Almost every work day, Matthew Richards cycles along Townsend Street to his software engineering job near Oracle Park. Recently, as he approached Seventh Street, Richards was distracted by an unusual figure painted on the newly repaved road.
He could tell what the marking’s intention was — it featured a bicycle denoting the bike lane he was riding in — but the bike was elongated, as if it had been copied with Silly Putty and stretched horizontally, and it had small, square wheels. It’s difficult to tell if a rider is depicted. To Richards, if anything, it looked more like a scooter than a bike.
“When I first saw it, something looked non-serious about it, and it just seemed like someone was being lazy,” Richards told me. “The cartoonishness just seemed inappropriate for a road safety item.”
The marking on Townsend Street is one of many curious, sometimes hallucinatory, street markings around San Francisco that include crude and downright sloppy images and words. Further down Townsend, between Second and Third Streets, a marking, likely an incomplete turn arrow, resembles a letter from an ancient alphabet. Is it telling you to turn? Or offering some more arcane message?
If safety is the intention of these markings, confusion is often the outcome.
The distorted road markers are a result of the city’s streets being repaved, said Madhu Unnikrishnan, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). Road construction is often handled by contractors hired by the city’s Department of Public Works (DPW). Contractors first lay down temporary road markings using a removable pavement tape, sometimes attempting to replicate the original markings. Once DPW signs off on the construction, SFMTA sends paint crews to replace the temporary images with permanent markings.
San Francisco has 474 miles of bike lanes; 141 miles of them are off in parks separated from traffic by marked pathways and plastic poles, called “soft-hit posts,” according to SFMTA. The confounding images aren’t limited to images of bicycles. The words “BIKE LANE” and “STOP” are also first laid down in tape, sometimes in crooked and unsteady letters that look like they were scrawled by a child. Often the words are smeared or warped. Both the images and words can last for quite some time because DPW requires the contractors to redo part of a job, or due to the paint crews’ other priorities, Unnikrishnan said.
“So the markings are there, and they don’t look great, but they’re still functional,” Unnikrishnan said.
On another stretch of bike path, on Bryant Street between 15th and 16th Streets, cyclists encounter a distorted bicycle that looks like a pair of suture scissors. Further along, there are two squares touching at their corners, resembling dice. Is that a bike, possibly as interpreted by someone who has never ridden (or seen) a bike?
On Wednesday, Palin Hung, a lawyer, was cycling on the path to get to a morning meeting. “The bicycle is extremely rudimentary,” she told me. “I do not know what the two squares are.”
“The bicycle infrastructure is getting better in San Francisco, so I’m always grateful for something, but certainly we could do a lot more,” Hung added. At least one of these temporary markings may last a bit longer, albeit not on the street. A crude drawing of a cyclist painted atop a strip of newly constructed Folsom Street bike lane between 5th and 7th Streets has become a favorite of some cyclists.
The figure sits on an object easily identified as a bike (this one with what looks like studded tires), one arm tucked down, the other jutting straight out with four, pointed fingers extended outward as if the cyclist is straight-arming oncoming traffic. Its head looks like it was flattened by an anvil.
The marking is the creation of DR Traffic Control, which was hired by Mitchell Engineering, a contractor hired by DPW, but for the figure’s fans, it might as well have been created by Banksy.
Krissa Corbett Cavouras, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, a bicycle advocacy group, called it an “objectively hilarious and creative temporary stencil.”
Corbett Cavouras liked it so much, a friend recently made her a T-shirt featuring it and gave it to her for her birthday, which was good timing: SFMTA aims to replace the figure and finalize the stretch on Folsom by the end of this month.
