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Jeremy Sammons was biking to a Friday night "bike party" recreational ride downtown from his home in the Outer Richmond at around 7:45 p.m. when he came upon a crash that had just taken place between a motorist and a cyclist. Just before the turn on the Wiggle bike-route from Oak to Scott street, he saw an SUV parked in the bike lane, just past the last safe-hit post. His first thought was that the motorist was parked in the bike lane, but then he saw "...there was a man laying between the car and the sidewalk on the ground" with a bicycle.
"The guy had blood all over his face and he was not moving. A woman who was a witness said the SUV driver swerved after the last post and cut the guy off, and the cyclist ran into him," explained Sammons to Streetsblog. The collision left the injured cyclist "..in a bit of shock. He had a serious laceration under his right eye where he appeared to have hit the concrete--he was missing a number of teeth...he said he could not feel his mouth."
Streetsblog has reached out to the SFPD and SFMTA. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's Brian Wiedenmeier said they don't yet have any information about the crash. Streetsblog will update accordingly.
This stretch of Oak Street has a protected bike lane, but not protected intersections. Friday night's crash happened at the approach to the intersection--in the so-called 'mixing zone.'
The idea of a mixing zone (as seen in the lead image) is that, as bikes and cars approach an intersection, the physical protection for the bike lane ends and cyclists and right-turning motorists mix together and are supposed to somehow merge with or across each other's paths.
Dutch traffic engineers have long abandoned the mixing zone, at least on all but the quietest streets, as dangerous and unrealistic--it requires motorists to slow, signal, check over their right shoulder, make sure the bike lane is clear, and then merge into it or across it. In practice, it turns into a deadly game of brinkmanship--with motorists muscling ahead of or into the path of cyclists. Sometimes, motorists "right hook" cyclists, as seems to have happened Friday evening. Streetsblog, along with many advocates, has taken SF's "Mixing Zones" to task for some time now.
It doesn't have to be this way. Here's just one of many videos available online that explains how Dutch-style protected intersections work:
Of course, the right from Oak Street onto Scott would require some modifications, since there's no protected bike lane on Scott. But there are certainly ways to make it work.
Clearly, mixing-zone intersection treatments are not safe, especially for children or less confident cyclists who aren't expecting to be thrown back into the mix with motorists. "Don't design streets that make the five percent already biking marginally safer," bike safety advocate Chris Bruntlett, author of Building the Cycling City, writes in a social media post about how the Dutch design intersections. "Build them to entice the other 95 percent back on their bikes."
To date, SFMTA has built one protected intersection--completed in 2016 at 9th and Division. Yet on all its newest installations, such as the troubled new bike lane on 2nd Street, the agency continues to fall back and build more mixing zones.
Meanwhile, Sammons, who is a regular Wiggle rider, said the simplest solution for the turn from Oak to Scott shown in the lead image may be to continue the protected bike lane all the way to Scott and ban or heavily restrict right turns by motorists.
If you have any more information about Friday's crash, please post below. Also, share more of your thoughts on SFMTAs mixing zones.
