New lanes offer wider options on Benicia Bridge

New lanes offer wider options on Benicia Bridge
By Barry Eberling | DAILY REPUBLIC | August 03, 2009

BENICIA - A truck disabled during the Monday morning commute sat in a shoulder on the southbound Benicia Bridge -- a shoulder that didn't exist a few days ago.

Had the truck experienced problems last week, it could have blocked a lane and clogged up traffic. Instead, improvements to the southbound bridge over the Carquinez Strait linking Benicia to Martinez debuted in time to handle the problem.

'It's a big improvement,' Caltrans spokesman Robert Haus said after spending Monday rush hour from 5 to 7:30 a.m. at the reconfigured bridge.

The 1962 bridge originally carried both northbound and southbound traffic. When the new northbound Benicia Bridge span opened in 2007, the old bridge became the span for southbound traffic only.

But the state Department of Transportation still had to reconfigure the lanes and do other work on the southbound span, even as it kept the bridge open to traffic. The bridge had three lanes and no shoulders for the past two years as workers did the renovation work.

The $50 million project was completed at 5:40 a.m. Saturday. Now the southbound bridge has four lanes and two shoulders. Haus said the shoulders keep the bridge from being as claustrophobic as before, when motorists in the far lanes drove close to barriers.

See the complete story at the Daily Republic online.