ON MAY 19 , politicians and community leaders all over the city will strap on helmets, grab water bottles, and demonstrate their allegiance to ecological transportation by joining Bike to Work Day. Promoting bicycles as a healthy, inexpensive, and environmentally sound alternative to cars is now a mainstream cause in San Francisco, thanks in part to the relentless and effective advocacy work of groups like the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. But on the ground, where rubber really meets road, city policy makers still make sure that cars still come first. And until that changes, San Francisco will never be a truly transit-first, bike-friendly town.

As Steven T. Jones reports on page 14, the city's long-term Bike Plan is a case in point. The plan has been in the works for years. It contains a broad set of policy guidelines, which almost everyone agrees are good: educating drivers and bikers about the rules of the road, encouraging more people to get around on bicycles, enforcing existing laws protecting bicyclists, and creating more bike parking. That part of the plan is moving forward and will be adopted soon.

But the part of the plan that will really affect people's lives – the specific engineering changes that could, for example, involve new bike lanes, redesigned intersections, and other road improvements that would make more room for bicycles (at the expense of cars) is on hold for now. The reason: the city's Planning Department has decided that those changes could have a significant impact on the environment, and thus require a full environmental impact report.

Of course, by any rational standard, the real environmental impact will only be positive: more bikes mean fewer cars, which means less exhaust fumes in the air, less oil being pumped out of wells, transported, and refined ... less of a long list of things that damage life on the planet. But the way San Francisco has traditionally interpreted state law, anything that causes traffic congestion is considered a negative impact, and thus requires an EIR. And new bike lanes may lead (in the short term, anyway) to cars that once had two lanes crowding into one, creating more congestion – and that's an impact the city has to study, at considerable expense.

So that part of the Bike Plan is waiting in line behind a bunch of other traffic improvements that need environmental review.

It's long established under the California Environmental Quality Act that traffic congestion – known in planning language as "level of service," meaning how easily car traffic can flow on a street – is a factor in any valid EIR. And although some activists are suggesting that the city's overall interpretation of CEQA needs reform, we're not convinced that the law itself if wrong: if a big high-rise office building, or a new retail development, or any other sizable project is going to attract a lot of cars, and those cars are going to clog neighborhood streets – creating more air pollution, noise, and danger – that's a factor that has to be considered in evaluating the project. And the city can't exactly pretend that more congestion is really less congestion.

But there has to be some way to take into account the fact that making it easier and safer to travel around town on a bike is such a positive environmental impact that a bike plan should come first, before traffic improvements aimed at easing the flow of cars. (Besides, as Jones notes, there's actually money for the bike-lane work, earmarked for the city in a transportation bond measure.) The mayor and the supervisors ought to tell the DPT to move the Bike Plan to the front of the line, and expedite the review.

But this is just one example of a mentality that remains at almost all levels of city planning. Streets are still viewed primarily as places for cars. Bikes, pedestrians, streetscapes – the feel of a city from outside, instead of inside, a metal box – is mainly a second thought.

There are plenty of recent examples. The process for Octavia Boulevard was cars-first: The goal was to bring cars off the freeway as easily as possible, even if that meant more bicycle and pedestrian accidents on Market Street. Even Muni's new budget proposal, calling for a fare increase to $1.50, is a car-friendly move: It will inevitably discourage bus ridership (every fare hike does), and some of those people will go back to driving cars. And the proposal to lower the hikes in parking tickets and meter rates would have the same effect.

The supervisors should refuse to approve any Muni budget that includes a fare hike, and simply raise the cost of driving – through tickets and parking fees, downtown or in the neighborhoods or both – to whatever level is necessary to pay for decent Muni service.

And if the city is serious about a bike-friendly and transit-first policy, the supervisors ought to look seriously at closing some streets (like Market) to all private cars, leaving them clear for Muni, bikes, and pedestrians.

San Francisco isn't a 1950s suburb, created for and captive to the private automobile. In 2005, cities are going to have to make a clear, strong statement that cars are not the best way to get around and will not be the centerpiece of urban planning. That could turn Bike to Work Day into more than a nice, symbolic statement – it could become a credo for business as usual.