Have the City install a bike rack in front of _________

Tired of chaining your bike to some just-small-enough parking meter in front of one of your regular haunts? Ever wished that your favorite bar/restaurant/venue/store/market/office/etc. in San Francisco had a bike rack or two in front of it? Now's your chance to get one put in on the City's dime.

To do this, go to this site and fill out the form, indicating the address, cross streets or business name where you want a rack installed. Super quick, super easy.

The SFMTA is looking to put in 1000 new bike racks around the city once the bike-plan injunction is lifted in 2009. The agency needs 500 more requests to reach this goal. Now's your chance.

My requests so far:

Phone Booth
Bank of America in the Castro
Green Apple Books
Embarcadero West (275 Battery)
Bar on Castro (hmmm)
Great American Music Hall
Bottom of the Hill
Slim's
Truck
Books Inc. (on Market)

PS - Holy shit, a new post! More Than Four, we've missed ye.

Ride the Wolfpack Hustle

Do you live in San Francisco and have a certain amount of antipathy towards our bigger southern neighbor? Smog, traffic, fake boobs, bleached hair, surf culture, bling bling, road rage, endless sprawl, image, style, no substance...no, I'm not talking about San Jose; I'm talking about Los Angeles.

Well, if you have a bike and like to a. ride, b. ride fast, and c. ride fast at night, you now have a reason to visit Los Angeles (!): Wolfpack Hustle.


An amazing--a-m-a-z-i-n-g--way to experience an otherwise not-so-bike-friendly city, Wolfpack Hustle is a 25- to 50-mile ride that begins at a donut shop in Silverlake


at 10PM every Monday. People gather with their bikes--geared or fix--and await the announcement of directions to the first stop, chatting, smoking pot, whatever. A two-minute warning is given and then--bam!--you're off to the fucking races (but not really, because it's not a race.) An all-out effort is made, at speeds mostly above 20MPH: skirting cars, around pedestrians and through (some) red lights.

Like Critical Mass, the route changes every week. Unlike Critical Mass, you may feel the need to puke up that quesadilla, bag of Skittles and can of Tecate you naively consumed--thought this was gonna be like Critical Mass, huh?--immediately prior to pounding the shit out of your pedals as you whiz down Sunset into West Hollywood clubland, streaking past the dropping jaws of the drunk and drugged staring at the pack of 25 bikers hustling past.

You arrive at the first stop. You catch your breath, have some water, bullshit with the other riders. Maybe you take a piss. Then comes the next batch of directions, with corresponding stop. Two-minute warning. Bam! Go!

Along the way you take in the (nighttime!) metropolis, watch out for potholes, talk when you can, occasionally see your semi-delirious grin reflected on the face of the rider next to you, draft a lot, and--above all--keep up.


A few hours after you began, you return to the start, bullshit some, get a donut, stretch a bit, and go home. Next week the route is different; hopefully you can make it.


Wolfpack Hustle is fucking awesome. It is a ride that has been going for well over 52 weeks straight, and is faintly reminiscent--a bunch of (mostly) dudes come together in the middle of the night to work, sweat, and (occasionally) bleed, damning (in this case) automotive society, and whatever sort of on-the-job Tuesday a five-hour night of sleep will bring, to hell--of Fight Club. For another account of what it's like to ride, go here. I worship, from afar, the people who started it.

Patronize Box Dog Bikes

With little money and even less knowledge, how you despise the thought of entering a bike shop to repair that rhythmic clunk emanating from the chunky tubes of your battered beater!

As you approach the front door, the sweat beads on your forehead, your breath quickens in your constricted chest (maybe you shouldn't have worn that harness today) and you want to dump the bike, run home and stuff your head under your pillow until the last rays of daylight have receded from between the cracks in the aluminum foil covering your bedroom window.

If only there were a bike shop where the repair people didn't look at you like an idiot when you thrust your two-wheeled friend into their arms, a tear of bafflement simultaneously dislodging from its glistening perch at the corner of your eye and then didn't go ahead and recommend a bunch of fixes that amount to more than the original price of said POS.

Here's your answer:


Though not entirely the idealized always-friendly-and-completely-free bike shop of your sweet vermouth-addled dreams, Box Dog Bikes comes pretty close.

• Box Dog is a worker-owned cooperative.
  
• There is a "community bench" that anyone with basic bike-repair knowledge can use sans charge.
  
• A 10% discount is given to members of the SF Bike Coalition.
  
• Free bike-repair classes are offered every few months.
  
• A couple file cabinets stand full of used components, organized by type.
  
• Most everyone there seems attuned to the needs of those not wanting to spend gobs of cash to fix every small thing on an older bike.

Fuck yes.


Box Dog Bikes is located on 14th, between Guerrero and Valencia. It is open Monday-Friday (closed Wednesday), 11-7; Saturday, 10-5; and Sunday, 12-5.

Vote NO on Proposition H

Lucky for all of us, you're not leaving the city till after the municipal elections on November 6th, meaning one more vote against Proposition H. Funded by what the SF Bay Guardian likes to demonize as "downtown interests" led by Republican (in San Francisco?!?!?!) Don Fisher, founder and chairman emeritus of Gap, Inc., this loser of a ballot measure will effectively mandate more parking spaces in the city, putting more four-wheeled menaces in the path of your scrawny ass and its two-wheeled steed.

Organizations against Prop. H are many and as varied as (partial list):

San Francisco Democratic Party
Sierra Club
Senior Action Network
Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association
Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council
San Francisco Tenants Union
Teachers for Social Justice
CC Puede
etc., et al.

Are you willing to oppose the Dems, the environmentalists, the old, the yuppies, the hippies, the renters, the teachers AND the Latinos, among others?

Read up on the SF Bike Coalition's response to the measure (and its concurrent support of pro-MUNI Proposition A) here. And, if you're so inclined, there's another community group's viewpoint available here.

As a proposition and not a preparation, this stinker is more likely to cause than to cure hemorrhoids. And really, who wants hemorrhoids (or more cars on the road in San Francisco)? Not you, surely!


Here is a short profile on Don Fisher. (My friend who works at the Gap tells me that he's a real asshole.) If you're wondering about voter registration and polling places and other such information, see what the SF Department of Elections has to say. (The last day to register for the upcoming election is October 22.) And, of course, you can always do your part for a bikeable city by joining the good old SF Bike Coalition.

Go for a bike ride through the Alexander and Russian River Valleys

Remember that $4000 Cannondale you bought when you first moved to Cow Hollow? Do you still know where it is? If so, take it to a bike shop and have them tune it up for you in time for the weekend. Ignore the snarky comments they'll (rightly) make about the pristine condition of your tires. You can tell them that you are so excited to be going on a gorgeous bike ride through the same Alexander Valley that supplies the wine to all of your "fave" restaurants in the Marina. Don't mind the blank looks on the mechanics' faces--the only kind of wine Zeitgeist serves comes in juice boxes.

Highlights of this 45-mile trip include the kind of scenery plump, prosperous people from Tennessee on flights home from San Francisco talk about having seen from the tinted windows of an air-conditioned bus while on a Napa wine tour--"we just adooore Napa"--except this isn't Napa, so there aren't a zillion cars and there's more than two routes you can take on your ride through the valley.

Stop for lunch at the Jimtown Store--"the cool place with the hot name"--for a snack and a water refill.

To add some hills to an otherwise-flat ride, when following the directions on the linked-to route slip below, turn right off Hwy 128 just before Jimtown onto the misleadingly named Pine Flat Road for a hill-assisted view of the valley. (Pine Flat dead ends 12 miles off of 128, the last two miles of which are said to compose the steepest section of road in the county.)


For a map and directions, a route slip created by the Santa Rosa Cycling Club is available here. To add about 12 miles onto the route's total, turn right and continue on Hwy 128 north after Jimtown instead of continuing straight onto Alexander Valley Rd. Take Hwy 128 all the way to Geyserville, turning right on Geyserville Ave. Follow Geyserville Ave. under the 101, where it changes to Canyon Rd. Take Canyon Rd. up the small-ish hill until it dead ends at Dry Creek Rd. Turn left onto Dry Creek Rd. and follow that until you come to downtown Healdsburg. At this point, find Mill St./Westside Rd. and resume the directions given on route slip. See here for a map of the addition.

Join up with a Critical Mass

Honestly, are you really going to move away without having taken part in the original free-form expression of a collective bike-centric consciousness? I didn't think so. Joining up is one step to making sure that bicycle-hating Republican warbots don't descend from the heavens and eat your children.



(What an asshole!)

Anyway, go out back, dust off that 30-pound bruiser that you bought off the junkie outside 16th Street BART and then quickly forgot about, and haul it to Justin Herman Plaza before 6PM on the last Friday of any month. You'll know you're in the right place when you see about eight hundred other people lolling about on two wheels, waiting for the unspoken signal to get rolling and take back the streets (for a few hours) from soon-to-be-outraged (but normally dangerously oblivious) motorists.


Don't forget your heaviest U-lock, handy for securing your bike outside a Tenderloin liquor store after you run out of Tecate or throwing through the windshield of an irate soccer mom's minivan.


Critical Mass is just plain cool. It happens on the last Friday of every month and follows no particular route. Feel free to lament the fact that you missed out on the oft-proposed "taking of the [Golden Gate] Bridge", but know that It Could Happen To You. And despite jokes to the contrary, don't be an asshole and provoke soccer moms into pointless confrontations just because they happened to inch forward when you were self-righteously blocking an intersection; remember that the maternal instinct to get back to Lafayette as fast as possible in order to microwave frozen TV dinners for the kids is biologically ingrained to a sometimes murderous extent. Don't mess with the soccer moms, you fixie-riding schmuck. PS - Even Google likes bikes.

Visit the Marin Headlands

The Headlands are the brown/green hills you can see--when there isn't fog, at least--directly across the Golden Gate Bridge. The road that snakes up to the top of Hawk Hill "affords spectacular views of San Francisco" and is a part of the popular "Headlands Loop" bike ride that many cyclists make a part of their training regimen. (For those who don't know, this is easily doable after work during the summer months.)

It is likely that you visited the Headlands if you came to San Francisco as a tourist before moving here. Ditto if you've lived in the city for a while, have a bicycle or access to some kind of personal motorized transport and have entertained out-of-town visitors. But if you're like my friend who recently left San Francisco after living in the Bay Area for six years and had never been to the Headlands and didn't have a car...take the bus--see below.

Lots of good stuff to do/see here. There's Point Bonita Lighthouse, a Nike missile silo, a beach, a lagoon, a hostel, lots of hiking and mountain biking trails and a nice place to view the sunset (when there isn't fog).


The 76 Marin Headlands runs only on Sundays and holidays. Here is a schedule and a route map.

Check out the Richard Serra sculpture at UCSF Mission Bay

For those that don't know who Richard Serra is, here is a bit of a primer.

My quick synopsis, though, is that he's an artist who is best known for making these mammoth metal sculptures that are usually intended for some specific outdoor site. Eli Broad, some really rich dude who really loves LA, likes his work, as does whoever organized the retrospective currently going on at MOMA in New York.

In the case of UCSF Mission Bay, you've got two 50-foot-tall, 80-ton slabs of steel facing each other in the middle of a dirt courtyard and tilting slightly in opposite directions.

(un-justice-doing picture)

Beyond the easternmost slab is Third Street, China Basin and the East Bay. Benches are conveniently placed for enjoying a tall boy of Tecate while watching the setting sun inflame these rust-colored hulks.

Also, be sure to check out the chain netting partially enshrouding one of the parking garages on the campus--specifically, how it can also appear to be a solid indigo-colored panel, depending on where you're standing. It's hard to describe, but is cool in person.


UCSF Mission Bay is located at the corner of Third Street and 16th, and is accessible by, among other things, bicycle and the T Third Street. The sculpture in question is visible from Third Street and is located in a plaza, evidently called Gene Friend Way, located between Third and Fourth. The plaza and the parking garage--the latter labeled Community Center Garage--are on this map. Here is an article about the rather difficult installation of the piece.

Check out the murals in Balmy Alley

One of the great things about living in the Mission is the number and quality of the murals that you stumble by in the midst of your daily routine. Depending on where you live, that might happen while biking past the Women's Building to Dolores Park, scavenging for clean needles in Clarion Alley or vomiting on the ground on Clinton Park after an afternoon-that-turned-into-night at Zeitgeist. Worth a special trip, though, is Balmy Alley.

Make it an afternoon, perhaps. Get huevos rancheros or tacos at Taqueria Vallarta--located right at the 24th-Street mouth of Balmy--grab a tall boy or two from the corner store across the street and then head into the alley. You will find a block-long stretch of garages and the backs of houses painted in all manner of styles by a number of different artists. (If you're really good, you'll probably recognize the work of a few artists who have done other murals around town.) And once you pop out at 25th, make sure to keep an eye out for another Mission icon: the passed-out drunkard pissing himself in Garfield Square.


Balmy Alley connects 24th and 25th Streets and is between Treat and Harrison. The Women's Building fronts 18th Street between Valencia and Guerrero. Clarion Alley connects Valencia and Mission, between 17th and 18th. Clinton Park is a tiny street off Valencia that smells like hell. If you really dig murals and want the whole shebang, check out the walking tour offered every Saturday morning by the community arts organization Precita Eyes.