If you’re reading this and your name is not Rob Anderson — hi there, Rob! — we question your true bike cred, and wonder why you and the rest of your bike-nut friends aren’t out causing a $10,000 ruckus at Critical Mass. But in case legalese gets your cogs cogging or your Wiggle-beating legs are broken, allow us to lay it on you — earlier today, City Attorney (and cyclist!) Dennis Herrera’s office wheeled over thousands of pages worth of bike plan-saving legalese to San Francisco Superior Court.
There, a motion to dismiss the injunction that has for three years halted the Bicycle Plan in its tracks is now in Judge Peter J. Busch’s hands, upper desk drawer or wherever he keeps motions.
In short: sometime in the next few months, there should be a hearing on whether or not the city can build bike racks. After which, the moment we’ve all been waiting for will arrive: the city will learn whether or not it can build bike racks. That could come before the winter rains do, according to a Bicycle Coalition interview with The Examiner.
While it was California environmental law — and specifically CEQA, which requires an environmental impact review before, well, basically anything can get done in this goddamn state — that snared the plan in court, Herrera is now arguing that public safety demands the injunction be lifted, allowing bike racks to be installed, bike lanes to be striped, and motorists and Muni drivers to have coronaries. Specifically, “the growing number of bicycle-related injury accidents in San Francisco justify dissolving the injunction,” according to a press release from Herrera.
The MTA board overwhelmingly approved the Bike Plan’s latest iteration in June; the Board of Supervisors voted to certify the EIR and rejected two appeals in early August.
Herrera’s motion will no doubt be challenged in court by the bike plan’s staunch opponents, whose successful – and logical – argument that the bike plan didn’t follow CEQA might need modification this time around if it is to succeed in halting the plan a second time.
