Eyes on the Street: Cargo Way Bike Lane Finally Gets Paved

It opened in 2012. This week, it finally got paved.

The Cargo Way bike lane, San Francisco’s first concrete (and chain-link fence in this case) protected bike infrastructure, was described as having “dangerously uneven pavement” the day it opened.

The pavement continued to deteriorate to the point of making the two-way path almost unusable. Then, to add insult to injury, San Francisco Public Works (DPW) came by in August and paved the truck and car lanes–but left the bike lane as it was.

But this week all that changed. A crew came through and, as first reported by Stanley Roberts at KRON4, finally put down some fresh asphalt in the bike space.

A crew was there today cleaning debris off the path. The workers on the scene weren’t sure when the striping would get done.

So why did it take so long to repave it? One crew member said “money.” The other said “We didn’t have small paving machines. We had to rent them.”

Isn’t that kind of the same thing?

They looked at each other, shrugged, and nodded.

So far, it doesn’t look as if the missing segments of the much-maligned chain-link fence are getting replaced. Streetsblog has a request in with DPW to find out if what’s left will be torn out, repaired, or left to rust.