Marin County supervisors are supporting a plan to eliminate the bike lane on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge four days a week on a trial basis.

Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to write a letter to the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission urging it to launch a pilot study to evaluate the effects of such a change.

Bay Area Toll Authority commissioners voted to move forward with the plan on May 8. The multi-use lane on the shoulder of the westbound bridge would open to motor vehicles Monday through Thursday mornings.

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, known as BCDC, must approve the proposal. He is scheduled to take up the matter at his meeting this month or next. If approved by the commission, the plan will be implemented early next year and will last about 12 months before being re-evaluated.

The westbound frontage lane, which is located on the upper deck of the bridge, was converted to a multi-use lane for bicycles and pedestrians in 2019 as a four-year pilot project. The previous year, a third lane of part-time traffic opened on the lower deck eastbound.

“Morning congestion has not increased since the moving barrier was put in place,” Talia Smith, the county’s legislative director, told supervisors Tuesday. “However, the incidence of traffic accidents has increased 33% since the multi-use path was installed, and the effect has been greater variability in morning commute times from the East Bay to Marin.”

The mobile barrier, which separates the multi-use lane from motor vehicles, prevents minor accidents or stopped cars or trucks from being immediately removed from the traffic lane. Smith said several local employers have told the county that difficulty crossing the bridge in the mornings has affected their ability to recruit and retain employees.

The proposal to open a third lane four days a week was supported by the Bay Area Council, the North Bay Leadership Council, the San Rafael Chamber of Commerce, Kaiser Permanente, MarinHealth, BioMarin, the Health Service of Marin, the Marin County Office of Education and the Marin Public Employees Association.

“Commuters traveling over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge have no remote work options and no public transportation options,” said Joanne Webster, executive director of the North Bay Leadership Council. “These are travelers who normally work in the service sector. They are workers in construction, manufacturing, hospitality and healthcare. These sometimes unpredictable travel times can cause employees to be late for work.”

Mark Shotwell, executive director of the Ritter Center in San Rafael, said, “The overwhelming majority of our staff lives in the East Bay and has to cross the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge every day. Trips on the bridge can vary from 45 minutes on a good day to 90 minutes or two hours or more when there is an accident on the bridge.”

Max Perrey, policy director for Aliados Health, a network of community health centers, said Marin Community Clinics has about 160 employees (29% of its workforce) who live in the East Bay and commute across the bridge.

“Any additional time it takes to cross the bridge during commute hours has a real impact on the lives of those employees,” Perrey said. “This, in turn, has a real impact on the health center’s ability to attract and retain a diverse workforce and ensure continued access to patient care.”

Smith, however, said the proposal was opposed by the Marin County Bicycle Coalition, Bike East Bay, Save the Bay, the San Francisco chapter of the Sierra Club and other nonprofits.

Warren Wells, policy director for the Marin County Bicycle Coalition, said: “The long commutes faced by East Bay residents employed in Marin, including myself, are the result of decades of exclusionary housing policies by part of the cities and towns of Marin. and it has nothing to do with the multi-use path on the bridge.”

Bruce Beyaert, president of the Trails for Richmond Action Committee, said, “It makes no sense to close 5 miles of the San Francisco Bay Trail that links the North Bay and East Bay.”

Beyaert said the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley “analyzed the data and concluded that the trail does not increase congestion on westbound I-580, bridge crashes or accident cleanup times.” ”.

Supervisor Katie Rice raised questions about the adequacy of the available data.

Rice said he had been reviewing a Caltrans report on the multi-use lane, and the writers mentioned several times that they were unable to access information about the number of traffic accidents and the duration of related traffic delays. Rice said he found it hard to believe the data wasn’t captured somewhere.

But Lisa Klein, deputy executive director of mobility at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, told Rice that wasn’t necessarily the case.

“We received records from the California Highway Patrol citing how long it took a tow truck to get there,” Klein said. “It doesn’t address when traffic returned to normal.”

At the beginning of the meeting, Klein told supervisors that there are an average of 140 bike trips per weekday on the bridge and an average of 360 trips per day on weekends.

Supervisor Stephanie Moulton-Peters said that means only about 70 cyclists a day use the bridge on weekdays, as most cyclists make round trips. He said that, by comparison, the Golden Gate Bridge averaged 3,000 bike trips per weekday in 2021 and 5,500 bike trips per day on weekends.

Moulton-Peters, the county representative on BCDC, acknowledged the results of the UC Berkeley study, but added: “The lived experience of the people we have heard about in this county and elsewhere is very different. “We need to make a more reliable commute for people coming from the East Bay to work in Marin.”

Additional changes are planned for the bridge, including the removal of toll booths at the east end and the restoration of a former high-occupancy vehicle lane on the westbound upper deck. City planners are also studying the possibility of using the multi-use lane as an additional lane for carpools and buses.

However, Klein said Caltrans has determined that the bridge will need structural reinforcement before a third lane can be opened for permanent full-time motor vehicle use.

“It is not an urgent and pressing need. The bridge is safe,” Klein said. “But in the long term, it puts additional weight on the bridge.”