Spending on bike infrastructure plays, in debates about San Francisco’s budget, a role similar to the National Endowment for the Arts in debates about the federal budget: it is hugely and deeply important to many people, opponents like to rail against it as an outrageous extravagance, and it is, for anyone who cares to look at the actual numbers, a very tiny, tiny amount. Right now, the SFMTA spends around 1% of its budget for street and transit improvements on bike infrastructure each year. As the SF Bicycle Coalition has been pointedly reminding San Franciscans, this is less than the SFMTA spends annually on office supplies.

The SFMTA’s 2015-2016 budget, passed this week by the SFMTA’s Board of Directors and now up for approval by the Board of Supervisors, proposes increasing this figure to roughly 2% of the SFMTA’s annual budget for street and transit improvements, spending $17.8 million on new bike infrastructure in 2015 and $16.9 million in 2016, envisioning $87.9 million spent on bike infrastructure between now and 2019, out of a total of just over $3 billion spent on all street and transit projects.

This $87.9 million, if spent wisely, could be used to dramatically improve bicycling in our city. Based on the cost estimates included in the SFMTA’s recently published Bicycle Strategy report, the budget could fund, over the next five years:

the completion of the projects in San Francisco’s long-delayed Bicycle Plan

five miles of new bikeways (preliminary ideas include, among many others, Eddy and Turk in the Tenderloin, Lincoln Way, and 3 rd Street in Bayview)

Street in Bayview) upgrades, like adding buffer zones, for twenty miles of existing bikeways

intersection safety improvements, like bike traffic signals and bike boxes, at key intersections

10,000 new bike parking spaces

A budget that doubles the city’s spending on bike infrastructure and funds important projects like these is a significant victory, but the city’s commitment is still disappointingly small, and advocates like the SF Bicycle Coalition aren’t celebrating. Moreover,the city’s plans to improve bicycling have been, over the last few years, a story of steadily shrinking goals and unrealized visions.

In 2010, to much fanfare and self-congratulation, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution declaring it the city’s official goal that 20% of all trips within city limits be made by bicycle by 2020 (3.5% trips are made by bicycle today). This measure is known as “bicycle mode share.” The resolution, passed as the current economic and construction boom was getting under way, was meant to ensure that the growth in the city’s population would not overwhelm the streets with additional car traffic and to supplement the city’s longstanding Transit First policy. Since then, crucial projects, like the Polk Street overhaul, the Market Street redesign, and 5th Street bike lanes, have been delayed or watered down. By last year, talk of reaching 20% by 2020 had faded.

The SFMTA’s 2013 bicycle strategy looked at three different scenarios for new bike infrastructure to be built over the next five years and estimated the bicycle mode share that each one would allow the city to reach. (In general, building more bike infrastructure gets more people to ride.) Even the most ambitious of the three scenarios envisioned San Francisco reaching only a 8-10% bicycle mode share by 2020, half of the “official” goal.

Over the last several months, as the SFMTA prepared its new budget and solicited public comments, the Bike Coalition pushed for this diminished — but still ambitious — goal of 8-10% bicycle mode share, which the SFMTA estimated would have required it to commit 8% of its annual budget to bike infrastructure.

Based on the SFMTA’s estimates of the relationship between spending on infrastructure and ridership, the budget approved this week will allow the city to reach perhaps 6-7% bicycle mode share by 2020. This, of course, is assuming that the bike infrastructure budget and the projects it is meant to buy are not further diminished.

General goals like the Supervisors’ 20% bicycle mode share plan and detailed studies like the SFMTA’s Bicycle Strategy are crucial first steps, and in San Francisco these studies often offer strong support for bicycling and bike infrastructure, but the distance between plans on paper and paint and concrete on the ground is long and arduous. A lot, it turns out, can get lost on the way.

In short, this budget is a step forward for bike infrastructure, but not the leap it could have been.

The fact that Mayor Ed Lee demanded, and the SFMTA board supplied, an end to Sunday parking meter enforcement, a move which will cost the city an estimated $9.6 million each year, adds insult to injury.

Even more galling, Mayor Lee claimed (without any particular evidence) that abandoning Sunday parking meter enforcement was actually a pro-transit move because it would convince voters to approve a street improvement bond next year. (As Streetsblog SF and others have reported, Sunday parking meters cut the average time motorists spent searching for parking on Sundays in half.) This, it seems, is what a Transit First policy looks like in 2014: abandoning a successful, revenue-generating parking management program because doing so might convince voters down the road to approve a streets bond that, based on the success of other recent street improvement initiatives, would likely have sailed through either way.

The budget still needs to be reviewed by the Board of Supervisors, and it remains to be seen if the Supervisors will request more funding for bike infrastructure or push back against the repeal of Sunday parking enforcement. Most of the Supervisors claim to be avid supporters of transit and bicycling, but, until budget time, it’s hard to know what a politician’s priorities really are.