San Francisco city crews for the last few weeks have been installing pieces of a controversial protected bike lane running down the center of Valencia Street in the Mission District.
There are still sections of the street that are still under construction, but according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency there may already been a couple of minor crashes.
The project between 18th and 19th streets on Valencia Street also features little bumpers on the pavement. Those bumpers are supposed to help protect bicyclists from vehicle traffic down the middle of one of the Mission's busiest streets.
At Valencia and 21st streets, some of the project is more complete and bicyclist Mario Landau-Holdsworth is excited to ride through for the first time.
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So far, Landau-Holdworth is excited to ride through for the first time.
"What bicyclists want is to feel safe," Landau-Holdsworth said. "If you make it feel safe, you're going to get more people. You're going to get families."
But he admits portions are still a little confusing. Landau-Holdsworth said an SFMTA traffic enforcement officer said he could ride down the lane even though closed signs are still posted.
For bicyclist Chris Jerdonek, the intersections are a bit confusing since turning bikes will now have to deal with vehicle traffic on both sides.
"Taking a right now you're going to have to cross where the cars are," Jerdonek said. "And I don't know if they're going to start preventing cars from taking certain rights or certain lefts."
The SFMTA said there have already been two bicycle collisions on the mostly-completed stretches.
An SFMTA spokesperson said both incidents happened near areas where construction is still in progress. They said bicyclists will need to gets used to the changes and so will drivers.
There are new signs at some intersections advising no left turns or U-turns. Traffic on Monday seemed to back up pretty quickly if cars took too long to make a right turn in part because drivers now cannot drive into the protected lane.
But the changes will not only affect driving, it will also affect parking, construction, and maintenance, worker Alfonso Hinojosa said.
Hinojosa thinks the city did not take some working people into consideration with fewer parking and loading zones.
The city still needs to install small pollards along the bike lanes to make them even more protected.
An SFMTA spokesman said the full center bike lane project should be completed in another four to five weeks.
