By Peter Lawrence Kane
If you think the saga to extend bike lanes on Polk Street is like pulling teeth, it might be more accurate to say it’s like flushing a scratched cornea. When Dr. Ronald Hiura (pictured above on the far right), an optometrist on Polk and a friend of Mayor Lee, lobbied to nix a block-long section of raised bike lane outside his office, people started flipping out.
As SF Citizen noticed, some bike lane advocates have started venting their outrage on Dr. Hiura’s Yelp page. If you’re skeptical that a mayor would upend a hard-fought urban planning proposal so brazenly, well, Dr. Hiura came pretty close to outright bragging to Streetsblog SF about how he had the politico’s ear (possibly while Lee’s face was resting in a chin cup for one of those unbearable puff-of-air tests).
I spoke in person with Dr. Chris Hiura (the other half of Drs. Hiura and Hiura Optometrists), who, after flagging several comments for review, has reached out to Yelp to resolve the issue. The smear campaign began on Friday, and as of 11:30 Monday morning he still hadn’t heard from Yelp. While he wouldn’t comment on his relationship with the mayor, Hiura did say he doesn’t think the campaign is affecting business. Still, “if it’s not directly affecting our service to people, I don’t think it’s right to ruin a business’s reputation,” he said.
Hiura also clarified that he’s “not opposed to bike lanes, just a raised lane that takes away a loading zone and parking.” His office sees a lot of elderly patients with glaucoma and macular degeneration, and because they aren’t able to ride Muni, they require someone to drop them off and pick them up.
Say what you will about the merits of guerrilla Yelp warfare and the possibilities of blowback against the safer streets cause, at least the pro-bike lane people aren’t using profanity, all caps, or lots of exclamation marks to make their point. (Note that three of the four critics are frequent Yelpers who didn’t just join to trash this one business).
For Yelp’s part, spokeswoman Heather Cheesman told me by email that the site is not meant to support “political ideologies, media reports or hearsay,” and that their User Operations team “routinely reviews cases where businesses profiles have been raised by media reports” to remove anything that wasn’t based on firsthand experience. They also use automated recognition software that buries “reviews that may be fake, biased, an unhelpful rant or rave, or are submitted by users we don’t know much about.”
So, this isn’t likely to last much longer. I’ll also mention that as I left the 1400 block of Polk (which currently only has sharrows), I almost got creamed by a deranged minivan driver, because, man, that street is fucking scary to bike on.
[via SF Citizen; photo courtesy Dr. Hiura’s Yelp]
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