Up and over: Bridge Updates
Bike access on major and local bridges
Major bridges
You can soon enjoy a bike-ferry commute to San Francisco across the Bay Bridge, a more complete commute across the Richmond San Rafael Bridge, and if you’d like, take a triangular bike journey across both those bridges and the Golden Gate Bridge enjoying the best of views your home has to offer.
As of press time, the bike connection on Yerba Buena Island at the end of the East Span of the Bridge is fully open to Macalla Road and new ferry service is operating between Treasure Island and downtown San Francisco. All that stands in your way is a steep climb up and over Macalla Road along the north side of YBI. What isn’t complete yet are new separated bikeways on Macalla Road. When the west side ramps are complete (2024), you will be able to use Hillside Drive between the East Span and Treasure Island, and avoid Macalla’s steep hill.
Out on the Richmond San Rafael Bridge, the rains this year have eliminated Marin County’s plan for an emergency exemption for an immediate water pipeline on the bridge. Rather, they are planning the same pipeline, but via a more normal, extended planning process. This is good news because it gives them more time to study our ask: bury the water pipeline on the south approach to the bridge on the Richmond side, not on the north approach where the current bike path is. We have the support of Richmond City Council for this ask.
To get to and from the bridge, Marin County has recently completed several new bikeway projects from downtown San Rafael to the bridge, but a couple gaps still remain. On the Richmond side, the city of Richmond has started construction on a two-way protected cycle track on Harbor Way, and will soon start work extending this cycle track along Hoffman Blvd and Cutting Blvd, connecting to Gerrard Blvd in Point Richmond. And as part of Marin’s water pipeline project, we have also asked that the cycle track be completed within Point Richmond, where a gap exists for a few blocks on Tewksbury Avenue and Railroad Avenue.
If you bike all three bridges this Spring, take a selfie with hashtag #GoldenTriangle.
Local bridges
In addition to more bike access over the San Francisco Bay, numerous local bike-ped bridges are in the works, following on the heels of celebrations for Emeryville’s new bike-ped bridge at Bay Street and Fremont’s new bike-ped bridge at Warm Springs BART.
Construction has started on the Gilman Interchange bike-ped bridge in Albany/Berkeley and the Brentwood-Antioch bike-ped bridge over SR 4 Bypass. These two new signature bridges will take a couple more years to complete. Final design work continues on San Ramon’s bike-ped bridge over Bollinger Canyon and Dublin’s bike-ped bridge over Dublin Blvd, both part of the Iron Horse Trail. Caltrans is also proposing a new replacement bike-ped bridge as part of their 2022–2026 SHOPP program (Caltrans capital maintenance program), at Santa Clara Avenue over 580 near Grand Avenue. We will be discussing with Caltrans using this opportunity to improve bike-ped access along Grand Avenue under 580 as well.
For questions regarding advocacy updates, email Dave@BikeEastBay.org.
