The truck hit the curve at 50 m.p.h., which is the speed limit for much of the bridge, but not for the S-curve, a temporary detour installed over the Labor Day weekend as part of the decade-long Bay Bridge earthquake retrofit project. After a big rig crashed on the curve Oct. 14, spilling cargo across four lanes, CalTrans lowered the speed limit on the curve to 35 m.p.h. and installed new signs, but evidently they weren’t enough to draw the attention of a sleepy produce truck driver in the middle of the night.

The driver was killed when the truck went over the guardrail and plunged 200 feet to the ground on the shore of Yerba Buena Island.

Quoted in the SFGate.com story, a CalTrans spokesman blamed the driver, saying the crash was “another example of poor judgment.”

A reel of “raw video” on the KPIX website shows the impact scene before dawn, including a grotesque image of the driver’s severed forearm and hand.

Pictures show an eerily empty toll plaza, an eerily empty bridge, and stuffed BART trains. Meanwhile, a car thief blew through barricades in San Francisco and led police on a chase over the closed bridge, and most people in San Francisco today completely forgot there was any problem at all, since it’s a gorgeous, sunny, warm 1st of November.

You can text the word ALERT to 45227 (which is KCBS radio) and get a text message when the Bay Bridge reopens.

Update, 3:20 pm: The 511.org site now says the bridge will be closed “through Friday,” but “if” the bridge remains closed, BART will run hourly all-night service to the East Bay tonight and Saturday night. Here’s the all-night BART details. Note that only 14 stations will be in operation overnight.

“Everything went perfect” with the emergency repair job to the span, said Dam Himrick, president of bridge contractor C.C. Myers.

The illustration, from ktvu.com, shows Highway Patrol cars leading the first traffic across the bridge at sunrise this morning.

The unforeseen problem may delay the scheduled 5 a.m. reopening of the bridge to commuter traffic on Tuesday morning.

CalTrans said this morning it has no estimate for when the bridge may reopen.

You can follow the project’s Twitter account, baybridgeinfo, for updates.

Selected were Seattle, San Diego, Phoenix and Tucson, and the states of Oregon and Tennessee.

The project is being run by an Arizona company, eTec, which makes the chargers.

Modern tram (real!) in Milan. Flickr photo by martin97uk

I was literally startled when I saw this photo on a post on Streetsblog, a transit and urban planning-oriented site, showing a modern tram plying the streets of Milan, Italy. At first I thought it had to be photoshopped, but no, it’s real.

Streetsblog suggests using these monsters during commute times. I can’t imagine it helping. While you could load hundreds more passengers onto those long trains, what would happen to the streets crossing Market, given the sometimes short blocks between intersections? Imagine one of those things stretching back from Third St. all the way back to Second, completely blocking the Montgomery > New Montgomery intersection, which is one of only two ways to exit the Financial District during rush hour. Oy!

Ironically, San Francisco already has several streetcars from Milan — the orange “Peter Witt” jobs that still have Italian placards and warnings on the interior. Frankly they’re a lot of fun to ride. I’d save that long, modern tram for, maybe, the T line.

CalTrans will reopen a brand-new Harrison St. offramp from the Bay Bridge to the South Beach district at 5:00 a.m. Monday morning, three and a half years after the original exit closed in 2005. For drivers new to the area, the exit is a left exit off the bridge, half a mile before the left-hand Fifth St. exit.

The new ramp is another milestone in the multi-year project to earthquake-retrofit the bridge, the biggest piece of which will replace the eastern span (the part between Yerba Buena Island and Oakland) with a new suspension structure due to open, oh, seven or eight years from now.

When I was in Bangalore in 2007, I was struck by the utility of the ubiquitous motorized rickshaws, known locally as autocabs or just autos:

Any visitor to Asia has seen these things, since they’re in every Asian city. And they are cheap and they are everywhere. When I mentioned them to one of the panjandrums of the Bay Area public transportation scene, the executive director of one of the NGOs that lobbies for transportation policy, he was dismissive. “Oh, the tuk-tuks,” he said. “They clog up the streets, and they pollute. That’s not what we need. We need commuter rail that goes everywhere.”

Oh, fine, Mr. Bay Area Transit Boss! So I’m on my way to work in the morning. Never mind how I get to the BART station; I take a train across the bay to, say, Ashby. Now that I have alighted at your gigantor 1970s-era concrete monster BART station, I need to get to work, 2.3 miles away. It’s too far to walk. I could wait 20 minutes for a bus, and then that bus would take 20 minutes to poke along for the two miles, making my trip to work take over an hour… And that’s why I drive every day instead.

 
Yes, we need rail. It would be great, for example, if there were another BART line running through Oakland and Berkeley, with stops at the Grand Lake cinema, College and Telegraph, Sather Gate, North Gate, and the Gourmet Ghetto — call it the Yuppie line, and color it pink. It will be great when we have electrified CalTrain (target: 2015), and a bullet train from L.A. to downtown S.F. (target: 2018), and the Central Subway (target: 2016).

But then what do you do when you get to your stop? What if you have three heavy bags of groceries and live eight blocks up a hill? What if you just live three blocks from a bus line and you’re old, or injured — how do you shop? Sure, you could call a taxicab, and wait for twenty minutes, spend five dollars, and have to deal with a pissed-off driver who is mad at you because the short trip hardly registers on the meter and he’s having enough trouble today making his gate fee — if he shows up at all — and who, because he’s pissed off, won’t help you with your bags.

And why does it take twenty minutes? Because we’ll never have enough taxicabs in San Francisco — the whole issue is too political, and no mayor or public transportation commission has had the political will to fix the broken system. We have to have an alternative that works, goes door-to-door (or door-to-transit hub), won’t take two decades to put in place, and — extra benefit! — employs hundreds or thousands of people.

Take the worst part of autorickshaws: they’re smelly and noisy. Get rid of the smoky two-stroke engine, and electrify the things. On a battery, they’ve got enough juice to go 35 mph, and that’s more than enough for city driving. Maybe the driver will have to switch out the batteries once or twice during the day — fine, put battery switch-out stations all around the city in any of the hundreds of parking lots and vacant storefronts. (You’ll need the infrastructure eventually for the day when cars have the same system.)

Now, the other objection: that by being small enough to squeeze between larger vehicles, the autorickshaws contribute to traffic congestion rather than solve it. No — they’re going to be replacing cars on the road. Have you ever been to Rainbow Grocery on a busy day or evening? There are cars stretching in a line out of the parking lot, down 13th St., and sometimes around the corner onto Folsom. Since most of the people who shop at Rainbow are hippies or former hippies who would like nothing better than to grasp a green alternative, I’m betting they’d jump at the chance to take a less-polluting form of transport to shop. Multiply that by the thousands of shopping trips city residents take every day. Shit, just two days ago I drove one mile from my house in Bernal Heights to 23rd and Mission to pick up fish tacos at La Corneta. I was extremely lucky to find a parking place within a hundred yards, but if I take an autocab, there’s no need to find a parking place, no need to run my car for the two-mile trip, and now the Mission St. buses can get on their way without my car in the way. Yes, the thousands of autorickshaws would take up space on the roads. But a lot less than the taxis we have now, and a lot less than the cars they’d replace.

They’d also get cars off the road by increasing the attractiveness of large public transit systems like BART, because they allow me to get to and from transit hubs easily.

Oh, yes — I could ride a bicycle to and from BART too. But BART famously hates bicycles, banning them from the system during commute hours. I mean, hello!? CalTrain is better; they devote a car to bicycles on many trains, though the car often fills up. And I did ride a bike when I worked at that company 2.3 miles from Ashby BART — ten years ago. I’m now 52 years old; frankly, a bicycle is no longer an option for my commute.

So — I wish we had autorickshaws.