Dirt-bike riders caused frustration Sunday all over San Francisco as they drove the wrong way down streets, blocked intersections, and did stunts.
Packs of riders were seen speeding past Oracle Park, swarming a Muni streetcar in the Castro, zooming through North Beach, and amassing in other neighborhoods as they did wheelies and flouted traffic rules. Still, the city’s transit agency reported no delays.
Social media were teeming with complaints about the noisy caravan. One video captured a low-speed police chase in North Beach.
“They are in almost every neighborhood, from Embarcadero, Valencia, Chestnut, and even Presidio sometimes, are a huge safety liability, and are just total losers,” Reddit user golf_234 posted Sunday afternoon. “It is such an embarrassment to have these morons driving around our city putting literally everyone around them in danger.
“SFPD, please do something about this, it is absolutely insane to not,” the user added.
Another Reddit poster vented: “The huge pack of dirt bike riders just now. They did a brief sideshow on Columbus at Broadway then headed north. Seriously F them.”
In a video filmed at 16th and Bryant streets, an SFPD patrol vehicle is seen stopping briefly at the intersection while at least a dozen riders peel away.
“I think that they basically can only really follow them and hope that driving up will make them move on,” the poster said. “They’re way too understaffed to actually confront them.”
In another Reddit post, bikers are shown heading east along the Bay Bridge after a long day’s work annoying city residents. At least one commenter found them underwhelming.
“From a distance away they look intimidating and organized. Menacing. Up close they can’t ride these things lol,” Reddit user mysterious-ice-1551 said. “Saw 3 people fall off, one fall out a car window and two drop a helmet/gloves and had to double back. Then fell off. Hilarious stuff up close.”
After an hour a cop rolled up with lights flashing and the group took off.
— Sharky Laguana (@Sharkyl) August 26, 2024
We thought it was over.
It was not. pic.twitter.com/BtZp3JD1QT
But the bikers managed to spoil Sunday evening for several people, according to a series of posts from Sharky Laguana, who sits on the city’s Homeless Oversight Commission. He said he was meeting friends near 23rd and Valencia streets for pizza when a group of riders took over the intersection for more than an hour, using the Valencia bike lane for stunts and playing cat-and-mouse with police.
“Eventually more showed up and they started doing wheelies, going in circles on Valencia. 45 minutes later, they were still there, burning tires in the intersection. The restaurant smelled like burned rubber. We didn’t finish the pizza,” Laguana posted on X. “At one point a car did a doughnut suddenly in the intersection. Parents were grabbing their kids tightly and fleeing.”
Videos posted to YouTube and on social media point to the influx of bikers being part of an event dubbed Bay Day 2024. The video, posted Monday just after 1 p.m., shows bikers and ATV riders performing tricks across the Bay Bridge and around San Francisco.
So what did police do about it?
When The Standard asked about the incidents Monday, a representative of the San Francisco Police Department said officers made no arrests Sunday despite seeing several dirt-bike riders commit vehicle violations.
The spokesperson said the department’s plan to handle such incidents is to detain and arrest riders, as well as seize bikes and follow up to impound others.
The spokesperson added that officers used a drone on July 26 to track dirt-bike riders seen breaking into vehicles, yielding an arrest and a car seizure.
The mayor’s office has yet to respond to questions from The Standard about what is being done to rein in dirt bike riders.
But Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who is running for mayor and represents North Beach, said police are prioritizing the incidents, which are “extremely dangerous and difficult to solve.”
“They were marauding all through the town,” Peskin said, adding that he received emails Sunday evening from concerned constituents. “It’s consistent on weekends.”
In an emailed statement, Oakland police said its officers responded to “sideshow activity” involving over 100 dirt bike and ATV riders shortly before 3 p.m. Sunday along Grand Avenue near Lake Merritt.
After one vehicle driver lost control and tried to run away, officers “detained the individual and discovered the vehicle had been reported stolen,” police said. The department is continuing to investigate the incident.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who represents the Castro, where the dirt bikers barreled through this past weekend, said he reached out to police after getting a slew of calls from constituents asking what the city’s doing about the issue.
“The dirt bike problem, this is not new this weekend,” he said. “It has been going on for a while. But it is wildly alarming. It is dangerous. There have been injuries and deaths associated with these events. They’re doing crazy-dangerous stunts, and that makes it dangerous for other people around.”
Much like with sideshows, which Mandelman described as “somewhere between annoying for most people and dangerous for others,” the dirt-bike rampages are tough for law enforcement to control.
“The challenge for the police department is that it’s a pretty hard problem to get a handle on safely,” Mandelman told The Standard in a phone call Monday evening. “Because a police pursuit would also be dangerous.”
But the public is increasingly demanding that the city figure out how to prevent or punish scofflaw bikers. To that end, Mandelman said police are relying more on tools like drones, which they can more quickly deploy since Measure E relaxed oversight requirements on surveillance technology.
Since the dirt bike events seem fairly organized and take place in multiple jurisdictions, Mandelman said it would make sense for state law enforcement to play a bigger role in policing these things.