Comments on: SF Responds to Bike Injunction With 1353 Page Enviro Review http://la.streetsblog.org/2008/12/01/sf-responds-to-bike-injunction-with-1353-page-enviro-review/ Covering Los Angeles's livable streets movement Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:06:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Rob Anderson http://la.streetsblog.org/2008/12/01/sf-responds-to-bike-injunction-with-1353-page-enviro-review/comment-page-1/#comment-3216 Rob Anderson Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:20:02 +0000 http://la.streetsblog.org/?p=1438#comment-3216 "At a cost of more than $1 million, the city has attempted to demonstrate in excruciating detail what would seem to be the obvious: better bicycle amenities contribute to increased cycling and an improved environment." The details are indeed "excruciating," but my first reading of the Draft EIR on the Bicycle Plan is that it proves what we've been saying all along---that when you take away traffic lanes on busy streets you're going to make traffic worse on those streets. And, importantly, there are no real mitigations available where that is the case! You may be "befuddled" about why our litigation was successful, but no one who knows anything about the law is. The reality is that the city was obviously wrong about trying to push the 500-page Bicycle Plan through the process with no environmental review. It was an easy decision for Judge Busch. If it had in fact been such a bad decision, the city would have appealed but it didn't because they knew they were wrong. “At a cost of more than $1 million, the city has attempted to demonstrate in excruciating detail what would seem to be the obvious: better bicycle amenities contribute to increased cycling and an improved environment.”

The details are indeed “excruciating,” but my first reading of the Draft EIR on the Bicycle Plan is that it proves what we’ve been saying all along—that when you take away traffic lanes on busy streets you’re going to make traffic worse on those streets. And, importantly, there are no real mitigations available where that is the case!

You may be “befuddled” about why our litigation was successful, but no one who knows anything about the law is. The reality is that the city was obviously wrong about trying to push the 500-page Bicycle Plan through the process with no environmental review. It was an easy decision for Judge Busch. If it had in fact been such a bad decision, the city would have appealed but it didn’t because they knew they were wrong.

]]>