CHP urges caution as Golden Gate Bridge reopens (w/video)

The Golden Gate Bridge reopened Sunday night, more than six hours ahead of schedule, after a historic closing for the installation over the weekend of a new median barrier.

But whether the commute will go as smoothly is uncertain, as motorists adapt to a new merging lane and a lower speed limit approaching the bridge.

“The bottom line is we don’t know,” Marin CHP Officer Andrew Barclay said Sunday night of how traffic will handle the changed conditions today. “We will have extra officers there in case it’s bad. Hopefully we won’t need them.”

The $30 million movable barrier installed over the weekend required the first prolonged closure of the bridge in its 78-year history.

The barrier, which can be repositioned to shift the number of lane directions to accommodate commuter traffic is meant to prevent head-on collisions like the 128 crashes since 1970 that killed 16 people.

While the one-foot-wide, hinged sections create a solid safety barrier between oncoming cars, officials say it may feel a bit tighter since they take away a half-foot from the Golden Gate Bridge’s 10-foot, non-curb lanes.

About 120,000 vehicles cross the Golden Gate Bridge on a typical weekday.

“We’re asking drivers, the first time they’re going across, to have a little more patience as they approach the bridge and let people get used to it,” Barclay said. “If someone’s a little slower, bear with it and people will settle in soon.”

Southbound drivers will need to adapt to a new merging arrangement as they head into the city and the Waldo tunnel. Instead of merging from left to right as in the past, they will go from right to left.

“Fast lanes will continue and the slow lanes drop off,” is how Golden Gate Bridge District spokeswoman Priya David Clemens described the new configuration.

The speed limit approaching the bridge also has been lowered from 55 mph to 45 mph.

That means a learning curve for commuters who have driven the bridge hundreds and thousands of times before.

“We are encouraging people to take it slow and there will be a slow and steady stream into San Francisco, like most commute mornings,” Clemens said.

“If traffic is flowing slower than normal, if that’s what it takes for traffic to get across the bridge, so be it,” said Officer Barclay.

In a ceremony Sunday morning, political leaders and a survivor of a 2008 head-on crash on the bridge praised the new median barrier, consisting of 3,517 steel-clad concrete segments weighing 1,500 pounds apiece and held together with steel pins.

Bay Area physician Grace Dammann, paralyzed since the crash, spoke at a foggy ceremony to express her happiness with the new barriers, according to the Associated Press.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and the project’s chief engineer, Ewe Bauer, cut a red ribbon on one of the $1.5 million distinctive, yellow “zipper” trucks that will move around the safety barriers on the bridge’s six lanes.

Since 1962, there has been traffic lane management on the bridge using plastic pylons that workers move manually as they hang off the side of a moving vehicle.

Some of the work the past weekend involved filling the holes from the pylons that formerly created the lane barriers.

The work shut the 1.7 mile suspension bridge to private vehicle traffic for the longest period in its history, although it remained open to buses. The east sidewalk of the bridge stayed open to pedestrians and cyclists.

CHP officials said there appeared to be little impact to other roads and bridges during the weekend closure.

The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge was “moderate traffic at the speed limit,” said Officer Daniel Hill, who said the Golden Gate Bridge shutdown had “really no effect” on alternate traffic routes.

Officer Barclay said there was congestion at the MacArthur Maze on the east end of the Bay Bridge - as usual - but that it was difficult to say how much was the typical back-up that occurs there.

Clemens said the bridge district added four times more ferry service, but didn’t really need that much. There were about twice as many riders as a typical Saturday. Ferry traffic was lighter on Sunday than the day before, but heavier than a typical Sunday, she said.

She said there was average to light ridership on Golden Gate buses.

People may have stayed away with all the advance publicity. “We certainly worked really hard on an outreach effort,” Clemens said.

You can reach Staff Writer Clark Mason at 521-5214 or clark.mason@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter@clarkmas