The Bay Trail Around Richmond Just Got Longer. The Bridge To It Just Got Shorter.
Two things are true about Richmond's waterfront right now, and they pull in opposite directions. Crews are building the first public trail Point Molate has ever had, closing a gap that's kept that stretch of shoreline off limits for a century. At the same time, the one bridge crossing regulars have used for six years to get there is now closed four days out of every seven. If you bike, walk a dog, or just like a Sunday ride along the water, both halves of that story change how your week actually works.
Richmond has built more of the San Francisco Bay Trail than any other city on the planned 500-mile loop around the bay, with over 36 miles already complete. Only six miles remain, and the single largest of those remaining gaps is the stretch between the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and Point Molate Beach Park.
That gap started closing on August 1, 2025, when the East Bay Regional Park District and the City of Richmond broke ground on a 2.5-mile extension connecting the bridge trail to the beach park and on to the historic Winehaven district. The project is a genuine three-way split: Richmond owns 1.25 miles of the route, Chevron donated an easement for another 1.1 miles after more than a decade of working with the park district to identify access points, and the park district is managing design and construction on the whole thing. Construction started in October 2025 and the trail is expected to open to the public in late 2026 or early 2027, according to the park district's own project page.
The $13.1 million price tag is being covered by a mix of park district measures, the city, the California State Coastal Conservancy, the Natural Resources Board, MTC, and California State Parks. Once finished, it will be a 10-foot-wide, all-weather, ADA-compliant path with a boardwalk over two wetland sections and benches along the way, not a dirt trail or an informal shoulder.
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the celebratory press coverage. While the new trail was breaking ground, the existing route that cyclists already rely on to reach Point Molate got harder to use.
The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge Trail opened in November 2019 as a pilot program and quickly became the most-used bike path of any state-owned toll bridge in the Bay Area, logging 830,000 trips by June 2025, more than even the Bay Bridge's eastern span. But after nearly six years of that success, the Bay Area Toll Authority decided to convert the lane back into a car breakdown shoulder for part of the week. As of October 27, 2025, the trail is only open from Thursday at 2 p.m. through Sunday at 11 p.m. A free bicycle shuttle covers the closed days, but that's a scheduling hurdle that didn't exist a year ago for anyone commuting by bike or squeezing in a weekday ride.
So the honest version of the story is this: Richmond is building brand new, permanent, car-free shoreline access to a place that's never had any, while narrowing the weekday window on the bridge link that gets you there in the first place. Both are real. Neither cancels the other out.
The trail construction wasn't the only milestone. On August 26, 2025, EBRPD completed a $40 million acquisition of 82 acres at Point Molate from the Guidiville Rancheria of California, permanently preserving the property as public parkland. Planning for actual park amenities like trails, restrooms, and picnic areas is expected to take several years and will involve public input, but the land itself is no longer in play for redevelopment.
That matters because Point Molate has a genuinely layered history. It sits on the old Richmond Belt Railway corridor and was once home to Winehaven, once billed as the country's largest winery, along with a Chinese shrimp camp the park district is now working with the Chinese Historical Society of America to document. Mayor Eduardo Martinez has talked about a longer-term vision for the site that includes public soccer fields, outdoor amphitheaters, and even a future water taxi running from the Craneway up to San Pablo Harbor, though none of that is funded or underway yet.
The advocacy behind all of this has a name and a long track record: TRAC, the Trails for Richmond Action Committee, which has been pushing to complete the Bay Trail here for twenty-five years. This past June, TRAC led a small group on a rare tour beyond the usual gate at Point San Pablo, the peninsula just north of Point Molate, to build support for extending the trail even further. That stretch has its own history, including a whaling station that operated until 1971. Chevron has already agreed to an easement for a future trail segment there, according to former Richmond Mayor Tom Butt, though TRAC chair Bruce Beyaert says the railroad-owned stretch is still being negotiated with Union Pacific.
The construction underway right now doesn't automatically finish itself. Public comment emails submitted to the Richmond City Council around a June 2026 budget study session show residents pressing officials to close a $1 million funding gap needed to complete the Point Molate trail this year. One Point Richmond resident wrote urging the council to adopt the funding option, noting the trail is "currently under construction and can be finished this year." Another described it as work that would finally make the Bay "more accessible to everyone."
That's a live budget question, not a settled one, as far as the public record shows. If you've been assuming the trail is fully funded because the groundbreaking already happened, the reality is more specific: construction is underway, but finishing on the 2026 timeline appears to depend on money the city was still deciding how to allocate this summer.
Not everything here is under construction or waiting on a budget vote. A little south, near Terminal 3, Brookfield Properties recently completed Portside Observation Point, a new shoreline viewpoint with benches, picnic tables, and interpretive panels on the history of the Port of Richmond. It's reachable now via a newly paved section of shoreline trail starting at Sheridan Observation Point, and it's a genuinely pleasant stop if you haven't been down that way lately.
If you want a weekend built around the water, Marina Bay hosts its own farmers market on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. near Regatta Boulevard and Melville Square. Closer to downtown, the Richmond Mobile Farmers Market set up in front of the main library on Wednesdays starting this past January, and there's a Thursday market at 901 Nevin Ave. If the timing works with the bridge trail's Thursday-through-Sunday schedule, it's easy enough to pair a market stop with a ride out toward the beach park.
And if you've never made it to the Rosie the Riveter Visitor Education Center at 1414 Harbour Way South, it's worth knowing that a National Park Service community engagement specialist there has already called the trail extension "wonderful" for connecting the park's shoreline section to more foot and bike traffic. The center sits close enough to the new construction that the two projects will likely feel connected once the trail opens.
The headline version of this story, the one every outlet ran last August, is that Richmond is finally getting public access to a beautiful, long-closed piece of its own shoreline. That's true and worth being glad about. But the version that actually affects your Tuesday morning ride is different: the same twelve months that brought a groundbreaking also brought a four-day-a-week closure on the bridge trail you were already using, and the same period that brought a $40 million land acquisition also brought an unresolved $1 million funding question standing between construction and a finished trail. Richmond's waterfront is expanding and getting more complicated to use, in the same year, for the same reason. Keep both facts in mind before you plan your next ride out to the point.
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