Cyclists are using a new app called Safe Lanes to collect data on blocked bike lane violations and just secured a quick transformation of a dangerous street in San Francisco.
A few weeks ago one of our collaborators reached out to ask if we could isolate our search results to a specific area of the map. Erin had been documenting blocked bike lane violations at 4th and 16th St. in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco and wanted to share the data she was collecting with a nearby property manager.
Once I added the custom search area, Erin wrote…
On October 4th I organized a day of action to conduct a point in time count of every blocked bike lane violation in the city of San Francisco. Over the course of about 8 hours, approximately 80 volunteers and I documented 259 illegal parking violations using the Safe Lanes app I created earlier this year.
Our goal was to not only show how dangerous it is to ride a bike on key commuter corridors like Valencia, Polk, Folsom and The Embarcadero but to identify where and when the most blocked bike lane violations are happening.
One month ago I created Safe Lanes, a platform to monitor and analyze the public reporting of blocked bicycle lanes on the streets of San Francisco. Here’s why I created it and what I’ve learned so far.
On any given day in San Francisco approximately 40–50 reports of vehicles blocking bicycle lanes are reported to 311, the city’s public health service. This is alarming because every time a motorist drives into or obstructs a bicycle lane, they force cyclists to merge into fast moving vehicle traffic that can seriously injure or kill them.
On March 8th, Tess Rothstein was forced…
A short history of Revisions
In early 2011 I was working on a project with a team of designers who were struggling with what was a very common challenge back then, the need to easily version and share their files. At the time SVN was the dominant VCS system and while a handful of SVN clients existed (Tortoise, SmartSVN, etc) they all had highly technical interfaces that made them inaccessible to non-developers.
Git was beginning to emerge as the successor to SVN (largely due to the rapid adoption and popularity of Github) yet at that time a Git specific client…
Fight or Flight
Everyday millions of people go to a job they’re unhappy at and struggle with whether they should invest the time and energy to improve their situation or cut their losses and move on.
If you are struggling with this I am telling you that yes, you should invest the energy and here’s how and why you should do it.
But first let’s take a quick look at why you’re probably unhappy at work.
The most common reason by my experience is that you’ve been denied something that you desire. This could be a promotion, an opportunity to travel or…
Stephen Braitsch
Safe Streets Activist / Designer / Engineer. Trying my best to make this world a safer, more equitable place. Creator of SafeLanes.org
