Point Richmond's Bridge Trail Now Runs A Four-Day Week
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Every Thursday around two in the afternoon, a concrete barrier on the upper deck of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge gets rolled a few feet to one side. For the next three days and change, until Sunday at eleven at night, the ten-foot path that runs from Castro Street in Point Richmond across to East Francisco Boulevard in San Rafael belongs to bikes and pedestrians again. Then the barrier moves back, the shoulder becomes a highway lane, and the path stays closed until the following Thursday.
This is not a temporary construction detour. It is the standing schedule, and it has been since October 27, 2025.
The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge bike and pedestrian path opened in 2019 as a five-year pilot, the first time cyclists and walkers could cross the bay between Contra Costa and Marin counties without a car. In August 2025, the Bay Area's regulatory commission for the shoreline, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, voted 15 to 2 (with one abstention, out of 18 commissioners present) to cut that access down to four days a week so the shoulder could double as breakdown space for traffic and, Caltrans has said, as a test lane for buses and carpools during peak commute hours.
The schedule that resulted:
The pilot has since been extended through the end of 2028, so this is not a placeholder arrangement waiting for a return to the old seven-day access. It is the framework Point Richmond cyclists and walkers should plan around for at least a few more years.
On the four days the path is closed, there is a free shuttle. It runs with a bike trailer that holds up to ten bikes, picking up in Point Richmond at the AC Transit bus turnaround at Castro Street and Tewksbury Avenue, and dropping off in San Rafael at the Vista Point parking lot near East Francisco Boulevard and Main Street. Hours are 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, and 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thursday, timed to hand off right when the path itself reopens. Riders can track it in real time through an app rather than guessing at a curb.
It is a serviceable answer to a twenty-minute crossing, but it is a different trip than riding the span yourself, and for residents who use the bridge path as their link to Marin's trail network rather than as a commute, the shuttle solves the logistics without replacing the ride. Point Richmond's other cross-bay option, the Richmond Ferry, runs about thirty-five minutes to San Francisco. It does not go to San Rafael, so it does not fill the same gap.
The BCDC's decision was framed around emergency response times and westbound congestion, not around the bike path's popularity. In the roughly six years between the path's 2019 opening and the August 2025 vote, MTC recorded 413,889 bike trips and 60,003 pedestrian crossings on it. Public comment leading up to the vote ran heavily in favor of keeping full access: roughly 80 percent of the submissions supported the old schedule. The commission voted the other way anyway, and Caltrans has said it will report back on measured outcomes, benchmarked against that public data.
Layered on top of the weekly schedule is a second, unrelated project. Caltrans is in the middle of replacing the bridge's toll booths with open-road tolling, a job tentatively set to finish in summer 2027, and the agency has continued flagging overnight lane work and occasional bike-trail impacts tied to that construction as recently as September 2026. The four-day pattern is the baseline. Anyone riding the bridge regularly should still expect the occasional extra closure layered on top of it while that project finishes.
Richmond's own city council passed a resolution affirming its support for keeping the trail open, and Trails for Richmond Action Committee chair Bruce Beyaert has pointed to the tolling project and a planned HOV lane extension as the fixes that might eventually ease the westbound approach enough to revisit full access. None of that has changed the schedule yet.
The bridge path is six miles of a much larger network. Richmond maintains 36 miles of Bay Trail inside city limits, stitching together the shoreline route along Central Avenue through Marina Bay, the Shipyard 3 Trail, the Ferry Point Loop around Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline, the Landfill Loop, and the trails at Point Pinole. The bridge segment is the only piece of that network that leaves the county by bike, which is part of why its schedule matters more than its mileage would suggest.
Miller/Knox itself sits close enough to the Point Richmond access point that a four-day bridge window and a park loop pair easily. The park includes Keller Beach, one of the bay's few swimming coves, along with the hiking trails on Nicholl Knob. The Ferry Point Tunnel nearby, originally built for the Santa Fe Railway's ferry dock, now serves as the route into Brickyard Cove and the Richmond Yacht Club, long known on the bay for its sailing community.
Point Richmond's historic downtown triangle sits a short ride from the Castro Street access point, and it holds most of what a rider or walker would want on either end of a bridge crossing. The Hotel Mac, built in 1911 and listed on the National Register of Historic Buildings, houses Ristorante Biancoverde, an Italian restaurant inside the same three-story brick building. A few doors down on Washington Avenue, Jin Yè has served the neighborhood as a family-owned Chinese restaurant for years, closed only on Tuesdays. Point Richmond Market & Deli, also on Washington, stays open until 10 p.m. and has built a following for its deviled eggs and deli sandwiches, the kind of stop regulars describe as a go-to after a swim at Keller Beach.
The West Side Library, a branch of the Richmond Public Library, sits inside that same historic triangle next to the restaurants and the community center, and the Point Richmond Neighborhood Council meets there monthly to work through neighborhood business. None of that changes because the bridge path does. What changes is which days it makes sense to plan a ride that starts or ends in that triangle, and which days call for the shuttle, the ferry, or a loop that stays inside Richmond's other 30 miles of trail instead.
The barrier will keep moving on the same Thursday-to-Sunday rhythm for at least the next two years. Riders who build their week around that schedule, rather than around the version of the bridge that used to be open every day, are the ones who will keep using it.
If you're weighing a move to Point Richmond or anywhere else along Richmond's waterfront and want a read on how a specific block fits into daily life here, not just its listing price, reach out to Carla Shaheed. She works this market block by block and can walk you through what a property actually connects to before you make an offer.
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