The Green Bridge Gets the Headlines. The Olema Creek Bridge Gets the Longer Closure.

Ask three people in Olema when Highway 1 is finally going to shut down for the Green Bridge replacement and you'll likely get three different answers. None of them is really wrong. They're just reading from different pages, literally. Caltrans has published at least two versions of this timeline in 2026 alone, and the most recent one pushed the closure back a full year from what an older project page still says today.

That's not a knock on Caltrans. Big infrastructure projects slip, and the paperwork doesn't always catch up to itself in real time. But if you live in Olema, where two separate bridge projects, run by two separate agencies, both happen to route their detour traffic through your town, the gap between "what the website says" and "what's actually happening this month" is worth closing yourself. Here's where things stand as of this week.

What's Already Underway on the Green Bridge

The Green Bridge, the trussed span carrying Highway 1 over Lagunitas Creek just north of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, has been fought over for more than a decade. A group called Friends of the Green Bridge sued to force a retrofit instead of a full replacement and lost. Caltrans has since committed to a new concrete span with low steel railings, and the $28.5 million project is now visibly underway.

This spring, crews began relocating utility lines to clear room for the cranes that will install the new span. That work involved 100-foot poles and a helicopter pulling wire off the old lines, and it required the Point Reyes Animal Hospital, whose parking lot sits in the path of the temporary lines, to close for two days in early June. According to Caltrans District 4's own July 29 project update, one-way traffic control on Highway 1 near the bridge is scheduled from this month through November, then the project goes into winter suspension and resumes in spring 2027. The actual full closure, 21 days with no traffic at all, is now targeted for after Labor Day weekend in September 2027.

That's a meaningful shift. Back in December 2025, the Light reported that construction was scheduled to start that June, with the 21-day shutdown expected after Labor Day 2026, a full year earlier than where things stand now. And Caltrans' own district project page still lists that 2026 target today, even though the more recent district news release has already moved it to 2027. If you searched this topic last year, or even six months ago, and bookmarked what you found, you're working from a timeline the agency itself has since revised.

When the full closure does arrive, the detour is not small. Traffic between Inverness and Point Reyes Station, normally a 10-minute drive, gets rerouted through Olema, up Platform Bridge Road, and past Black Mountain, a trip the Light has clocked at 20 to 25 minutes. One resident who will lose a fir tree and part of a garden to a construction staging area put it plainly at a July 2024 public meeting:

"I think people have been lulled to sleep by the lack of news about the project, and I think Caltrans would dearly love to have kept it that way."

That comment from David Moser has aged into something closer to a warning than a complaint. The project did go quiet for a stretch, then came back to life this spring with pole trucks and a helicopter.

A Second, Quieter Bridge With a Longer Closure

Less than a mile away, a second and much less discussed project is working through its own timeline: replacing the bridge that carries Sir Francis Drake Boulevard over Olema Creek, just south of where it joins Lagunitas Creek. County paperwork sometimes still calls this the Levee Road bridge, a name with real history behind it. The road here was literally built as a levee across the marsh at the head of Tomales Bay back in 1875, decades before the whole route was dedicated as Sir Francis Drake Highway in a 1929 ceremony that took place right in Olema.

The current bridge dates to 1930, was extended in 1967, and Marin County's Department of Public Works has determined it's both functionally obsolete and too low to clear a 100-year flood. The county's project page, last substantively updated in June, now targets construction for spring 2028, running one six-month season from roughly June through October to take advantage of low creek flow. The new structure will be considerably wider than the old one, 38 feet across versus the current 24, at an estimated cost of $3 million.

The detour for this project is a different animal than the Green Bridge's. Because this crossing sits closer to Highway 1's junction with Bear Valley Road, the county's own estimate puts the added drive time at about seven minutes over a 4.1-mile bypass. The Light's June 2026 reporting puts it a bit higher, around ten minutes, a small but real discrepancy between the agency's traffic model and what reporters expect drivers to actually experience.

The bigger news, though, is timing. In a story published within the past week, the Light reported that the Inverness Association has formally asked the county to reconsider the plan, arguing that a six-month detour through Olema deserves more scrutiny than it's gotten. The public comment period on the project's environmental review closed July 1. Whether that protest changes the timeline, the detour route, or nothing at all is still an open question.

The Two Projects, Side by Side

Laid out this way, the pattern is easy to miss if you only ever hear about one project at a time: the bridge with the lawsuit, the helicopter, and the headlines closes for three weeks. The bridge nobody's talking about yet closes for six months. Total disruption over the next two years weighs heavily toward the quieter project, not the famous one.

What This Means If You Live Here

None of this happens all at once, and neither closure is imminent today. The practical takeaway is less about marking a single date on the calendar and more about knowing which project is in which phase at any given time, since the two overlap in geography but not in schedule. Through this fall, expect one-way control on Highway 1 near the Green Bridge, not a full closure. The actual multi-week shutdown of that bridge isn't expected until after Labor Day 2027. The Olema Creek bridge won't close at all until spring 2028 at the earliest, and that timeline still depends on how the county responds to this month's protest.

If you're trying to plan around either project, the county's and Caltrans' own project pages are the most current sources, but as this year has shown, they don't always agree with each other, so it's worth checking the date on whatever page you land on before you trust it.

In the meantime, life in Olema hasn't paused for any of this. Due West Tavern at Olema House, one of the town's few sit-down restaurants, was still serving its regular lineup of Tomales Bay oysters, clam chowder, and rotating weekday Blue Plate Specials as of a Pacific Sun feature published this week, open daily with happy hour from 4 to 6 p.m. The bridges are moving on their own timelines. The town in between them isn't waiting on either one.

For residents watching how these projects might affect property near either crossing, or anyone weighing a move to Olema or the surrounding stretch of Sir Francis Drake between Point Reyes Station and Inverness, B.G. Bates tracks these local infrastructure questions as closely as the market itself. Begin your West Marin story, connect with B.G. Bates.