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The City of East Palo Alto, in partnership with the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, began constructing on Tuesday a new entrance point to the Bay Trail at the end of Rutgers Street, a project that will give local residents easy access to the trail system.
Various dead-end streets in East Palo Alto’s University Village neighborhood directly face the Bay trail but are blocked off by chain link fences. To access the trail, residents have to either walk up a busy stretch of University Avenue or travel more than a mile south to access the bike path.
The new pedestrian gate, which will remove a portion of the fence, aims to solve that problem.
The San Francisco Bay Trail offers bicycle and pedestrian pathways along the Peninsula, but some areas are more accessible than others. After years of planning, East Palo Alto and Midpeninsula Open Space District in August 2020 resurfaced and added boardwalks to a 0.6-mile stretch between University Avenue and the Ravenswood Preserve.
The path, called the Ravenswood Bay Trail, aimed to provide better commuter routes for locals.
“Completing this trail gap connected 80 miles of continuous Bay Trail, connecting from Menlo Park to Sunnyvale and across the Dumbarton Bridge to the East Bay,” Midpeninsula Open Space District said in a statement.
But the main entrances to the stretch are located on opposite ends of the University Village neighborhood.
City Council member Mark Dinan, who previously advocated for the new access point, said the chain link fence cutoff University Village residents from conveniently accessing the Bay Trail.
“Frankly it’s an embarrassment,” Dinan said in a 2024 Midpeninsula meeting. “This should have never opened without having an access point for the community. Every day, you’ll see Facebook engineers biking through East Palo Alto.”
Joan Lane, trailblazing volunteer and Stanford’s go-to for ‘sticky problems,' dies at 97March 25, 2026 3:23 pm