Major Bay Area highway closure scheduled over Labor Day weekend

A repaving project on a major San Francisco Bay Area highway over the Labor Day weekend is expected to cause traffic disruptions in the region.

Westbound Interstate 80 will be shut down to vehicles between the Interstate 780 interchange in Vallejo and state Route 4 in Hercules, from 9 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 31, through no later than 5 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 5, Caltrans said. The closure is along about 6 miles of highway.  

A detour will be installed that directs drivers on westbound 80 in Vallejo to exit onto eastbound I-780, continue east past Benicia and onto southbound Interstate 680 toward Concord, before exiting onto westbound state Route 4 toward Hercules and hopping back onto westbound I-80.

The closure is part of a larger repaving project spread across four separate weekends that started in July; the Labor Day weekend closure marks the end of the project. 

Over the weekend, work crews will be repaving lanes No. 2 and 3 with pavement, which is stronger than asphalt, and doing repairs on No. 1 and No. 4 on westbound I-80.

“Lanes 2 and 3, they get the heaviest use, especially from trucks going back and forth,” Bart Ney, a Caltrans spokesperson, told SFGATE. “With this closure we can pave a 3-mile stretch — that means one long 3-mile pour of concrete reinforced with steel, by doing that we get 40 years of life out that.” Ney said it’s not possible to do a three-mile pour when the highway is closed only at night and open during the day. 

Ney said that each day, 50,000 cars on average travel along the stretch of highway that will be closed. He hopes raising awareness about the closure will encourage drivers to avoid the area.

When the eastbound lanes of I-80 were repaved along this same section of highway, he said traffic was reduced by about 50% of average. “We’re hoping for a similar impact this weekend,” he said.