The Doyle Drive Deathtrap, built in 1936, will be the first big local natural disaster story of the new century. When a big earthquake strikes on either the Hayward or the San Andreas fault, the Doyle Drive elevated roadway will crumble to concrete dust.
In the photo: That's Doyle Drive, built in 1936, teetering atop long thin legs of 72-year-old crumbling concrete.
The death toll will be shocking and most of the dead will be Marin County residents. Experts say that Doyle Drive has one of the lowest safety ratings of any elevated roadway in California. San Francisco's Doyle Drive is a deathtrap waiting to be sprung and envelope its victims in a terrifying death beneath tons of crumbling, crashing, crushing concrete.
Doyle Drive carries as many as (and sometimes more than) 100,000 commuters every day. The very clear majority of those drivers are Marin County residents. Michael Alexander was vice-chair of the Doyle Drive Task Force from 1991 to 1993 and is author of "A Scenic Parkway for the Park", his report to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Here's what Michael Alexander, writing for SPUR, had to say about Doyle Drive:
"Doyle Drive's concrete is crumbling in the salt-moist air of the Golden Gate. Inside its roadway, the rebar rusts. It has been patched and reinforced, and patched again. In places, its lanes are barely wider than one of the 270 buses that travel it each day. Oncoming traffic in the fast lanes is separated by a row of plastic pylons."
"Doyle Drive is the one-and-a-half mile southern approach road for the Golden Gate Bridge, from the tollbooths to the Palace of Fine Arts. During an average weekday it carries over 144,000 travelers. But San Franciscans have complained about its deficiencies for decades. In 1970, when a Porsche going more than 100 mph plowed across the pylons, killing ten, the newspapers screamed "blood alley." But Doyle Drive is indispensable. Without a southern approach, the Golden Gate Bridge would have to be closed. The possibility of structural failure was real: in 1993, USA Today reported that the elevated Doyle Drive was the fifth most dangerous bridge in America. Caltrans proposed an eight-lane freeway. San Franciscans refused." Read Michael Alexander's complete report here.
The sad part of this whole story is that the people of San Francisco have now put up money toward the project and so has the federal government. The State of California is making a major commitment as well. Only the people of Marin County - the very people who will likely lose their lives on a collapsing Doyle Drive in an earthquake - they are the only people who don't want to put up sufficient money. They are the Short-Sighted Folks of Marin County.
The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District believes the State of California should pick up the tab along with the federal government. They may be right, but one thing is for sure: if we keep debating the issue we will be doing so at the risk of many lives.
Time is of the essence.
Resources:
SPUR (San Francisco Planning & Urban Development Assn
Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District
DoyleDrive.com
Doyle Drive - The Presidio Trust
Congestion Pricing on Doyle Drive (.pdf) - Laura Stonehill, UC Berkeley
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