Here's a simple question: How do you get more bike parking at Ocean Beach?

It shouldn't be hard. Ocean Beach is packed on weekends. People are biking there — which is exactly the kind of behavior city leaders claim to encourage — and there's nowhere to lock up. The demand is obvious. The solution is a metal rack and some bolts. This is not a moonshot.

And yet, trying to figure out who to even ask reveals everything you need to know about how San Francisco governs itself.

Is it SF Parks and Rec? Maybe. Is it SFMTA, which has a dedicated bike parking email at bikeparking@sfmta.com? Could be, but it might not be their jurisdiction. Is it the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a federal entity under the National Park Service? Almost certainly — Ocean Beach falls under GGNRA control. But as one local pointed out, "their staffing has been decimated," so good luck getting a response through their online portal.

Another SF resident suggested reaching out to the SF Bike Coalition to advocate on your behalf, or even sliding into Mayor Lurie's Instagram DMs — noting he's "super into social media." When citizens are reduced to comment-section lobbying the mayor for a bike rack, something has gone sideways.

This is the quiet dysfunction that doesn't make headlines but slowly erodes trust. We have overlapping jurisdictions — city, state, federal — all converging on one beach, and nobody clearly owns the problem. A resident identifies a straightforward infrastructure need and is met with a bureaucratic scavenger hunt across three levels of government.

The bike parking issue itself is small. But the underlying problem is enormous: San Francisco has built a governance structure so layered and fragmented that installing a $500 bike rack requires navigating a jurisdictional maze that would humble a tax attorney.

Want more people biking instead of driving? Start by making it possible to park a bike when they get there. And maybe — just maybe — figure out which of the seventeen overlapping agencies is supposed to handle it.