San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Providing Bike Education For Genentech Shuttle Bus Drivers
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) – Tech shuttle bus operators from Genentech are getting lessons from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition in how to negotiate traffic safely.
The Genentech course is just one of the education programs the SF Bicycle Coalition teaches, to show drivers the rules of the road.
"We now teach every new and renewing taxi driver in San Francisco, a course just in how to navigate the street safely with biking," said Kristin Smith with the SF Bicycle Coalition. "We added Muni drivers this last year, and now we're launching a new program for tech shuttle operators."
San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Providing Bike Education For Genentech Shuttle Bus Drivers
Smith said Genentech is the first private company to sign on for the lessons, and there are more in the works.
"Understanding how to be sharing the streets together is really key in creating a culture of more calmness on our streets," she said. "As we're reaching out to these shuttle operators and the Muni operators, we're also doing our part to reaching out to the bike riders to say, hey please don't pass on the inside of a bus. They may not have the same turning radius as a smaller car."
Some of the key issues of the training course: how to make a right turn across a bike lane, how to safely drop off and pick up passengers on a street with a bike lane, and understanding bicycle infrastructure and merging lines.
Genentech tells KCBS, hundreds of its employees are cyclists, and it wants its shuttle buses to be able to co-exist peacefully with others on the road. Along with reducing collisions, the two sides hope to ease the tensions that have surrounded these tech shuttle buses.
