Voices for Lifting the Rush-Hour BART Bike Ban: Josselyn

This Thursday, BART will vote on a full lifting of the bike ban, opening up all-day access for bikes!

We’ve heard from countless people on both sides of the Bay that lifting the bike ban would improve their commutes and their lives. Throughout this week, leading up to the May 23 vote, we’ll be sharing some of those stories.

Meet Josselyn, a trained architect who knows the value of good urban design. Here’s what she has to say:

I work in landscape architecture and public health design, and seamless walk-bike-transit connections are incredibly important for public health, urban health, and environmental health.

I encourage you to vote to lift the Rush-Hour Bike Blackout to help allow more people to bring their bike on BART and improve regional connections. After the two successful pilot programs, we’ve seen clearly that bikes on BART during rush hour has no negative impact on the operations of BART — but has a huge impact on people’s abilities to travel throughout the Bay Area.

I would also encourage you to look to Danish urban design, which has seamlessly blended biking and transit for optimizing car-free travel. The main accomplishment of banning bikes on BART trains can only be seen as encouraging more people to drive their cars. As a San Franciscan, I value the steps this city has made to make it easier to walk, bike and take transit, and discouraging car use, but we still have a long way to go. This is the logical next step.

Please lift the ban.

Throughout the week, we’ll be featuring these stories in anticipation of this week’s BART Board of Directors meeting. If you want to share your story about why lifting the bike ban on BART is important to you, email Marc Caswell at marc@sfbike.org.

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