Setback for cyclists
Winter rains racked back roads beloved by Bay Area bikers
As cycling season spins around once again, the spirits of Bay Area cyclists are flatter than a rear tire after running over a broken beer bottle.
Where have all the roads gone?
The same torrential rains that brought a dramatic end to the five-year drought ripped apart, washed away and shut down the best-loved back roads, bridges and byways of the Bay Area — routes used by motorists and cyclists alike.
This, say some two- and four-wheel users, is what
infrastructure looks like when you don’t take care of it. Sinkholes, washouts, toppled bridges, crumbling tunnels. Longtime cyclists cannot recall this many roads being out of action at one time.
“It seems like the bottom is just falling out,” said Ginger Jui, communications director of Bike East Bay, a bicycle advocacy group. “It’s been an incredible year of rain, and it’s had a big impact.”
Canyon Road is shut near Moraga. Damaged bridge. Calaveras Road is shut near Sunol. Washout. Highway 1 is shut near Muir Beach. Road damage. Palomares Road is shut near Castro Valley. Unstable boulders.
Redwood Road is shut near Lake Chabot. Sinkhole. Alhambra Valley Road is shut near Pinole. Even bigger sinkhole.
The Bunker Road tunnel beneath the Marin Headlands is still shut for repairs that were planned before the rains began to fall. It was full of cracks and falling rocks and other features generally not recommended for tunnels.
And then there’s the biggest calamity of all — the failure of the storm-weakened Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge on Highway 1 in Big Sur. That wiped out what has been called the world’s greatest road and bike trip, the Highway 1 through passage of the Big Sur coast. A new bridge will not reopen until the end of summer at the earliest, although parts of Big Sur are accessible from either side of the fallen bridge.
“The ground underneath the roads just got soaked,” said Frank Castro, chairman of the annual Grizzly Peak Century bike ride, which had to jury-rig a new route in the East Bay hills this year to get around a washed-out bridge and a washed-away road.
“I can’t remember the weather ever having this much of an impact,” Castro said. “We needed water. We got a lot of water.”
Leland Mew, a retired Lafayette physician who has been cycling the roads of the East Bay since the 1970s, said the closures have dramatically changed his sport.
“Cyclists are forced to ride on busy streets instead of quiet roads,” he said. “You really have to think about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.”
The failure of the 81-yearold Canyon Road bridge near Moraga two weeks ago has knocked out indefinitely the favored back-door link for cars and cyclists between Contra Costa and Alameda counties. It has also effectively shut off the small community of Canyon, tucked into a shady grove of majestic redwoods on the west side of the closure.
Some of the hillside that slipped away and contributed to the bridge failure lay on East Bay Municipal Utility District property. Andrea Pook, a spokeswoman for the agency, said the district had been monitoring the area for some time but that there was little it could do to keep the rains from doing their damage.
“There are many, many acres of landslide-prone areas on district watershed,” she said. “Landslides occur all the time. They just occur. It’s difficult to predict where.”
A spokesman for Caltrans, in charge of maintaining state roads, said nature — not poor maintenance — was largely to blame for the onslaught of Bay Area road closures.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Caltrans information officer Bob Haus. “Two years worth of rain in one year. When you get this much water, all bets are off. There’s no adequate way to prepare. You clean the drains and the culverts, but you can only do so much.”
“Cyclists are forced to ride on busy streets instead of quiet roads. You really have to think about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.” Leland Mew, retired Lafayette doctor who has cycled East Bay back roads since the 1970s