Richmond-San Rafael

Started: 2025-02-26 21:09:42

Submitted: 2025-03-01 16:25:55

Visibility: World-readable

A transit-involved adventure biking across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge

Interstate 580 crosses the northern lobe of San Francisco Bay between the East Bay city of Richmond and the Marin County city of San Rafael via a bridge named after the two cities it connects. (It turns out this bridge is often the easiest way to get from my house in Santa Cruz to much of Marin County and places further north, avoiding highway 1 through San Francisco in exchange for East Bay traffic on I-880.) In 2019 a bike path opened on the top deck of the bridge, along side westbound traffic heading to Marin County, though it's officially classified as a "pilot program" running through 2024. News reports indicate drivers want to claim the path for their own. It's not yet clear what will happen to the path so I figured I had better ride it while I still can.

(While we're talking about claiming bridge deck for bike paths, I don't want to read articles about the western span of the Bay Bridge that claim there's no room for a bike path on the existing structure. There's plenty of room, all we need to do is reclaim one of the ten lanes of cars and there's more than enough space for a path.)

To get to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge I undertook a transit-involved adventure, starting at San Jose-Diridon Station with the 10:05 eastbound Capitol Corridor service. (This is basically a longer version of my trip biking across the New Bay Bridge last fall.) When I arrived at the station the Amtrak ticket vending machine indicated that it was unable to print tickets, though it was happy to sell me a ticket. Amtrak's website was no longer selling tickets for the 10:05 service departing in a few minutes, but it turned out that I could buy the ticket from the vending machine and give it my email address and it would send me the ticket, saving me the trouble of having to figure out another way to buy a train ticket with only minutes to spare.

I arrived on the train platform just as it was boarding. The front car was marked as the bike car, with the luggage racks on the lower level of the double-decker passenger carriage converted to work as vertical bike racks. I found a front-facing seat and settled in for the ride north out of San Jose, through the industrial strip between Santa Clara and San Jose (part of Santa Clara County's legacy of semiconductor manufacturing that became a series of toxic Superfund sites) and onward past Alviso through the salt marshes at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, then up the East Bay.

I got off the train in Richmond (the city in the East Bay, not to be confused with the neighborhood of San Francisco or any other cities named Richmond elsewhere on the continent). I followed Google Maps' biking directions from the train station, following an off-street bike path on a greenway that looked like it could have been a rail line once, past residential neighborhoods and past rail sorting yards to the neighborhood of Point Richmond, tucked along the bay between a Chevron refinery and hill rising from the point next to the port of Richmond. I biked past the neighborhood, through a tunnel cut in the side of the hill (with a generous protected bike lane/sidewalk elevated above the road that turned out to be inconvenient to get to from the bike lane on the side of the road), and emerged in an East Bay park named Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline.

The place seemed like the Platonic ideal of every East Bay park: a grassy park perched above the shallow waters of San Francisco Bay, shaded with massive eucalyptus trees, with hazy views across the bay of the hills above San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, under a grassy hillside that was now a pale shade of green in the winter rainy season.

I biked along the paths in the park to a point of land extending into the bay ending in a derelict gantry sitting in the water.

This gantry was built by the Santa Fe railroad in 1900 as the western end of their transcontinental railroad. The gantry itself was used to transfer freight cars to barges to transport them across the bay. Passengers disembarked at the point and transferred to ferries to reach their final destinations. The remains of the pier where the passenger ferries docked is still visible in the current Google Maps photo but it was demolished last year to remove the treated wood that had been leeching creosote into the water. The new concrete fishing pier remained, giving me a chance to look at the gantry up close and see the counterweights and pulleys that kept the drawbridge section in the right place to meet the freight barges.

I ate lunch on a nearby picnic table, within view of the historical relic guarding the edge of the bay. I biked back through the Point Richmond Tunnel and biked through the neighborhood of Point Richmond on my way to the bridge. (I have a handlebar mount for my phone so I can follow Google Maps' biking directions in real time, which is considerably more convenient than having to stop and check directions every time I reach a cross street.) The route followed a protected bike path along the side of the westbound lanes of I-580, overlooking the Chevron refinery sprawled out on the hill, bypassed the westbound toll gates, and joined the bridge next to two lanes of westbound traffic on the upper deck, separated from vehicle traffic by a sturdy movable concrete barrier.

The bridge began with an almost-imperceptible ascent from the shore towards the first main span. Traffic was slow on the bridge; I could easily bike faster than the cars on the two vehicle lanes. From where I started it looked like the bridge would ascend steeply towards the steel truss; but as I reached the inflection point on the bridge the climb was much more gradual than I first expected. (It's possible that I've trained myself to climb hills by biking up the hill to my house.) Half-way up the approach to the main eastern span I saw the reason that traffic was slow: a car was stalled in the left lane, with two people standing on the narrow walkway on the opposite side of the bridge on mobile phones, forcing everyone to pass the car in the right lane. After that point traffic sped up and I was no longer faster than the cars.

The bridge is a compound span with two steel truss cantilever spans over the two main shipping channels leading north into San Pablo Bay connected by a long viaduct on the approaches on either side of the main spans, and connecting the man spans together. From the bike path on the upper deck my best view was north into San Pablo Bay; next to one of the main shipping channels I could see the tide buoy struggling to maintain its position in the ebbing tide, leaving a substantial wake as the water in the bay rushed towards the Golden Gate. My view to the south of San Francisco Bay was almost as good, dominated by Angel Island and the Tiburon Peninsula. As I biked across the bridge these two hills parted to let me see one of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, then moved to occlude my view of the other bridge. But the main attraction was the bridge itself once I reached the cantilever truss sections where the bridge superstructure stretched high above the bridge deck.

I was not the only person on the bridge enjoying the bike path, or appreciating the structure of the bridge itself. I saw several other people biking on the path (and I passed a few of them, on the climb to the first main span. Anecdotally I saw more traffic heading west, the same direction I was heading, than I saw in the opposite direction. The official statistics for the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge bike path reported 331 bicycle trips on Saturday, the 22nd of February, which seems credible; but I'm not sure how reliable the data is because it also reports more than 40,000 pedestrian trips every weekday for the prior week, which does not seem credible.

At one of the cantilever truss sections, I passed a guy on foot holding what looked like it might be a stereoscopic camera built with two blocky GoPro cameras with flared lens hoods mounted on a bar a foot apart.

Between the main spans the bridge descended slightly, then climbed again to reach the second span. After crossing the second span the bridge began its long slow descent towards its landfall at San Rafael. Once we touched down on dry land the bike path left the lanes of traffic, following the first offramp down to the surface streets leading to San Quentin state prison. I stopped at the scenic overlook to look at the bridge I had just biked across, then followed the directions on my phone towards Larkspur. Google Maps took me on a bike path that joined a highway flyover ramp exiting I-580 ending up on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. (This brief ascent was the steepest climb on the whole trip.) I followed the boulevard down towards the mouth of Corte Madera Creek, winding around the hillside above the local corner of San Francisco Bay, to the Larkspur ferry terminal.

I arrived with about twenty minutes to spare before the next ferry heading to San Francisco, which seemed reasonable given that the next ferry after that was an hour-and-a-half later. I tagged in at the Clipper card reader and walked my bike into the ferry terminal, under the large awning covering the entire ferry terminal under a roof truss built out of perfectly-replicated tetrahedrons built out of steel tubes, and wondered what precisely the right protocol was to board the ferry with my bike.

When the ferry staff opened the boarding gate just ahead of the published ferry departure time I followed the crowd through the boarding gate and across the gangway to the upper deck of a newer catamaran ferry. (Compared to the older, Spaulding-class single-hull ferries, the newer catamaran ferries operated by Golden Gate are considerably faster (36 knots) but have a much smaller bicycle capacity.) A crew member pointed me to the bike storage at the back of the boat, where I found a couple of bike hooks mounted to the wall to hang my bike vertically. The bike storage was empty when I arrived, and when I returned to my bike it was still the only bike there.

I found a seat inside, on the theory that I'd spent enough time outside already, and watched the ferry push away from the dock, maneuver to point itself in the right direction in the narrow channel, and head towards San Francisco. As we reached open water past San Quentin the boat picked up speed and cruised across the flat water of the bay, hitting at least 30 knots according to the GPS app on my phone.

Our route gave me my best chance so far to look at the bridge I had just crossed, and to study its structure. The bridge is more than four miles long, forcing me to choose between capturing a very long panorama of the bridge (which would be awkward to zoom into any one section), or to optically zoom into a single main cantilever span to focus on the most interesting part of the truss structure of the bridge.

We reached San Francisco and I walked my bike off the ferry into the crowds around the Ferry Building. It was the middle of the afternoon on a sunny February afternoon, and the farmer's market that wrapped around the Ferry Building was being dismantled as I arrived. I parked my bike and headed inside for a snack; I got two Argentinian empanadas and ate them on a bench overlooking the ferry berth I had just arrived at. The ferry had already departed for some Golden Gate Ferry destination north of us.

I biked to the Caltrain depot at 4th and King, and hit every single light on the Embarcadero on the way. Just as I had biked through a block and I was approaching the next street the light would change and I had to stop and wait for the next cycle of the traffic light. (I spent at least as much time waiting at stoplights than biking.) I made it to the Caltrain depot with only a few minutes to spare before the next southbound train, but it was just enough time to tag in and hurry through the boarding door and walk down the long narrow platform to find the bike car and stow my bike and find a seat upstairs before the train pulled out of the station on its long ride south, operating an all-weekend, all-stations stopping service all the way to San Jose. (At least the fancy new electric multiple units are timetabled to make the journey in only eighty minutes, but it's a bit discouraging to feel the train accelerate out of the station only to immediately decelerate to stop at the next station in the next town a few miles down the track.)

I had a great time biking across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and I hope the bike path will stick around so I can do it again in the future.

I took more pictures biking through Richmond and across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge at Photos on 2025-02-22.