Millbrae Section Of The San Francisco Bay Trail Stalled

The Millbrae Department of Public Works has stalled the construction of a bicycle bridge over Highway 101.

The $16 million project in Millbrae has been in the pipeline for years, but has yet to break ground due to a lack of money, according to Ron Popp, the Director of Public Works in Millbrae.

The plan calls for a bridge attachment on the north side of the Millbrae Avenue overpass. The bridge will span over the 101 freeway and send bicyclists and pedestrians toward the Old Bayshore Highway near the Chevron gas station where the current Millbrae Avenue overpass touches down.

"There's just no convenient way to get bikes over the 101 to Bayshore," Popp said. "We're still several years away from construction."

The concept is to link bicyclists and pedestrians from the San Francisco Bay Trail to the Old Bayshore Highway. However, spanning the freeway is proving to be consistently complicated and lack of funding has halted the project.

The Bay Trail is a 500 mile stretch of bicycle and pedestrian trails that hug the Bay Area's shoreline linking 47 cities and nine counties. There are currently 300 miles of completed trails with sections either in development or stagnant.

One major pocket of undeveloped trails lies in Millbrae where the long planning process of bridging the freeway has delayed further construction of bike and pedestrian trails from  Millbrae to South San Francisco.

The Bay Trail currently stops at the edge of Bay Front Park and then picks up again just south of San Bruno Point, leaving about a four-mile gap in the trail, according to the San Francisco Bay Trail Project organization.  

"It's a huge priority project for us,"  said Laura Thompson, a Bay Trail project manager for San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, of the bike bridge in Millbrae. "The real problem is they don't have the funds to complete the project."

Thompson said the city of Millbrae received an undisclosed amount from a $2.4 million Bay Trail grant a few years ago to get the bridge project rolling. However, the funds were only a reward after the Bay Trail organization accepted their proposal to bridge the freeway.

Popp and Thompson said they hope Millbrae receives more federal earmark funding for the infrastructure project and secures more grant funding from other sources to expedite the project.

The Bay Trail is currently accepting project proposals from Bay Area cities and counties until March 31, 2013 in order to siphon money out from their general grant funds for filling in the 200 miles of unfinished trails.

The Bay Trail organization's grant money comes from Proposition 84 funding, which was passed by voters in 2006 to protect coastlines and water in California.

Thompson added that even though projects like the bridging in Millbrae and a tunnel underneath the 101 freeway in Palo Alto are having trouble gathering funding and momentum, there have been accomplishments in other areas.

The latest completion of a trail near Moffett Field is the Bay Trail's latest success, Thompson said. A 26-mile trail between East Palo Alto and San Jose will be opening September 20. The trail sits within a 15,100-acre estuary and will become part of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Thompson said it will be another 10 years before the remaining 200 miles of trails are complete. 

"We still have a lot of gaps," she said. "However, the pieces are falling into place; these projects do take time."