Your Bay Area Transit Questions, Answered: Bridge Tolls, Lane Closures and Vanity Plates Too

Bay Curious

KQED

History, Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.9 • 999 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the topics we get the most questions about from our audience is transportation. Today we round up answers to a handful of your questions, including: Where does all that toll money from Bay Area bridges go? Why has one toll booth on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge been closed for years? Why are do so many of our interstates end in "80"? And: Are there more vanity plates in the Bay Area? Plus a few more! We're joined by KQED's Dan Brekke, who has been covering transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 20 years. Additional reading: You're Really, Really Curious About BART Why Doesn't BART Go More Places? When BART Was Built, People — and Houses — Had to Go The Tale of the Bay Bridge Troll Sign up for our newsletter Enter our Sierra Nevada Brewing Company monthly trivia contest Episode Transcript You can submit a question to Bay Curious. Your support makes KQED podcasts possible. You can show your love by going to https://kqed.org/donate/podcasts This story was reported by Dan Brekke. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz and Christopher Beale. Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, Alana Walker, Holly Kernan and the whole KQED family.

Transcript

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0:00.0	from KQED.
0:03.3	Hey everyone, Olivia Allen Price here.
0:05.7	And I want to take you back for a moment to April 2015 when you could have been scanning the radio and settled on 88.5 KQED to hear the very first airing of a Bay Curious story.
0:20.6	Okay, time for something fun.
0:22.3	Today we're launching a special series about local oddities, mysteries, and curiosities.
0:27.3	We're calling it Bay Curious.
0:31.2	It was about this old wrecked car that hikers pass often on Mount Tamilpias.
0:36.8	Reporter producer Katrina Schwartz and I hiked out to the wreck to check it out.
0:41.1	Holy cow, that's it.
0:42.9	What a piece of junk.
0:44.3	That is really unexpected.
0:46.8	In some ways, that was the perfect story to kick off what is now nearly a 10-year-old journalism experiment.
0:56.0	It took us through some Bay Area history. We learned about car manufacturing in the 1940s.
1:01.5	We talked to some fascinating people. It was a story that had all the elements that I hope Bay
1:07.2	Curious has come to be known for. And it was about a car, which really isn't surprising.
1:13.3	Because over the years, more than 10,000 questions have poured in from you, our dear audience,
1:19.0	and transportation is one of the topics that we get the most questions about. Maybe it's because
1:24.7	getting around our region has some pain points.
1:28.0	I don't know.
1:30.8	Today, as we barrel toward our 10-year anniversary, we thought we'd answer a bunch of your transit
1:36.6	questions that have been lingering in the Bay Curious inbox.
1:40.6	Like how much toll money gets collected on our bridges and where does it go?
	...

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