September 3, 2013
A bicycle-and-pedestrian path on the newly constructed eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (famously nicknamed the Bay Bridge) made its debut. The noontime opening of the completed two-thirds of the path took place the day after the roadway portion of the new span was inaugurated.
A segment of the original eastern span had collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the region, and the California Department of Transportation consequently initiated efforts to replace the entire span with a self-anchored suspension bridge and a pair of viaducts that would make the structure a lot more seismically safe. A path allowing bicyclists and pedestrians to cross over the Bay Bridge on their own power was included in the plans for the southern edge of the new span.
While popularly known as the Bay Bridge Trail, the route was formally named the Alexander Zuckermann Bicycle-Pedestrian Path in memory of a local bicycling advocate who died in 2007. The 15.5-foot (4.7-meter) wide path has one lane in each direction for bicyclists and a lane on the outside for pedestrians. The path’s final section was completed in 2016. This section connects the path with both Yerba Buena Island and Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay.
Photo Credit: Lauraat (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)
For more information on the Alexander Zuckermann Bicycle-Pedestrian Path (Bay Bridge Trail), please check out https://www.baybridgeinfo.org/path
Additional information on the 2013 opening of the path is available at https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/bicycle-die-hards-test-out-bay-bridge-bike-path/1953261/
Leave a Reply