SF CYCLES
Connecting Your City with Livability, Equity, and Safety
Our Vision for the Biking & Rolling Plan
The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s SF CYCLES campaign will ensure the passage of a Biking and Rolling Plan that creates a visionary, comprehensive, equitable system to support biking and rolling in San Francisco, centered on a citywide, interconnected network of car-free and people-prioritized corridors and incorporating policies and programs that increase access and reduce barriers. This system, when complemented by world-class transit, will make sustainable transportation preferable to and more convenient than driving a car.
Our Principles
These principles form the basis of the SF CYCLES campaign. In collaboration with our members and constituents, we will develop specific demands and metrics to enact these principles.
Equity and Access
Barriers to access experienced by SF residents will be accounted for in the plan. Needs and desires of communities who have been historically disenfranchised will be considered and addressed.
Connectivity and Convenience
Anyone in the city can leave their house and be on the network on their bike or scooter within 5 minutes and use the network to reach any other neighborhood, without gaps or interruptions. The plan creates a network and policies that make biking and rolling easier to use than driving.
Safety and Belonging
Contact and conflict with motor vehicles is limited and, wherever possible, eliminated. The different threats to safety experienced by different people will be accounted for — safety from traffic violence, safety from interpersonal violence, safety from biased policing.
Vitality and Joy
The plan supports a vital San Francisco, with healthy local businesses, thriving cultural expression, and opportunities for civic and social interaction. The plan and network should foster the appreciation of San Francisco’s inherent beauty and offer everyone in the city delight and joy.
Urgency and Accountability
The plan will have an ambitious timeline and scope, suited to the transformation the city requires to achieve climate and safety goals. Clear mechanisms will exist to ensure action, provide transparent data, and keep decisionmakers answerable to the plan.
Our Proposal
While our principles provide high-level guidance, these must be translated into real-world outcomes that demonstrate the City’s commitment to achieving a world-class biking and rolling system. Such a system comprises both a safe network and programs and policies to support that network and the people who use it.
For the five guiding principles that an ambitious plan requires, we have put together a detailed proposal with desired outcomes that reflect these principles.
Our Progress
- Form a Biking & Rolling Plan membership working group
- Summer summit with BRP CBO partners
- Develop specific demands and metrics for each principle
- Circulate Principles to other organizations and advocates for feedback and sign-on
- Establish regular meetings with SFMTA project team
- Turn out supporters for informational update at August SFMTA Board meeting
- SFBike’s election endorsements process runs concurrently; candidate forums highlight candidate views on the developing plan
- Win commitments from SFMTA Board members, SF Supervisors, and agency heads to only support a plan reflecting our principles
- Conduct citywide outreach on the platform, building grassroots support
- Bike the Vote campaigns to highlight candidates’ stances on BRP
- With CBO partners, deliver finalized policies and programs recommendations to SFMTA project team
- Respond to and provide feedback on connectivity map
- Determine stance on final draft of BRP — does it reflect our principles?
- Turn out membership for public comment at SFMTA Board meeting in January for approval or request for amendments.
How do we get there?
After over two years of planning and public engagement, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is preparing its first comprehensive update of the City’s bike plan since 2009, in the form of the Biking & Rolling Plan. It’s slated to go before the SFMTA Board of Directors for approval in January 2025.
We have long believed that citywide interconnectivity for bicycles is key for mass adoption of active, sustainable modes. In the early 2010s, we launched the Connecting the City campaign to achieve connectivity. Since then, we’ve learned a lot: a network that asks vulnerable road users to “share the road” with cars is neither safe nor inclusive. As we stare down a climate emergency, we also face an epidemic of distraction and traffic violence on our streets. A trickle of investment hasn’t improved the situation. People who choose more sustainable (and vulnerable) modes must have dedicated space.
At the same time, communities that have historically had the least input into decisions that impact their neighborhoods — especially low-income and Black and brown communities — should have their needs and desires accounted for. We must equitably balance the urgency of achieving our goal with trust-building and inviting contributions from people in those communities who need better, safer streets.
Join Us
Be part of the movement as we launch the SF CYCLES campaign and reshape our city
We’ve launched a video series featuring San Franciscans talking about what biking means to them, and what they’re looking for in a transformative Biking and Rolling Plan. Watch the first one here: