Bay Area Bridge Tolls Will Increase (again).

It’s about that time again. Starting January 1, bridge tolls around the Bay Area will see a 50-cent increase. The toll hike comes one year after a systemwide dollar-increase last January boosted prices from $7 to $8 per crossing. This year’s increase affects the same seven bridges: the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge as well as the Antioch, Benicia–Martinez, Carquinez, Dumbarton, Richmond–San Rafael and San Mateo–Hayward bridges. These state-funded crossings require regular maintenance, and if you drive to and from work, they’re passing the buck onto you.

For the past year, drivers of standard 2-axle vehicles have paid $8 to cross one of seven bridges CalTrans maintains. The Golden Gate Bridge is too cool for the CalTrans Club, governed instead by its own Golden Gate Highway & Transportation District. Her tolls already went up in July, from $9.25 to $9.75 (2-axle, FasTrak). Perhaps they’ll use the money to fix up her rusty-ass towers (“Nurse!”). That’s right, Ms. GiGi Bee; your edges are showing. We might never know the luxury of owning a home, but to us cretins, the Bay Bridge is a fellow workhouse. And the cover charge for riding into San Francisco will soon cost $8.50. 

I’m not great at math, so feel free to correct my calculations (you will anyway). But in a 250-day working year, with a driver that doesn’t miss a single day, $2,125 of their net pay goes to bridge tolls. Considering fuel costs, insurance, and whatever parking scheme you get sucked into once you touch down in SF, that’s extreme. Drivers living north of the Carquinez Strait will get shaken down twice; once at the Carquinez Bridge, next at the Bay Bridge. That double-whammy will cost them $4,250—more if they don’t have FasTrak come 2027. 

This toll increase represents the first in five increments planned for every January through 2030. Whether you pay using FasTrak or by invoice mailed to the address associated with your license plate, it’ll be $8.50 to cross. That’s just for 2026 though. Starting 2027, tourists and passers-thru (that is, drivers without a FasTrak device) will pay a 25¢ premium on top of what will be a $9 toll. FasTrak users will not pay this premium; their toll increases to $9 in 2027, $9.50 in 2028, $10 in 2029, then $10.50 in 2030. 

An ABC7 article on this tiered pricing plan (from January 2025) says funds will support “freeway improvements across the area and the purchase of new BART cars.” ABC7 added that funds will also contribute to “an extension of the BART system, the Caltrain corridor, MUNI's transit vehicle fleet and the San Francisco Bay Ferry Service.” 

Or perhaps the Authority, part of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, is thinking along the same lines as the Golden Gate Highway & Transportation District. While in the news less and less, COVID continues taking blame for budgetary shortfalls and deficits. The District pointed to “a significant drop in riders since the COVID-19 pandemic” as one reason for their toll increase. District officials counted 40,003,340 total crossings in 2019. By the end of 2021, that figure had fallen to 26,833,762; from about 109,598 daily crossings (2019) to 73,517 (2021). 

Meanwhile the Lady in Grey, the people’s queen with Oakland on one arm and San Francisco, the other, stayed busy. Approximately 47,488,975 vehicles crossed the bridge in 2019. By EOY 2021, the number had decreased to 42,367,401 (~130,106 daily crossings in 2019 to 116,075 in 2021). (Source: Metropolitan Transportation Commission) 

Bay Area Bridge Toll Authority officials knew commuters wouldn’t be happy with the toll hike, the San Francisco Chronicle says.

Regarding the increase, former MTC Chair Alfredo Pedroza offered the following platitude:

“I’m sensitive to the overall cost of living in the Bay Area,” Pedroza told the Chronicle, noting that his constituents were already reeling from high grocery prices and utility bills. He also lamented tacking on another transportation expense, calling it “a painful decision.” In the meantime, a real painful decision looms not only for commuters to San Francisco, but across the Bay. Should you pay $42.50 weekly to cross a bridge or complicate/lengthen your commute with public transit? I don’t know which is worse; have you seen how fucked BART is lately? It just might come to this: Either you’re sitting in traffic on the westbound runup to the Bay Bridge, totally boxed in and tracing the line of vehicles through heat-beveled air while the cause of this delay eludes you, or on a hot train with other restless passengers, late for your shift, class, hang, date, sweating through your shirt while you wonder if they’re scraping someone off the tracks ahead. It’ll cost you either way, more and more, for the next five years. 

But hey—none of that matters once Red Bull’s cameras start rolling.