Although I’ve since moved, I spent two decades living in Marin County, so the story about a strong protest against a bike lane on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge piqued my interest. It turns out that what was a sop to the leisured and environmental classes has sparked a workers’ uprising in the San Francisco Bay Area.
To understand this story, you need to know a few things. First, the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge is a major thoroughfare connecting Marin County to Alameda County (home to Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond). When I left in 2019, it reliably saw bumper-to-bumper traffic during rush hour. Also, if I remember correctly, one of the lanes was closed as a carpool lane, forcing all the other cars into the remaining lanes.
Second, Marin County is an affluent region. Not everyone there is rich, but it still boasts one of the highest median incomes in America and has a blessedly low unemployment rate.
Third, Marin is true-blue, with Kamala Harris getting 80% of Marin’s votes last November.
Fourth, along with being true blue, Marin is heavy into environmentalism. It’s got all sorts of nature preserves. Marinites were also early Tesla adopters (although I’m sure they now regret it). But most of all, Marin is a bike heaven. They bike on the trails and on the roads.
And oh! How they bike on the roads. Even when there are bike lanes, the bicyclists often disdain them, opting to ride along in the traffic. And rules? Feh! Rules are for people in cars that produce carbon dioxide. Rules don’t apply to the morally superior bicyclists. They don’t care that, in mortal combat between a car and a bike, the bike loses every time. It’s not even close, and the moral high ground won’t save you.
I lived near a popular road for bicyclists, one that was between my house and my kids’ school, and the stress of driving on that road was always very high. You never knew when you’d come around a curve and suddenly find a bicyclist slowly pedaling uphill in your lane.
What I hadn’t realized, because it happened right as I left the Bay Area, is that California created a change to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. In 2019, the state ran a four-year pilot project that saw it put a barrier-protected bike lane on the bridge’s upper deck (the one heading into Marin) in what had been the emergency vehicle and breakdown lane.
To any sentient, non-ideologically driven person, the results would have been inevitable and obvious: Nightmarish traffic. But to the leisured, environmentalist solons...well, it wasn’t so obvious.
And now another inevitability has come to pass. The people who need their cars to get across the bridge for work have had enough and are protesting the barrier, and demanding that it be removed and the car lane restored:
Business leaders, labor groups and elected officials rallied at the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge on Wednesday demanding that the third westbound lane on the upper deck be reopened to vehicles.
What’s fascinating is the class element contained within this demand:
“Thousands upon thousands of workers, including many of our members, must drive across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to get to work. Riding a bicycle is not a viable option for any of them,” said Rollie Katz, executive director of the Marin Association of Public Employees, the union that represents the majority of the county’s employees, including the lowest-paid workers.
Katz said more than half of the association’s members do not live in Marin, and many commute from Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
“These are working people who cannot afford to live in Marin County,” Katz said. “This is a matter of equity for us.”
One of the people interviewed for the linked article said that his employees were having to leave an hour earlier for work every morning because of the increased traffic.
And here’s something else to think about. According to the article, the bridge sees about 80,000 vehicles a day crossing it. Meanwhile, estimates are that the bike path gets “an average of 140 bicycle trips per weekday and 360 trips on Saturday and Sunday.”
I bet that most of these working people are still die-hard Democrats, but I see every one of them as a future Republican voter. With every passing day, we are seeing that the leaders in the Democrat party—the ones who make bike lane policies—have no interest in the needs of America’s working people.
Today’s Democrat party is an abnormal amalgam of limousine leftists, hardcore communists, and sexual freaks. The people mounting this protest against the bike lane on a commuter bridge are surely going to realize that their party leaders just don’t care about them anymore.