Tricky Traffic Shift to Close Bay Bridge Over Labor Day Weekend

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be closed in both directions over the Labor Day weekend in September 2009 to accommodate an operation critical to the construction of the bridge’s new East Span.

By Karin Betts
Published: June, 2009 

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be closed in both directions over the Labor Day weekend in September 2009 to accommodate an operation critical to the construction of the bridge’s new East Span. The bridge will close as early as the evening of Thursday, Sept. 3, and reopen in time for the morning commute on Tuesday, Sept. 8, potentially making it a four-day closure. Crews will use the opportunity to slice out a double-deck chunk of the existing East Span that is nearly the length of a football field, and slide in a new double-deck piece that will shift traffic to a temporary bypass.

The maneuver echoes a similar deck removal and roll-in that took place over Labor Day weekend 2007. The same firm that constructed and moved that piece, C.C. Myers, Inc. of Rancho Cordova, Calif., is handling the construction of the East Span bypass and the roll-in of the new section.

“This is a massive operation,” said Caltrans spokesperson Bart Ney. “We’re talking about moving nearly 7,000 tons of steel, 150 feet in the air.” The traffic shift will clear the way for crews to demolish a half-mile section of the original 1936 bridge, and eventually hook up the new East Span with the Yerba Buena Island tunnel.

Crews are currently at work seven days a week, 20 hours a day finishing the detour viaduct and building the temporary support structures that will be used to roll the old bridge truss out and the new one in over the holiday weekend. Over the months to come, the new tie-in truss section and a movable support system will take shape south of the existing bridge at deck level, more than 10  stories in the air. Most of the half-mile-long, double-deck viaduct detour is already observable to motorists on the bridge.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is working with Caltrans and local public transit agencies to ensure mobility options for transbay travelers. BART will run all-night service to select stations over Labor Day weekend, and extra vessels will be deployed to expand ferry service on select routes.

The East Span project is being directed by the Toll Bridge Program Oversight Committee, a consortium of three agencies: MTC’s Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA), Caltrans and the California Transportation Commission. BATA is financing the $5.7 billion East Span project with bridge toll funding. For more information about the project, go to baybridge360.org and baybridgeinfo.org.