Sop: 1) a thing given or done as a concession of no great value to appease someone whose main concerns or demands are not being met.
Monday morning marked the first day the movable barrier on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge was shifted to close the only bikeable connection between Marin and the East Bay, ostensibly to relieve automobile traffic by making all six lanes on the bridge available to cars during the workweek. In its place, Caltrans and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission are providing an infrequent van shuttle to ferry cyclists across (see lead image).
And here's an early morning shot of the westbound shuttle on one of the bridge approaches, courtesy of Bike East Bay's Robert Prinz, who got up before dawn to go check it out:
Prinz wrote a thread about his experience handing out fliers and observing the shuttle on Monday morning. "The shuttle headways were estimated at 20-25 minutes apart. But this morning it’s definitely taking much longer than that. It was 20-25 mins alone for the last shuttle to get even just 0.4 mi from the stop to the freeway. The entire bridge crossing by bike was previously about 30 mins," he wrote in his thread.
So rather than solve traffic, the lane closure now forces cyclists to wait around for a van and sit in traffic too.
Streetsblog readers will recall how drunk-and-hit-and-run driver Marin Assembly-member Damon Connolly and the Bay Area Council, a local business group long opposed to the bike lane, engineered its closure. They even gaslighted that the bike lane caused pollution in Richmond. Unsurprisingly, "I don’t see anybody from Bay Area Council here this morning," wrote Prinz. "They had $100k to spend on their propaganda campaign to close the bridge trail, feigning concern for East Bay commuters. But they don’t have time to show up & meet the bike commuters their actions affected."
If you're one of those poor souls who has no choice but to continue commuting across the bridge by bike even now that there is no lane, be sure to take the rider survey.
