New Bill Would Ban Tolls for People Walking and Biking Across California Bridges
Back in 2014, the Golden Gate Bridge district was looking for ways to close its perennial budget deficit and considering a long list of measures to help close the fiscal gap.
One idea on the list was imposing a toll on people who came to the bridge to walk or ride their bikes across it. The proposal wasn’t popular, and Assemblymember Phil Ting of San Francisco headed it off with a bill that prohibited bridge tolls on pedestrians.
The bill, passed and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015, expired in 2021.
Fast forward to this week. The bridge district, facing a five-year deficit estimated at $220 million, opened its formal public presentation of a proposal to raise tolls for motor vehicles. The fee would rise between 35 and 50 cents a year for the next five years. Fastrak users would pay between $10.50 and $11.25 by the fifth year of increases in 2028. Those who use other payment methods would be charged more.
This time around, the bridge district is not discussing charging people to walk or ride bikes across the bridge.
But Ting and his allies in the cycling and pedestrian community want to make sure that option is taken off the table for good.
Using the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop Thursday, Ting announced AB 2669, a bill that will permanently ban tolls on people walking, biking or scootering across any bridge in the state.
“At a time when we’re dealing with climate change, and we’re trying to encourage more people to walk, more people to bike, I can’t think of a greater disincentive than actually charging a toll for pedestrians and cyclists to cross one of the most famous bridges in our world,” Ting said at a Crissy Field press conference.
“These are modes of transportation that every level of government should be encouraging and incentivizing everyone to use,” said Christopher White, interim executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “But the norm is that driving and cars are subsidized while using sustainable active modes suffers from lack of investment. This bill flips that script.”
For Karen Rhodes, the president of the board of directors of Walk SF, maintaining spaces accessible to everyone is an equity issue.
“People in community, outdoors with each other, young, old, local, visitors from all over the world — tens of thousands of people making use of our bridges in this way every day,” Rhodes said. “We’re all walking, rolling, using mobility aids to get outside and enjoy the restorative benefits of being outdoors.”
Ting said that the worst thing the state can do is to penalize active modes of transportation. He said that there is an active coalition of support for his proposition all over the state.
The bill will get its first hearing in March.
And a historical note: For the first 33 and a half years after the bridge opened in May 1937, the bridge actually did charge pedestrians to stroll across the span. The initial charge was a nickel — deposited in a turnstile — and was raised to a dime in 1938.
The reported rationale for levying a pedestrian fee was that the district was legally obligated to charge all bridge users while it was paying off the voter-approved bonds that paid for the bridge’s construction.
The bridge district repealed the pedestrian toll in 1970, which was also the year cyclists were first allowed to use the bridge.
From the vantage point of 2023, the fee doesn’t look like it was a big moneymaker. In November 1970, the district reported it had collected $132 from pedestrians and $58 from cyclists.
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