San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bay Trail makes strides by adding segments this year
The spaces are as disparate as a San Francisco park with a beach and a reed-lined boardwalk in East Palo Alto. A monumental Oakland plaza and an aged drawbridge near the Giants’ ballpark.
Yet the members of this quartet have one thing in common: They are among the newest segments of the Bay Trail, a complex work-in-progress that offers shoreline access in all nine Bay Area counties and is intended to eventually offer more than 500 miles of interconnected public pathways for pedestrians and bicyclists.
This year’s fresh links in the regional chain add just 3 ½ miles to the 350 or so that already existed. But in a year when outdoor attractions
close to home are valued more than ever, the recent additions show the cumulative power of a regional vision conceived more than 30 years ago.
“We call them our small but mighty segments,” said Ana Ruiz, general manager of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. “Each one is of lasting importance.”
The importance can lie in how existing strands of the Bay Trail are connected via carefully placed links. Other extensions quickly become attractions on their own.
The segment that the Midpeninsula district added near the Dumbarton Bridge is an example of the former.
The 10footwide path begins at a fencedoff stretch of University Avenue in East Palo Alto and parallels a private road before becoming a redwood boardwalk through wetlands en route to the Ravenswood Open Space Preserve, where an older piece of the Bay Trail awaits.
There’s no parking where it begins and, honestly, not much reason for anyone except a birdwatcher to make it a destination. Instead, the new piece provides the missing link for 80 miles of the Bay Trail that extend east from Menlo Park across the Dumbarton Bridge and south through Santa Clara County.
Compare this link to the one in northern Alameda County, where a milelong segment opened in May alongside the Golden Gate Fields racetrack in Albany.
For recreational bicyclists, the segment allows an easy shoreline ride from Emeryville through Berkeley and Albany to Richmond’s Marina Bay with virtually no interruption. But the new piece is also a magnet, offering cliffhugging vantage points 45 feet above the water and a restored beach with a small parking lot at Buchanan Street.
Other segments are delivered as part of larger projects.
That’s the case with the shortest 2020 addition to the trail, a separated bike path on San Francisco’s Third Street Bridge across Mission Creek. Better known as Lefty O’Doul Bridge, the muscular metal drawbridge from 1933 was given a thorough structural upgrade by San Francisco Public Works that also placed a steel deck over the perforated metal surface and turned the easternmost car lane into a separated twoway passage for bicycles.
This allows smooth riding for cyclists from the Embarcadero to the Mission Bay shoreline — and, south of that, a paved bicycle path through the Port of San Francisco’s new Crane Cove Park. There, two lawns and a sandy crescent beach serve as incongruous but inviting public nooks in a onetime industrial zone. At Township Commons in Oakland, the expansive new plaza between the water and Ninth Avenue comes with a wide sidewalk and bicycle lanes that are part of the Bay Trail and will extend farther north as future blocks and parks are developed. When SonomaMarin Area Rail Transit began service from San Rafael south to Larkspur last winter, a mile of Bay Trail was included; it’s not scenic, but it adds a safe route for pedestrians and cyclists that didn’t before exist.
Each project would have happened anyway. The larger vision for the Bay Trail helped ensure that while they serve local needs, they also serve a regional goal.
“It’s always fun for us to go into GIS ( mapping) and turn a dashed line into a solid one,” said Lee Huo, one of the three planners assigned to the Bay Trail by the Metropolitan
Transportation Commission. “It’s important to keep track of how everything knits together so that we get the connected trail one day.”
That goal is spelled out in the plan approved in 1989 by the Association of Bay Area Governments — a 13page blueprint for a future trail that “highlights the wide variety of recreational and interpretive experiences offered by the diverse bay environment” and “is accessible to the widest possible range of trail users and which is designed to respect the natural or built environments through which it passes.”
At the time there were roughly 120 miles of trails in existence along the shoreline; as of this month, the Bay Trail encompasses roughly 350 miles that include offshoots into nearby recreational areas. In 2021, new segments scheduled to open include a stretch of the Martinez shoreline, Yosemite Slough in San Francisco and an upgraded path across Corte Madera Creek in Larkspur.
Each extension is the work of an individual municipality or park district, so there’s no target date for when the trail might be considered complete.
The only financial boost from regional planners comes when the transportation commission provides a small grant to a potential project to help get planning off the ground.
“We’re a small entity with no regulatory power and relatively little funding,” Maureen Gaffney, the commission’s regional trails program manager, said in describing the role that she and Huo play. “We play a coordinating role among all the jurisdictions, and try to pay attention to any and all segments that could close a gap.”
Not surprisingly, the gaps often exist because of the cost and bureaucratic difficulties in closing them.
In Albany, the East Bay Regional Parks District worked on the extension north from Gilman Street for more than a decade, and costs climbed to
$ 14 million by the time the agency received the necessary permits and completed the construction feat of carving an accessible trail for pedestrians and cyclists into a craggy bluff.
At Ravenswood, the link from University Avenue into the preserve cost $ 4 million to construct. But it took 15 years of effort not only to line up funding from a half dozen sources but also to get signoff for running the boardwalk through ecologically sensitive wetlands.
“It’s one of the most regulated habitats I know, rightfully so, with multiple endangered species” Ruiz said. “Those constraints add complexity and costs.”
The oftenarduous groundwork tends to be forgotten once a trail segment opens. We are drawn to the novelty of another waterfront park along the water or the easy connection to the outdoors that can be reached on two wheels or by foot.
No wonder — the overlap of developed communities and natural spaces, water and hills, and everchanging views is integral to the Bay Area’s enduring allure. And the Bay Trail is more integral to this allure with every passing year, a corridor shared by people of all races and economic income levels.
With luck, 2021 will be less fraught than 2020. However things play out, the Bay Trail’s importance will only continue to grow.