Westbound Interstate 580 on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge will be fully closed for nine hours overnight on Saturday, November 14, so crews can install the overhead toll gantry that will carry the Bay Area's first open-road tolling system, Caltrans District 4 has announced.

Source: Caltrans District 4

The full closure runs from 11 p.m. Saturday until 8 a.m. Sunday, November 15, Pacific time. The shutdown is timed for the quietest traffic window of the week, but it removes the only direct road link between Richmond in Contra Costa County and San Rafael in Marin County for the whole night.

The evening wind-down starts well before the full closure. Westbound lane reductions begin at 7 p.m. on Saturday, and the bridge's shared bicycle and pedestrian path closes at 9 p.m. Westbound I-580 will be closed beginning at Canal Street and Castro Street in Richmond. Eastbound lanes, on the bridge's lower deck, remain open all night.

Drivers who still need to cross from the East Bay to Marin during the closure must follow the posted detour around San Pablo Bay: off I-580 in Richmond, north on Richmond Parkway to Interstate 80, then west on State Route 37 and south on U.S. Highway 101 into Marin. Caltrans advises motorists to expect delays and to follow the detour signs.

Source: Bay City News via The Richmond Pulse

Local access is protected during the work. Access to Stenmark Drive along the Richmond shoreline remains open for residents, although the street's westbound I-580 on-ramp was already closed before this weekend and is tentatively scheduled to stay closed until February 2027.

Why the bridge is closing for a night

The closure lets crews lift and set the overhead gantry structure that will hold the new tolling equipment above the westbound lanes. Under open-road tolling, the gantry reads FasTrak tags and photographs licence plates as vehicles pass at highway speed — no booths, no slowing down, and no cash lanes. The bridge's toll booths have not been actively used since 2020, when the Bay Area moved to all-electronic tolling during the pandemic, but the physical plaza has remained in place until now.

The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge is the first of the Bay Area's seven state-owned toll bridges to make the conversion, in a programme run by Caltrans together with the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA). Construction on this bridge started in late April 2026, with months of nighttime lane closures and work to re-stripe the toll-plaza approach before this one-night full closure for the gantry installation.

Source: Metropolitan Transportation Commission / Bay Area Toll Authority

For the Punjabi and wider South Asian communities of Richmond, San Pablo, Vallejo and Marin — and for truckers who use I-580 as the link between the I-80 corridor and Highway 101 — the practical advice is simple: cross before 7 p.m. on Saturday if you can, use the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge or the SR-37 detour during the night, and do not rely on the bridge reopening early.

What happens next

After gantry night, the project moves to its next stages on the published Caltrans schedule: the toll booths are reconfigured in December 2026, the booths themselves are removed in winter or spring 2027, and construction on the bridge's open-road tolling project is targeted for completion in summer 2027. The same conversion is then expected to roll out to the Bay Area's six other state-owned toll bridges.