A San Anselmo inventor has designed a bridge barrier that
he believes could prevent head-on collisions on the Golden
Gate Bridge. Robert M.Guernsey will go to the Golden Gate
Bridge District Board of Directors in June with his proposal
for computer controlled barriers that would automatically
rise from recessed slots in the roadbed to divide oncoming
traffic. According to the district's Bridge Division Manager
Robert Warren, the district's building and operations committee
asked Guernsey to present his design in April. But Guernsey
said he doesn't want to make a presentation until he has time
to drum up public support for his plan and show people how
his system would work. "I want the people of Marin to
see how it works and see the model before I officially take
it to the district," he said.
 Guernsey
is taking his case directly to Marin residents. He will bring
a working model of his barrier design to Marin shopping centers,
so he can show people exactly how it would work. He will be
at the Corte Madera Town Center on April 6 from 9 a.m. to
6:30 p.m. On April 20, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., he will
be at the Bon Air shopping center. On April 27, from 9 a.m.
to 5:30 p.m., he will be at the Red Hill shopping center.
On May 4, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., he will be at the Montecito
shopping center.
Although a number of bridge barrier systems already have been
proposed, the bridge board has, for a variety of reasons,
rejected each one as being unfeasible form an engineering
or safety standpoint. Some critics of the bridge district
say the board has rejected barrier proposals that could have
worked. They also say the district is dragging its heels to
the detriment of safety.
Warren said the criticism is undeserved. "The directors
have turned the previous proposals down for good reasons,
not because we don't want a barrier. On the contrary, if
we had a proposal in front of us that would work, I'm quite
sure the directors would be very interested in pursuing
it." Bridge directors now may find themselves under
more pressure to pursue barrier proposals because of a lawsuit
brought in October of 1995 by David Sutton.
The 41-year-old Sonoma resident was involved in a November
1994 head-on collision in which he lost his right leg and
four fingers on his right hand. He filed a lawsuit in Marin
Superior Court charging that the bridge is unsafe and should
be closed until a barrier or other means of separating traffic
can be installed. Marin Superior Court Judge Terry Boren
ruled in February that the lawsuit had legal merit and Sutton
can proceed with his case. Warren said he would not comment
specifically on Guernsey's proposal for a barrier, or any
barrier proposal, as long as the Sutton suit is pending.
The
last barrier proposal that the bridge district rejected
was submitted by Barrier Systems Inc, based in Carson City,
Nevada. District staff determined that the proposed barrier
would necessitate removing one lane from the already congested
bridge. Guernsey, an elevator technician who has worked
on the bridge's tower elevators, said his proposal deals
with many of the concerns the district board voiced when
it reviewed past proposals. His design, he said, would not
require any major construction to the bridge's roadbed or
guard rails. "The district has only the existing bridge
to work with, so any barrier has to work within the confines
of what is already there; mine does that," he said.
His proposal, which he estimates would cost as much at $20
million, calls for barriers made of rectangular galvanized
steel tubes six inches wide by two inched deep. They would
be set into the roadbed where lane markers now exist and
rise from the roadbed via pneumatic cylinders to divide
whichever lanes need to be separated, depending on the time
of day and traffic flow. Robert Atchison of Rexroth Worldwide
Pneumatic has helped Guernsey design the system. During
each scheduled changeover, the lanes workers and safety
vehicles drive between the lanes that will be changed, as
this is completed the new lanes configuration will be raised
out of the road surface, and the old configuration will
be lowered in the road surface simultaneously, creating
anew lane configuration and a permanent safety barrier.
Guernsey decided to try his hand at a barrier design after
reading accounts of the bridge district's project to retrofit
project the span for earthquake safety. "I thought
to myself that the district was trying to make the bridge
safer in a quake; we should be trying to make it safer everyday,"
he said. While he was working on a computer design of the
barrier, his computer crashed, forcing him to begin over
again with only a few elements of his first design. "While
it was a setback, it was also a blessing because it made
me focus more clearly on elements of the original design
that didn't work as well as they should have," he said.
Wishing to give his proposal very possible chance to gain
approval in front of the district board of directors, Guernsey
is trying to line up public support for his project. To
aid him, he has enlisted the help of Frank Schweiger and
Lucien Remy, who are gathering signatures to place an advisory
initiative on the November ballot that would pressure the
bridge district to find a barrier system that works and
install it as soon as possible. Schweiger was injured in
a head-on accident on the bridge a dozen years ago. Remy's
great uncle submitted a barrier proposal that the district
board rejected in 1988.
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