Golden Gate Bridge board to vote
on suicide barrier study

By James Lanaras, Bay City News

March 10, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) - The Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District's board of directors will vote again today on plans for a proposed suicide deterrent system on the bridge.

A board advisory committee last month approved proceeding with a phased approach to a $2 million, two-year study on a physical barrier that could prevent people from jumping from the famous span.

The board is scheduled to vote on that recommendation today.

A year ago, the board approved going ahead with the engineering and environmental study as non-district funding becomes available.

So far, $125,000 from Marin County and San Francisco has been received in local matching funds that allow the district to access $500,000 of the $1.6 million granted by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission for the study.

That means the district will have $625,000 for the first phase of the study project. The district still needs an additional $275,000 in local matching funds for the full $2 million study.

The district estimates it would take four months to receive and review requests for proposals on the study, to select a consultant and negotiate and award a contract. The first phase of the project would then take six more months.

The focus of the first phase of a two-phased study would be to identify generic conceptual designs for testing and to determine the design's impact on the bridge's overall wind stability.

Wind tunnel tests would analyze the impacts of having a barrier installed either with or without a median barrier in place.

The second phase of the project would include a full environmental and historical preservation analysis, community outreach and input and a preliminary design of the preferred alternative and a cost estimate of the project.

The district's board of directors identified about a dozen criteria for a suicide prevention system. The suicide barrier must impede the ability of an individual to jump from the bridge, must not cause safety or nuisance hazards to sidewalk users, must not interfere with security on the bridge and must have minimal visual and aesthetic impacts on the famous span from which 1,218 people have leapt since 1937.

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