A Personal Update — 2021
Reflecting on a year of catastrophic loss and the journey ahead.
Hi Friend,
It’s been awhile and I hope this finds you well. I’ve been mostly offline these past nine months and I wanted to share a personal update as well as an update on a few of my projects you may have been following.
As you may have heard, I lost my younger brother Billy in September. He was just 40 years old and we were very close, only four years apart in age. My brother was a popular high school teacher in Hawaii where he taught AP English for 13 years.
The sudden loss of my brother has devastated our family and to be completely honest it has at times paralyzed me with complex feelings of helplessness and anger at not being able to prevent it. The circumstances surrounding my brother’s death are complicated but the fact is I wasn’t there for him when he needed me. I was instead completely consumed with trying to advance my career and establish myself in the bicycle advocacy world.
A very good friend recently said to me “charity starts at home” and that’s exactly where I’ve been these past nine months.
In 2011 I helped my brother purchase a road bike which he loved and rode all over Hawaii. He would often use it to commute to school 2 hours each way. When my wife Alicia and I flew to Hawaii in September we discovered his bike in an awful state of disrepair; covered in rust, broken spokes and all. We shipped it back to SF and over the winter I completely rebuilt it. As Alicia and Billy are about the same height, his bike is a perfect fit for her and now when we ride together throughout the Bay Area, he is there with us, watching over us.
As you may know, I make a living designing and building websites, mobile apps, interactive installations and by providing consulting services that help fund and bring them to market. For Billy’s birthday in April, I made him a website to help people learn about his extraordinary life. I hope you’ll take a moment to learn about my brother, watch some of the videos and read the wonderful words his friends and colleagues have written. He loved baseball and we were planning to road trip across the US this summer to visit every MLB stadium once the pandemic restrictions lifted. He was an incredibly unique and kind man and I miss him more than words can express.
On March 9th 2019, the day after Tess Rothstein was killed by an inattentive motorist on Howard St. here in San Francisco, I started the Safe Lanes project to crowdsource and track motor vehicle violations and pressure our elected leaders to put safer infrastructure in the ground. In just six months, collaborators on the platform logged over 18,000 violations and succeeded in replacing 5 parking spaces with dedicated passenger and commercial loading zones on 4th St. in Mission Bay.
Last Spring, as my collaborator Peter and I were rewriting our pitch deck to apply for another batch of grants and accelerators, COVID-19 hit and our daily average of 100 reports almost instantly collapsed to less than 20. In response, Peter and I started thinking of how to expand the platform to provide value beyond just capturing motor vehicle violations and started to look at public transit headways, delays and “pass-ups” particularly in historically underserved neighborhoods. Instead of shaking your fists or futilely complaining to 311 every time the bus passed you by, could we help people capture data on these incidents and use it to pressure local officials to improve service? We thought so and started to build this into the platform alongside a “campaigns” feature that would allow anyone to organize data collection in a specific neighborhood or along a service route and take that data to exactly the right people who needed to see it. I worked on this all summer alongside contract work to keep the lights on while applying for grants and developing the platform for iOS and Android. As the months ticked by and the pandemic showed no signs of letting up, I started to burn out having no idea when we’d be able to share with the world Safe Lanes 2.0.
Then on September 4th, at 1:41AM, I received a phone call from my mother hysterically telling me to call my brother in Hawaii right away.
As I reflect on the fact that I poured over a year and a half of my life into Safe Lanes, despite the many challenges, I’m proud of what our community has accomplished and deeply thankful for the friends I’ve made along the way. While we never made any money, achieved any fame or widespread adoption we did physically change the face of one San Francisco street and made it much safer for everyone. A mere ripple in the ocean of safe streets advocacy, however I believe it’s been time well spent.
As Peter and I were trying to figure out how to navigate the pandemic, my friend Sam reached out inspired by a bike match program his friends had setup in Washington D.C. Hungry for a temporary distraction from Safe Lanes, I designed and built the first version of bikematch.network in 72 hours. Sam handled most of the outreach and within a few weeks we had 13 partner organizations join the platform. As of July 2021, BMN has helped connect over 200 people in need with a free bike and has received over 1200 requests. Seeing the photos uploaded to our “stories” page has been a wonderful light for me throughout one of the darkest periods of my life. Thank you to all of our advocacy partners who have put their time and hearts into this program. As I start to come back online I’m looking for someone to take over BMN and guide the future of the platform. If you would like to learn more or help in any way, please let me know.
As I reflect on these past 18 months, I know unfortunately that in my grief I am not alone. What we’ve experienced as a society from the pandemic to the wave of police violence against Black Americans to the assault on our democratic institutions has been nothing short of horrific. On top of this, every single day in this country approximately 115 Americans are killed by an imprudent driver in a motor vehicle, another 120 die at the hands of vicious gun violence and a staggering 221 of our friends and family members lose their life from a drug overdose.
EVERY SINGLE DAY
If you are grieving the loss of a loved one, please know that I understand your pain and if you need someone to talk to, I am here for you. Just reach out and let’s setup a time to talk.
I know at times the state of the world can feel overwhelming and the challenges that plague our society are formidable but we have to keep fighting for a safer, healthier and more just society.
If it’s been months or years since we’ve last spoken, let’s catch up. I’d love to know how your projects are going and how I can support you and your work. If you need help with a project or are interested in collaborating on something, let’s talk. There is much work to do and I look forward to rejoining the fight for a sustainable and equitable society as I get back on my feet.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Stephen Braitsch
July 2021
San Francisco, CA
