Ride the Iron Horse Trail south from the Bollinger Canyon crossing this fall and the rhythm changes twice. First you glide across a 950-foot bridge that did not exist a little over a year ago, cyclists and runners moving through without ever touching a brake. Then, at the next major arterial south, you hit Crow Canyon Road and stop dead at a signal, the same at-grade crossing that has sat there since before the bridge was ever a line item on a city budget.
That gap is not an accident of geography. It is the current shape of a decade-plus infrastructure project that solved one crossing and is still working on its twin.
Why the Two Crossings Used to Feel Identical
For years, both intersections worked the same way. The Iron Horse Trail, built along a Southern Pacific Railroad right-of-way established in 1891 and abandoned in 1978, runs uninterrupted for 32 miles between Concord and Pleasanton except where it meets a handful of major roads at grade. Bollinger Canyon Road and Crow Canyon Road, both busy arterials feeding San Ramon's office corridor, were two of those interruptions. Trail users pressed a button, waited for the light, and crossed alongside the cars.
San Ramon started studying both crossings together in 2009, as part of a citywide bicycle and pedestrian corridor plan. In 2013 the city hired a consultant team led by Biggs Cardosa Associates to run community outreach on both bridges at once. Conceptual designs for each crossing were selected together in 2015. For most of a decade, Bollinger and Crow Canyon moved through the process side by side, on the same schedule.
Then the schedules split.
What Actually Opened in July 2025
Construction on the Bollinger Canyon Road overcrossing began in late spring 2023. Roughly two years later, on July 19, 2025, the city held a ribbon cutting at 10 a.m. following remarks in the City Hall rotunda, and the crowd walked out for a group photo on the finished bridge.
The structure runs 950 feet across six spans, engineered as a cable-stayed design by the Danish firm Dissing+Weitling and built by Shimmick in partnership with Myers and Sons. Bridge sections were fabricated in Washington state and shipped in for assembly. The team finished the work two and a half months ahead of schedule and added more than 7,500 plants along the approach. The project has since collected industry recognition, including a 2026 Northern California award for Overall Outstanding Local Streets and Roads Project.
None of that came cheap, and almost none of it came from San Ramon's own general fund. More than 82 percent of the funding traced back to outside sources: grants from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's Transportation for Livable Communities program, One Bay Area, and the Tri-Valley Transportation Commission, layered with Contra Costa Transportation Authority Measure J money. That funding stack is a large part of why Bollinger moved when it did.
Why Crow Canyon Road Is Still Waiting
Crow Canyon Road never lost a design competition. It lost the funding race, and the wait is still running.
The city's own project records lay out the timeline. After the shared 2015 conceptual design phase, Bollinger's design was finalized in April 2019 and broke ground in May 2023. Crow Canyon Road's path was slower. The city council did not vote on a final bridge style for that crossing until a pair of meetings in November and December 2023, choosing among truss, butterfly, tied-arch, and railroad truss options for an overcrossing that would span an approximately 2,000-foot segment of trail. San Ramon issued its request for proposals for design and engineering services on the Crow Canyon overcrossing in 2025, the same year Bollinger's bridge opened to the public.
As of this writing, there is no published construction start date for Crow Canyon Road. The signal is still there. The at-grade crossing is still there. Anyone riding from the Bollinger side toward Crow Canyon Country Club, Forest Home Farms off San Ramon Valley Boulevard, or the shops further south is riding into a stretch of trail that still behaves the way both crossings used to behave before 2023.
A Bigger Idea Is Testing Itself a Few Miles Away
While Crow Canyon Road waits on its bridge, county planners are piloting something larger just up the trail. Contra Costa County Supervisor Candace Andersen briefed both the Danville and San Ramon councils this July on a design phase for an express bicycle lane along the Iron Horse corridor, an idea that traces back to a 2020 county study exploring what planners called a bicycle super-highway. That study also floated running an autonomous shuttle along the trail, a concept the county has since dropped from active consideration.
The pilot is centered in San Ramon, on the stretch between the completed Bollinger bridge and the future Crow Canyon overcrossing, and Andersen put the design work for that first segment at roughly 65 percent complete. She was direct about how she got it moving.
"I didn't want to have this project sitting forever."
Andersen said she redirected about half a million dollars in park impact fees collected from unincorporated parts of San Ramon to fund design on that first stretch. If the pilot proves out, the next candidate for expansion is the trail segment between Crow Canyon and Sycamore Valley roads in Danville, with a longer-range idea floated for a connection toward the Dublin and Pleasanton BART station.
What This Means for the Trail You Ride This Fall
If you already use the Iron Horse Trail through this stretch, here is what actually changes your ride right now and what does not.
- The Bollinger Canyon crossing is finished. No more stopping, no more signal, and that will hold regardless of what happens with the county's bicycle expressway pilot.
- The Crow Canyon Road crossing has a chosen design but no construction date. Expect the same signal and the same wait through at least this fall, since the design and engineering RFP only went out in 2025.
- Watch the pavement on the segment between the two crossings. If Andersen's pilot moves from design into construction, that middle stretch, not Crow Canyon Road itself, is where changes would appear first.
- If a second phase of the pilot happens, it points toward Danville, specifically the Crow Canyon to Sycamore Valley segment, not toward Pleasanton or Dublin in the near term.
None of this is a reason to route around Crow Canyon Road. It is a reason to expect the ride to feel a little uneven for a while longer, one smooth bridge behind you and one patient signal still ahead.
The Kristy Peixoto Team tracks the infrastructure changes that shape daily life around Crow Canyon as closely as we track the market itself, because the two rarely move independently. If you want a local read on how a project like this touches property near the trail, Schedule Your White-Glove Consultation with our team.
