As anyone who has biked over the Golden Gate Bridge over the past month can tell you, The Bridge is an unbearable mess right now.  At the beginning of June, the western side of the bridge, which is dedicated to peak hour bike usage, was closed for four months for construction.  The result of this closure is now San Francisco cyclists must try to ride around the disoriented mob of tourists and photographers—a task this blogger can assure you is enough to make you leap off your bicycle and find the quickest exit from the madness.

Thankfully, the SF Bike Coalition has been taking the Golden Gate Bridge District to task over the situation, as announced in yesterday's newsletter:

The SF Bicycle Coalition asked for added measures to help bridge users understand what's going on and safely manage the capacity reduction (such as posting uniformed staff at key points to help sort things out), as well as asking the District to provide roadway space for bicycle traffic during the sidewalk closure, or at least bike shuttles across the bridge (already done for other bridge sidewalk closures). But the District claims that it can't be done.

Really? Impossible to mitigate the loss of half the bridge's non-motorized capacity? If the District had closed half of the bridge's roadway lanes for four months would they just shrug and look the other way? We're letting the District know that cramming all their summertime foot and bike traffic onto just one sidewalk is impossible — it's time to bring real solutions to this serious (and long-planned) capacity reduction. Give bike traffic a temporary lane, or give it a shuttle. You can let them know as well — tell the District what you think at ggb@sfbike.org. Take extra care if you do get out on the bridge, and please show some extra kindness to other folks dealing with this disruption — now more than ever it's about giving and getting respect.

I'd also recommend taking a Xanax.

[Photo by SF Examiner]

I had a burning desire to order overpriced shots of Jameson from a meth addict last night, so I made my way over to 800 Larkin with two of my three friends.  Rather than leaving our bikes to the mercy of the Tyrone Biggums-looking sketchtard who offered to “watch over” our rides for five bucks and a cigarette, we opted to park 'em in front of the well-lit Century strip club on Larkin.  Within 10 minutes, some agro dude wearing a shirt that clearly didn't fit him and a tie, who we later learned was the proprietor of New Century Theater, began running around the block yelling “whose bikes are these?” He even ran into 800 Larkin and yelled at all the glazed-over hookers and coke dealers. When he learned they were our bikes, he squawked “come with me and remove them.” Naturally, we resisted because they were locked up to a parking meter on the sidewalk, but he insisted that because they were parked at the edge of a white zone (loading zone), it was illegal and that he would cut the bikes from the meter if we did not voluntarily remove them. So we did the mature thing and told him to get bent and finished our drinks, while he called the police and told his bouncer to fetch a saw.

To our surprise, these guys were actually intent on cutting our bikes off the meter and throwing them up the street.  A car quickly pulled up to loading zone and the owner and bouncer started riffling through a trunk full of tools.  As all this went down, the police showed up and clearly didn't know what the fuck to do. After a minute of the owner ranting against the bicycles hurting his business, it came down to the cops asking us “how long are you leaving your bikes there?” We quipped some  awful pun like “we're just loading up our drinks and we're biking back to a more civil place.” Then they said they'd be by later and expected our bikes to be gone.

So is it actually ever illegal to lock your bike up to a meter?  SF's laws don't say there is anything wrong with locking your bikes up in a white zone, but I'm sure cutting bikes from meters isn't cool.  That said, next time you're in the TL, watch out for ornery strip club owners mugging your bike.

[photo by miss.libertine]

I found myself in Santa Cruz the other weekend, eating a fat bowl of Marianne's ice cream at 11 in the morning when it hit me: San Francisco ice cream sucks.  In fact, whenever I dive into a waffle cone in other cities, I find myself wondering where San Francisco went wrong.

That's not to say San Francisco doesn't have any good ice cream.  Anyone who claims Mitchell's sucks, especially when it's done up as a sundae at St. Francis, is a damn fool.  Berkeley Farms is pretty legit for an ice cream that's stored next to frozen pizzas in- Safeway.  And It's-Its are the retired jersey of ice cream sandwiches: untouchable.  But the bulk of the ice creameries in SF just don't cut it.

Let's consider this graph:

In short: most SF ice cream is pretentious, some of it is good, much of it is only marginally better than dog feces, and I have too much time on my hands.

I don't mean SF ice cream is pretentious as in you see people gripping their cones with their pinky sticking out in the air and holding a monocle to their eye.  Rather, it's more about how needlessly 'weird' our ice creameries are.  Would a 6-year-old eat Humphry Slocombe's balsamic vinaigrette ice cream?  No, because it tastes like ass.  This is the beauty of children: they come with absolutely no pretenses.  Kids won't eat something because it was 'creative' or challenging to make; they eat what tastes rad.  Any child that finds themself tugging at their mom's hips for a scoop of “Boccalone Prosciutto” has clearly lived in this town for far too long.

So what the fuck is up? Why is San Francisco a decent ice cream black hole?  I'm no expert on this subject, I cannot help but feel the Straus base is to blame.  Something about locally-sourced, organic ingredients appears to make ice cream makers lose their goddamn mind and start filling their scoops with shit that just doesn't belong in ice cream.  Whereas Mitchell's and Marianne's is just a delicious concoction of sugar mixed with candy and other flavoring agents, Humphry Slocombe, Bi-Rite and Xanath mix goose liver and olive oil into their ice cream and caters to people who think eating food on the sidewalk is a “movement.”

Why can't I just find a place that will serve me 5 scoops of moose tracks in this town?  It's keeping me up at night.

(Marianne's photo by Liralen Li)

I found myself admiring some guy's shoes when he walked over this statement: “NOT A TOURSIT ATTRACTION. AN ALLEY.”  Obviously duder fails to understand that the two are not mutually exclusive (“THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE.  NOT A TOURIST ATTRACTION.  A BRIDGE.”).  But let's ignore that for a hot minute, why does it matter if murals are a tourist attraction?  Shouldn't people like murals?  Plus, it's not like there are Segway tours rolling up down 24th and turning down Valencia… holy shit, I'm arguing with spraypaint.