SFPD are ticketing cyclists, but they're doing it all wrong
May 4-Market Street might be mostly carless these days, but the return to work marching orders from many downtown companies has led to a resurgence in morning commuters. The thoroughfare attracts 35,000 cyclists a month as of 2025, and on my daily bike ride to work, I'm now most often flanked by a dozen other cyclists.
A few weeks ago, a phalanx of police officers was waiting for us. The officers were handing out tickets for running a stoplight at Market and Powell. The light doesn't govern an intersection, but rather a crosswalk that pedestrians rarely use, thus bikers almost never stop when the light is red. The operation was related to the new high injury network map, but the decision to enforce a superfluous light felt more punitive than practical. Last week, another initiative continued the crackdown on red light runners, while also targeting cell phone use by e-bike and scooter riders.
Meanwhile there's a different biking problem that SFPD is ignoring: Section 7.2.12 of the San Francisco Transportation Code, which plainly states that two-wheeled vehicles need to stay the hell off the sidewalk.
It might be surprising to hear an advocate for "acoustic" bikes declare that police should be ticketing bicyclists, but I'd like nothing more than for these sidewalk scourges to be fined for their crimes. I can't tell you the number of times I've turned a corner while walking my dog and almost been barreled into by a Lime scooter or e-bike traveling at 15 mph on a narrow sidewalk. It's so pervasive that any police officer posted up on a Market Street sidewalk for an hour could easily bank a few hundreds of dollars for Daniel Lurie's Let's Go San Francisco Fund. Instead, they went into high gear for the lowest of offenses.
It's a fair thing to say pedestrians need protecting in San Francisco. Despite a 29% drop in pedestrian deaths in 2025, we're still far from the original promise SF made to its citizens over a decade ago in Vision Zero, which intended to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2024. In 2026 so far, there have been at least eight pedestrian deaths. Last year, a rider on an e-scooter hit a pedestrian on Market Street, killing him. Last month, a teen on an electric bike on a bike path killed an older woman in Davis. Even more recently, an e-bike rider critically injured another older person in Orange County. Are we going to wait for another crash like this to happen on San Francisco's sidewalks?
These days on San Francisco streets, electric scooters and BINOS (bikes in name only) are everywhere. Bay Wheels now has 6,000 shared bikes available in the city as of last fall, with riders at least three times as likely to use a 20 mph electric bike than pedal-powered. In 2025, 1.5 million e-bikes were sold in the U.S., with the market size increasing from $1.5 billion to $2 billion between 2023 and 2025. Injuries related to e-bikes spiked 1,022% from 2020 to 2024, and the American College of Surgeons says only one third of injured e-bike riders were wearing helmets. Clearly these supercharged vehicles are a danger to both their riders and others.
I can empathize with some novice cyclists afraid to pedal alongside cars on a busy street. San Francisco ranked fourth in the country in 2025 for bicycle infrastructure among large cities, but - despite a wealth of protected bike lanes - it's still not an easy place to ride. That's due in no small part to both cars and pedestrians loitering in bike lanes, but that's another rant altogether. The reality of city riding is that you're going to end up on some uncomfortable blocks. Unfortunately, that's just a consequence of getting into any vehicle - bikes included.
But I have absolutely no sympathy for e-scooters or two-wheeled Google Gemini ads (aka Bay Wheels) bombing down sidewalks as they weave between pedestrians. Each of the major scooter rental companies flashes a warning when booting up its vehicles, reminding users that riding on sidewalks is prohibited, which is promptly ignored by a large percentage of riders. The problem is particularly bad on one-way streets, where riders use the sidewalk as a shortcut. And so many pedestrians wear headphones these days that they don't hear riders coming up from behind.
Admittedly, there are pitfalls to police enforcement. When New York City cracked down on sidewalk cyclists in 2025, writing 5,000 tickets in a year, Black and Latino riders were disproportionately ticketed, which partly led to the city retract its policy. After weeks of unanswered calls and emails, SFPD responded that they've been increasing general enforcement efforts of "everything that can lead to a traffic collision" along the high injury network corridors, one of which is Market Street. The SFPD representative said the enforcement effort isn't specific to cyclists and that sidewalk riding does fall under this distinction, but couldn't offer any specific data as to citations.
"It's dangerous for pedestrians, it's dangerous for the cyclists obviously since it's tough to see a cyclist riding on a sidewalk, people are pulling in and out of driveways or turning at an intersection. It's dangerous for the cyclist and same with scooters," said SFPD spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky. "These laws are in place to protect people and keep them alive."
City data shows that there was a big jump to 16 citations issued for biking offenses in March, up from just one in February.
I'll admit that in moments of frustration, I've played chicken with scooter riders, refusing to cede my government-given right of way and forcing them to swerve around me or dismount. But that's an antagonistic stance that's resulted in more than one ugly confrontation. As much as I'd like to call on all pedestrians to stand their ground, I can't recommend it - we shouldn't be the ones tasked with enforcing this law. And we shouldn't have to wait for someone to get hurt for the city to take action.
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This story was originally published May 5, 2026 at 11:29 AM.