An effort to reduce access to the Richmond-San Rafael bridge bike lane is on hold for the moment after transportation officials requested a second postponement of the highly-anticipated vote.
The transportation agencies seeking the bike lane restriction sent a letter Wednesday to the Bay Area Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), which was set to vote on it Thursday, requesting a second extension to allow them to “materially amend the current application.” The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), which operates the Bay Area Toll Authority, and the state Department of Transportation, originally sought to limit bike lane access to four days a week. The group now has until July 12 to submit a proposal to the BCDC or it will have to be permanently withdrawn, the letter acknowledges.
John Goodwin, communications director for the MTC, which oversees transportation planning and financing for the Bay Area, confirmed the decision to postpone the vote a second time, acknowledging that the postponement pushes back any potential changes to the bridge’s bike lane schedule.
“This postponement will of course delay BCDC’s consideration of the MTC-BATA/Caltrans proposal to have the upper deck space now used for the bike/ped path used as a shoulder lane Mondays through Thursdays, with the barrier moved to accommodate bike/ped use on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays,” Goodwin told Richmondside in an email. “But we believe the changes to be made to the application may lead to more favorable consideration of the proposal by BCDC when it returns to the agenda.”
According to the discussion summary notes from a Jan. 16 BCDC workshop, where 15 commissioners divided into small groups to discuss the bridge, some commissioners said they believe the five-year lane pilot has shown that the current seven-day usage of the path is viable and that considerations about reducing hours should center on whether the lane creates “significant use conflicts.”
Initially, the amendment — which was proposed in 2024 — looked at reducing bike lane access to provide the participating agencies with a “two-year period to collect additional information about (emergency) response times and delays related to incidents on the bridge.”
The movement to close the path four days a week was opposed by resolutions of the West Contra Costa Transportation Commission (WCCTC) — which represents all five cities of western Contra Costa County — and by resolutions from the Richmond, Albany and Berkeley city councils.
Local bicycle advocates, including Bike East Bay Advocacy Manager Dani Lanis, are celebrating news of the postponement but also acknowledge that the proposal may make a reappearance this summer.
“This is a huge victory, but we can’t let our guard down,” Lanis wrote in an email to Bike East Bay members Friday morning. “Even with significant support, this has been an uphill battle, as we face well-funded opposition spreading misinformation and straight-out lies. We are celebrating the fact that this time, bicycling and pedestrian access was victorious.”
In a statement sent to Richmondside on Friday afternoon, Bike East Bay Co-Executive Director of Mobility Justice Justin Hu-Nguyen said that although the fight is not over, the decision to push back the vote represents a significant victory for advocates of alternate modes of transportation.
“Restricting access would be a major setback in our pursuit of economic and environmental justice and in our efforts to combat climate change,” he said. “As this is merely the latest delay, we must remain vigilant. We must encourage our leaders to be more ambitious, equitable, and innovative in addressing the systemic issues that have long affected our communities, such as inadequate workforce housing and insufficient investment in active and public transportation.”
Consider that nearly all of the problems on the bridge are preventable. Fill your car with gas. Maintain your vehicle and tires properly. Drive carefully and with full attention and the required legal distance from the preceding car within the speed limit. Signal when changing lanes and turn and check. If drivers did these things, there would hardly ever be a need for a shoulder. Since almost all of the problems can be prevented by driver behavior changes, there is no reason to impose restrictions on people who choose to not drive.
I completely agree.
Daily commuter over the bridge for the last 17 years at 7:30am. 200 trips a year, and the record number of cyclists I’ve seen at that time of the morning is… four. The usual is zero. Today, a stall and an accident caused an hour long delay that a breakdown lane would have fixed. I’m a cyclist myself, but the bridge is no longer the sleepy one of the three; the times for the bike lane need to be amended! The mistakes aren’t just “bad” driving– they’re caused by the slowly frayed nerves of thousands of daily commuters. There are hundreds of us who see each other every morning in a death crawl. Please– some common sense could prevail here.
This is disappointing, but is a winnable fight. The city of Sausalito’s Bicycle Coalition all resigned recently – let’s keep that momentum going and get this lane back for breakdowns and ready for a time when it can be reopened for commute hours.
The pollution created when it takes an hour to get across the bridge due to a stalled vehicle or accident on the bridge (which could be moved to the break-down lane – current bike lane) is not outweighed by the daily handful of bikers who cross the bridge (mostly for recreational purposes). This pollution, and the real cost of gas and time (not only for the commute, but to have to get up early and leave early in case of an accident on the bridge making you late to work), are the reasons I am in support of leaving the shoulder open during the main commute times. I understand how anti-car the biker coalition tends to be, but the fact is that the vast majority of people are using their cars to commute across the bridge. It is not fair to the many thousands more people who are affected by this effective lane closure so that a few bikers can have 24/7 access.