a news story in our Bay Area papers recently regarding a proposal to place a speed limit on bicycles crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. On the face of it, that doesn't seem like such a controversial proposal, but the actual limit--10 mph--and the way in which the proposal was made have turned this into a hot-button issue for cyclists who use the bridge.

Golden Gate BridgeCurrently, there is no speed limit for bikes using the walkways on the bridge. The plan to impose and enforce a 10-mph limit on the main span (and 5-mph around the two towers) was first proposed at a meeting of the bridge's Building & Operating Committee on April 13, 2011. Cycling activists in San Francisco and Marin County immediately objected, saying the limits were unrealistically low, the $100 fine was unreasonably high, and, moreover, that none of the cycling coalitions or other cycling stakeholders had been apprised of the plan ahead of time or in any way consulted about the proposed policy. In the face of this fairly unanimous and vociferous outcry, the committee decided at its next meeting on April 21 to postpone any action on the matter to some as-yet-unspecified later date, pending further research and review, etc.

That gives all of us a chance to catch our breath and consider the matter a bit more carefully.

Living and cycling up in Sonoma County, 50 or more miles north of the Golden Gate, I don't ride across the bridge all that much these days. But I have done so several times in the past year. I lived and cycled in either San Francisco or Marin County for most of the time between 1968 and 1983 (before moving to Sonoma County), and during those years, I was on the bridge frequently. I've never been a daily cycle-commuter over the span, but my recreational riding had me out there more times than I could count…hundreds of crossings, easily. I've seen the cycling environment on the bridge change in various ways over those many years. As a long-time rider on the bridge, I feel entitled to add my two cents' worth to this discussion.

The rationale behind the proposed speed limit is of course safety and the reduction of cycling accidents on the bridge. In making the proposal, the committee was accepting the recommendation of Alta Planning + Design, a consulting firm from Berkeley that had been commissioned to study bike safety issues on the bridge. Their report is available on-line here. It's only 23 pages long, and not densely packed pages either, so the whole thing can be digested in a few minutes. It makes for some interesting reading and is filled with facts and figures about bike use on the bridge. It's possible to quibble over some of their data, but in general, I'm willing to accept most of it as at least plausible. I don't agree with their conclusions, but we'll get to that.

Before looking at some of their numbers, it might help to review the way the bridge functions for bikes. All the time on weekends and after 3:30 pm on weekdays, cyclists ride on the west walkway, which they have all to themselves. On weekdays, up until 3:30 pm, the west walkway is closed so the bridge workers can get around easily. Bikes must then share the east walkway with all the sight-seeing pedestrians. Pedestrians are restricted to the east walkway at all times. The bridge is closed to pedestrians overnight, but cyclists can still cross. They have to be checked through security gates at both ends. (I've never done this, but it must be a magical experience to cross in the dark in the wee hours of the morning, with the bridge walkways deserted, perhaps on a warm autumn night, with a full moon above the glittering jewel box of San Francisco…)

These clock-driven shifts from one side of the bridge to the other--from an all-bike world to a bikes-and-peds world--make it hard to come up with any one-size-fits-all answer to safety questions. Additionally, both walkways vary considerably in width, surface, and in other ways as riders pass assorted "road furniture" along the way: getting around the two towers, passing the cable-anchor pylons, passing construction sheds, etc. All of that makes it challenging to collect reliable data and then to extract meaningful conclusions from that data. If you're really interested, you can read the report and kick the numbers around yourself. I have been doing that.

One of the stats that most interests me is total counts on cyclists crossing the bridge. The consultants only took counts on three days: a Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday in mid-August of last year. Assuming there must be significant variation in counts between a peak summer month, when they did their count, and a cold, rainy winter month, their little sampling leaves something to be desired as a data set. They do have a chart that shows August as the month with the most bike accidents on the bridge, with a ragged bell curve tapering off from there to the winter months. That supports the obvious assumption of fewer crossings per month in the winter, but it doesn't really allow us to assign even halfway accurate numbers for each month. All we can do is take a shot in the dark at it.

With that disclaimer in mind, here are the numbers that we can say are fairly accurate for their August tally: 5700 crossings on Saturday and Sunday each (11,400+ combined) and 2500 crossings on each weekday (12,500 for five days). That adds up to about 24,000 crossings a week. I'd like to be able to extrapolate from those figures to come up with a total count for a year, but that's going to be hard to do. I wish I had counts for all months or at least for a couple...January and May, for instance, but they don't provide them. I can only speculate, based on what we know of the climate and the general riding habits of cyclists in the Bay Area: that it is a relatively temperate climate; that we can and will ride most of the weeks of the year, but that we tend to back off somewhat in the winter, at least when it's raining.

However, there is another part of this equation that doesn't have much to do with the habits or inclinations of Bay Area riders, and that is the factor of the tourist cyclists on rental bikes. If you haven't ridden across the bridge in recent years, you might not be aware of this phenomenon at all: the rental bike army on the march. It is the single biggest change in the cycling environment on the bridge now, compared to when I used to ride it back in the 70's and 80's. Just as there has been a boom in biking at all levels in the past decade or so, so too has there been a big increase in the number of cyclists on the bridge. No surprise there. What is surprising--amazing, really--is the exponential growth of the business of putting tourists on rented bikes in San Francisco and sending them across the bridge. If you google "Bicycle rentals, San Francisco," you will find a list of a half-dozen concessionaires who all follow approximately the same business model: rent the bikes to the tourists at Fisherman's Wharf, send them over the bridge and down to Sausalito or onward to Tiburon, then bring them home on the ferries from those two towns.

GGB RentalsThe tourists are out there in their legions, and because they're on vacation, it doesn't matter whether it's a weekend or a weekday. They're there, all the time. Most of them are easy to recognize because the rental bikes all have handlebar bags with their rental company logos splashed across the fronts. (Blazing Saddles seems to be putting the most bikes on the road, but several other vendors are not far behind.) I have no idea how many of these rental bikes are out there on a given day in prime tourist season, but at least during the peak hours in the middle of the day, they appear to constitute nearly half or possibly even more than half of all the bikes you see. I'll make a seat-of-the-pants assumption that their numbers fall off in the early morning and in the evening, when the cycle-commuters and serious recreational riders are more prevalent. But even allowing for that, I would guess they must add up to a quarter or a third of all of those 24,000 crossings in a week in August…maybe 6000 or 8000 riders a week. That's a helluva lot of riders and a helluva lot of rented bikes! That's big business!

I must also assume these numbers will taper off dramatically in the cold, rainy months…November through March…that in fact their numbers fall even more than those for the local riders: the cycle-commuters and recreational riders. I will have more to say about the rental-bike phenomenon later, but for now, I'm just trying to get a handle on total numbers. So going back to that figure of 24,000 crossings a week in August: I don't think the local rider numbers will fall by 50% in the winter months, but I do think the rental-bike numbers will, so, just to be conservative, I will posit an overall drop of 50% at the opposite side of the year from August, with the numbers picking up in the spring and tapering in the fall. Fair enough? That means our weekly average for the whole year would be around 18,000 crossings. I think it's probably higher, and I wouldn't argue with anyone who held out for 20,000 a week. But I'm trying to be low-ball conservative here.

18,000 crossings a week times 52 weeks adds up to almost 940,000 crossings a year. The bridge is 1.2 miles long, so that works out to just about a million miles ridden per year in crossing the bridge. The consultant's report offers data on bike accidents on the bridge spanning the ten year period of 2000-2009. If we want to compare our total miles or total crossings to their accident data, we would again have to make a flying leap of an assumption about what the counts would have been ten years ago or five years ago. The robust growth in the popularity of cycling makes that an obvious necessity. But maybe we don't need to do that. Maybe what happened ten years ago is not all that relevant now. Instead of trying to figure out ten years' of bike miles on the bridge, how about we just take the accident count from 2009 (or other more recent years) and compare that with our crossing numbers for 2010?

The bridge authorities keep quite accurate track of how many bike accidents there are on the bridge and where on the bridge they happen. They also make some subjective assessments of the cause of the accidents. They report 23 accidents each in both 2008 and 2009. These are the highest annual totals in their ten-year survey, which seems consistent with what must be a large increase in total crossings in recent years, both because of the general boom in the popularity of cycling but especially with the enormous growth of that bike-rental tourist industry. These are only the accidents that were serious enough to warrant the attention of bridge personnel. Undoubtedly, there were more little bumps and jostles that didn't add up to anything worth a hospital visit or an incident report.

There is an old bit of biking wisdom that says cyclists will crash once every 3000-4000 miles. I've heard this old chestnut for as long as I've been a rider. I don't know where it originated. It doesn't agree with my own experience. There are some further refinements to that metric that discount the skew for child bikers, college students, racers, and such risk-prone subsets, and then suggest your average adult recreational rider might crash every 10,000 miles. So okay then: back to the bridge: 23 crashes in a million miles works out to one crash every 43,000 miles. Admittedly, we're only counting the crashes that were severe enough to make the incident report list. But it would take another 77 minor shunts to get up to 100 "crashes" in a million miles, which would meet the one-every-10,000-miles yardstick. The actual figure of how many crashes in a million miles is probably somewhere between the 23 reported collisions and the hypothetical 100. Based on that, it wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that the incidence of crashes on the bridge is below average.

What I'm trying to get at here is this: what's the problem? Based on their own data, the incidence of accidents on the bridge is considerably lower than what the conventional cycling wisdom says is the norm for adult recreational riders. I'll be the first to admit that my conclusions rest on a stack of assumptions…of shaky extrapolations from not enough data. But given the paucity of data in the report commissioned by the bridge bigwigs, what else can we go on? It's the same data that the consultant used to arrive at the conclusion that there is a problem and that speed--too much bike speed--is the big culprit.

Ah yes, speed! Too many racer-wannabes going too fast: if we can just clamp down on those bad boyz, we can solve all our problems. The report states that, based on the subjective assessments of the authority figures who wrote up the incident reports, too much speed was implicated in 39% of the accidents.

Now, first of all, most of us who have cycled for awhile have either been involved in a bike accident or have heard about or read about one in which an authority figure--typically a responding police officer--has rendered a judgment on the spot as to who or what was at fault in the incident. (This judgment by someone who wasn't there, mind you, and who, furthermore, is probably not an experienced cyclist.) And in a good many cases, those subjective assessments have been maddeningly at variance with what really happened. It's not my intent to launch into an extensive diatribe against our hard-working law-enforcement personnel. But any common-sense assessment of this "39%" figure must include a grain of salt to cover the possibility that the responding figure--the incident report writer--may have erred, maybe just a little.

But setting that common-sense caveat aside anyway, let's run with the 39%. That means out of 23 accidents, nine of them in a single year were caused by some measure of excessive speed. Throw in your grain of salt, maybe it's six or seven of the crashes. One every two months or so. Or, put another way, one out of about 40,000 trips across the bridge. So, to rectify this catastrophic plague of speed-related crashes, the bridge committee is proposing a speed limit of 10 mph, which would entail a great deal of money spent on signage and some mechanism for enforcement (which they don't address in the report). Frankly, it's using a bazooka to kill a flea. And that's accepting as a fact that the flea even exists.

I found one observation in the speed section of the report to be of particular interest: "While bicycles generally travel faster on the west sidewalk where pedestrians are not allowed, speed was implicated in a smaller percentage of collisions (on that walkway). This suggests that absolute speeds are not as significant a factor in collisions as speeds relative to other path users." And yet, in spite of saying flat out that absolute speed is not the culprit, they still recommend an unrealistically low speed limit…at all times, and on both paths, even in situations where those interactions with "other path users" are minimal or non-existent.

There were 165 bike crashes reported over that ten-year period, and they were split almost exactly evenly between the east sidewalk and the west sidewalk. On the west sidewalk, cyclists travel a bit faster because they don't have to interact with rubbernecking pedestrians. On the east walkway, with all the swarming crowds, the riders do the sensible thing: they slow down and work their way through the milling masses with some care. They may not like to slow down, but they do so. This is an obvious example of a self-governing solution to a real-world situation. It doesn't take an artificially low speed limit and heavy-handed enforcement and all sorts of expensive infrastructure "improvements" to work this out. It is being worked out, one rider at a time, several thousand times a day. Furthermore, throwing all that governmental, bureaucratic weight around is not at all a guarantee that it would solve the problem (assuming there even is a problem). In an appendix to the report, it is noted that a newly imposed speed limit on a multi-use path in Stanley Park in Vancouver, BC didn't appear to have altered the speed at which riders travel on the path. It wasn't that they were being outlaw hooligans; it was just that they were continuing to ride as they always had done, responsibly and prudently and appropriately for the conditions, regardless of the posted speed.

I want to go back and revisit the matter of those masses of tourists on their rental bikes. It's very tempting to say unpleasant things about them. There are so many of them and they really do clog up the walkways on the bridge, and also the multi-use trails between Sausalito and Tiburon and in the Presidio in San Francisco. It makes riding anywhere around the bridge rather like being in a critical mass rally, with most of the other riders more-or-less clueless. But I don't really want to be mad at them or to look down my nose at them. They're out there in the fresh air, finding a wonderful, pedal-powered way to experience the beauty and drama of one of the most beautiful, dramatic landscapes this country has to offer. It beats the hell out of endless wagon trains of tour buses belching diesel fumes. They are not bad people, but they are also not good cyclists. They wobble around from left to right as they gape at the scenery; they stop in the most inconvenient and perilous places. I don't know if anything can be done (by the bike rental agencies) to educate the riders before they shove them out the door. I do know that I, as a rider sharing that path with them, have to be on my guard all the time.

In a perverse sort of way, that may end up being exactly the sort of self-governing response that this alleged problem of too much speed is going to need to sort itself out. The wobbly, goofy, clueless tourists on their rented bikes are doing the job now on the west sidewalk that the pedestrians are doing on the east sidewalk: they are presenting the other cyclists with a situation where they simply have to slow down and pay strict attention at all times. Even if you're the most testosterone-crazed racer boy around, it's almost impossible to hammer through that rolling scrum. Yes, a few idiots will try to do it: to go fast. And a few collisions will occur. The world of bikes is little different from the world of cars in this respect: there will always be a few bad apples in the barrel. But judging by the consultant's numbers--one speed-related collision for every 40,000 trips across the bridge--it doesn't appear to be a problem of epidemic proportions.

In their own appendix, the consultants cite several other trail systems around the country that have 15-mph limits. (I know the ones around Sonoma County have that.) Also, some of the trail systems they mention that do have limits are not nailing speeders and hitting them with heavy fines. They may occasionally tag a blatant offender, but in most cases they're simply reminding people to ride responsibly and courteously. If the committee members on the Golden Gate Bridge really feel like they need to be seen to be doing something, how about a 15-mph "suggested limit," with some fairly elastic wiggle room around that top end, and with warnings instead of fines? If they have so much money to burn, how about a public relations campaign--ongoing, indefinitely--that reminds riders to be courteous and patient. How about more efforts by the rental folks to provide tutorials for their patrons before they hit the road?

There may be some places in our society where more laws and restrictions and more expensive infrastructure are the solutions to a problem. But this isn't one of those places. Based on the numbers in the study, it's debatable whether there is even a problem that needs solving. And even if there is one, the recommended speed limit and all its attendant baggage won't be the right way to go about making things better. Let's hope the folks making the final decision will come to see it that way.

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



Rides
View All

Century's
View All

Links
Commercial
Bike Sites
Teams

Other
Advertise
Archive
Privacy
Bike Reviews

Bill
All Columns
About Bill

Bloom
All Columns
Blog

About Naomi

© BikeCal.com 2023