The CHP Golden Gate Division

One geographic feature - water - dominates the CHPs' response to traffic flow in the Golden Gate Division. The Division's nine-county area, featuring some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, is dominated by San Francisco and San Pablo Bays and the northern sweep of the Pacific Coast.

 Eight toll bridges, more than any other CHP Division in the state, are the arteries that move the lifeblood of commercial and commuter vehicles over the bays. Paradoxically, the bridges also can act as a hindrance, by narrowing traffic flow at the toll entrances or cutting movement entirely when traffic collisions occur on the spans.

 In addition to moving the 6 million people concentrated mostly around the bay, the CHP faces challenges along the steep coastal Highway 1 and in the wine country, both popular tourist destinations where mud slides and floods closed road during 1997's disastrous winter rains.

 The Division pioneered the CHP's community outreach program, sending a contingent of 14 officers to East Palo Alto in 1993 to assist local government in controlling a high crime problem. The three-year cooperative program resulted in a 98 percent drop in the homicide rate from the baseline year of 1992 to the end of the program in 1996. Subsequently, the CHP cooperated on "Operation Safe Streets" in Vallejo and "Operation Crackdown" in Richmond.

As patrol officers will tell you, there is nothing like working the graveyard shift in Marin County north of the City. As they emerge from the southern end of the Waldo Tunnel, the dazzling panorama of San Francisco lights open before them, bordered on the left by the Bay Bridge and the right by the silhouette of the Golden Gate.