A Breathtaking New Bike Path and What It Might Mean for Future Commuters

With apologies to San Francisco native Robert Frost, who for all we know was an avid bicyclist of the penny farthing era: Something there is that loves a bike path, that wants to get out and ride.

The latest evidence of that, and of a long-term trend to create more and better non-motorized access to Bay Area bridges, is the breathtaking new bike-pedestrian path that opened on the Richmond-San Rafael span last November.

That means six of the seven state-owned bridges in the Bay Area, plus the Golden Gate Bridge, all have some sort of bicycle or pedestrian access. The only links without such a path: the western span of the Bay Bridge and the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.

While one might tend to see cycling and walking paths across the bridges as purely recreational amenities, the lanes are getting new scrutiny as serious commute and travel options. That's in part because of a dramatic increase in urban cycling in San Francisco, Oakland and other core Bay Area cities in the last decade. Another major factor: the growing popularity of electric-assist bikes that make longer-distance rides, like commuting across your local bridge, less of a physical challenge than it has been in years past.

The new Richmond-San Rafael bike/pedestrian route — or "people path," as cycling and walking advocates call it — is getting more attention than any of the other non-motorized crossings. That's because the path is not necessarily a permanent bridge feature but instead a four-year pilot project that will study how heavily it's used and what impact it has on other modes of traffic across the bridge.

The path, separated from vehicle traffic by a 42-inch-high, movable concrete barrier, occupies a westbound upper-deck lane that was taken out of service during the drought of 1976-77 to install a water pipeline from the East Bay to then-parched Marin County. The pipeline was used for just a few months, but it was left in place for several years. When it was removed in 1982, the old right-hand traffic lane was left open for maintenance crews and vehicles that needed to move out of traffic.

A third traffic lane on the eastbound lower deck of the bridge was also removed from service, in 1980, to create a maintenance/breakdown lane. That third lane was put back into service for motor vehicles in the spring of 2018, a $36 million project designed to ease a choke point for evening commute traffic from U.S. 101 in San Rafael to Interstate 580 and the bridge.

Some officials in Marin and Contra Costa counties have lobbied for something similar on the Richmond-San Rafael span's upper deck. Their idea, meant to ease long morning rush-hour delays at the bridge's toll plaza, is to restrict bike and pedestrian use of the lane to non-commute hours.

That proposal has gone nowhere, for now. But local and regional officials, along with Caltrans and a team of transportation researchers from UC Berkeley, are watching how the new people path performs and how it affects overall bridge traffic.

John Goodwin, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, says Caltrans and UC Berkeley's Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology program are conducting a before-and-after study of conditions on the span that will be collecting data for the next several months.

Some of the key metrics under study include: traffic volumes in the westbound (morning commute) direction; travel times and vehicle delay; traffic collisions and other traffic incidents on the bridge; and how such incidents are managed, including the time required to clear collisions and reopen lanes to traffic.

As far as usage goes, what are the numbers so far? The jury is likely to be out for a while.

Cycling advocates point out that while transportation agencies have done an extensive amount of work to create a bike-friendly approach to the bridge on the Richmond side, those approaching the span from the Marin side face a more daunting experience. Most routes to and from the bridge on the San Rafael/San Quentin end of the bridge involve riding for a short distance on freeway ramps that offer no protection for cyclists and pedestrians. Until that happens, they say, the path's usage stats don't mean much.

But with that caveat in mind, numbers from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission show that 4,750 bikes were recorded entering the path on the Richmond side in December. That's after the initial euphoria, and very heavy use, of the new facility had passed. And it's during a period in which the weather was not great — measurable rain was recorded on 17 days during the month.

The MTC's numbers also show, unsurprisingly, that riding the bridge is mostly a weekend endeavor. For the period from last Nov. 16, when the path opened, through Jan. 6, Saturday ridership average 784 and Sundays 522, as measured by bikes entering the bridge from Richmond. The lowest daily average during the period: Wednesdays, with an average of 155.