Bay Bridge Closes This Weekend

UPDATE: This post is about the 2007 Bay Bridge closure. To read more information on the 2009 Bay Bridge closure, click here.

As you’ve probably noticed (thanks to months upon months of tireless advertising), the Bay Bridge is going to be entirely closed for the whole 3-day Labor Day weekend (as the photo states, from 8:00 pm on Friday 8/31 to 5:00 am on Tues 9/4) to complete a major part of the bridge seismic retrofit. To put it simply, one particular stretch of freeway is being replaced by a new section that has already been constructed, and is to be “merely” moved into the gap. The level of construction involved requires that the entire bridge be shut down.

The other bridges will be open as usual, but the Bay Bridge is an important missing link, so the best way for traffic this weekend to operate as smoothly as possible is for as many people as possible to take public transit instead, leaving the freeways available for those with less readily available transit access.

Here is a summary of the service updates for this three day weekend:

• AC Transit’s Transbay buses will not over run over the bridge all the way into San Francisco; they will instead all terminate at West Oakland BART, so this station will be the transfer point between AC Transit and BART in both directions for any riders who want to use the East Bay-only portion of the Transbay routes. (In the eastbound direction, a BART-To-Bus transfer can be used to reduce the bus fare, but for the westbound direction, there is no fare reduction for the transfer to BART, so you will have to pay the full BART fare.) AC Transit reports that the 8:25 pm NL bus on Friday night will be the last Transbay bus to leave San Francisco.

• The All-Nighter Route 800 bus will not run between downtown Oakland and San Francisco, but the rest of the route will still run, as will all other All-Nighter routes. The transbay portion of the 800 will be replaced by hourly BART service in the middle of the night. To transfer to the East Bay portion of the 800, or to another All-Nighter route that serves only the East Bay, take BART to 12 St Station and transfer at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland.

• Service on Muni’s 108-Treasure Island line will continue through the weekend, as usual.

The ferries will run a little additional service, but BART, in particular, will be picking up the slack to get us through the weekend. BART will run 24-hour service through Monday, so for a little while, we can enjoy a taste of what it’s like to have a 24-hour subway system. During the daytime, BART will run normal weekend service on Saturday and Sunday and will run a Saturday schedule on Labor Day itself. In the middle of the night, when there is usually no service, BART trains will run once per hour but will only stop at the following 14 stations:

East Bay: Bayfair, Coliseum/Oakland Airport, Concord, Downtown Berkeley, Dublin/Pleasanton, El Cerrito del Norte, MacArthur, Oakland City Center/12 St, Walnut Creek. (Note: timed transfers at MacArthur and 12 St.)

San Francisco: Embarcadero, Powell, 24 St Mission.

Peninsula: Daly City, San Francisco International Airport.

BART has full timetables for the early morning hours on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday posted here. Please note that special BART service is not offered in the early morning hours on Tuesday 9/4; that is, no BART service between 1:00 am and 4:00 am on Tuesday.

Barring any problems or delays with construction, normal transit service will resume Tuesday, but I will be keeping up to date during the weekend on any potential service changes, beyond those described in this post. If they occur, I will post them here. Have a fun, safe, relaxing, and transit-oriented Labor Day Weekend!