Free Republic

Imagine driving along a four-lane elevated causeway above the brackish San Pablo Bay, shaving more than an hour off the normal Highway 37 commute. Transportation planners have for years envisioned remaking the 20-mile route from Novato to Vallejo into the North Bay’s most important east-west corridor. Now, they are ready to act. Officials in Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Solano counties have been meeting for several years, pondering solutions to Highway 37’s notorious bottlenecks, where 45,000 cars per day stretch the normal 20-minute commute to as much as 100 minutes. They have also acknowledged that traffic improvements will be irrelevant without...

A motorcyclist who sailed off the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway after crashing into a sport utility vehicle was clocked at 116 mph moments before the wreck, a bridge official said Monday (Dec. 12). The search for the victim has resumed, with sheriff's deputies from St. Tammany and Jefferson parishes scouring the water in boats.-snip-Dufrechou said a Causeway police officer was driving south on the bridge on Saturday at about 11 p.m. when he saw a motorcycle speeding north. The officer radioed to a colleague who was parked in a crossover near the bridge's eight-mile hump.-snipInvestigators were not sure whether the cyclist...

The Coast Guard Sunday morning (Dec. 11) continued its search for a 35-year-old motorcyclist who catapulted off the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway's northbound bridge late Saturday. The motorcycle rammed into the back of an SUV around 11 p.m., leaving debris spread over a half-mile stretch, Causeway General Manager Carlton Dufrechou said. The northbound lanes remained closed for several hours before reopening around 3:30 a.m. Sunday, Dufrechou said. The operator of the motorcycle has not yet been identified. Dufrechou said the motorcyclist was traveling at a high rate of speed when the accident occurred about eight miles from the south shore. A...

Birds are familiar and welcomed sights along the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. Brown pelicans set their large wings and glide amazingly close to motorists on the bridge. And large, frenzied swarms of purple martins appear at each end of the bridge at sundown during certain times of the year. Now some rare birds have also decided to make the Causeway their home, although largely out of sight. Several groups of brown boobies, large brown-and-white, fish-eating sea birds commonly seen farther south in tropical waters, have taken up residence alongside and beneath the Causeway. Bridge General Manager Carlton Dufrechou said about nine...