Fixing America's Favorite Suicide Destination?

Here is what most people think of when they think of the Golden Gate Bridge.  It is a gorgeous structure, perhaps the most iconic in American architecture, easily the most famous symbol of San Francisco.

Below is what comes to my mind.  The picture, shot from a similar vantage point, features a display of many, many, many pairs of shoes.  It was set up as San Francisco celebrated the bridge's 75th anniversary in 2012.

Many people disagree with me, and I can hear it. Desperate people who want to die will find a way. I have known people who killed themselves, and I have talked with a psychology professor who said, essentially, that we just have to let them go.

My point about the Golden Gate Bridge is that it is pernicious for a government to do nothing for 80 years to mitigate an attraction that has made it easy for as many as 2,000 people to commit suicide. (The exact number is unknown, and estimates almost certainly are lower than the real number.)

This doesn't happen in private settings. You cannot climb over a handrail and jump off the Empire State Building; this may be because the building's owner doesn't want lawsuits or because the owner doesn't want to be responsible, even indirectly, for people's deaths. Why shouldn't our government, the people's government, hold itself to a similar standard of caution?

If you were on the Golden Gate Bridge and you saw someone haul himself over that 4-foot handrail, would you stop and try to talk him back onto the sidewalk and, from there, to the parking lot? If not, why not?

Each pair of shoes represents a suicide done by jumping off the Golden Gate

The first desperate person to jump off the bridge did so within weeks of its opening in 1937.  No one knows how many people have died in the same manner, but the number is certainly greater than the official tally of 1,600.  The Golden Gate is by far the most popular suicide destination in the country, possibly the world.

In recent years, suicides have numbered more than 30 annually, with 80 or more attempts frustrated each year by police and pedestrians.

I lived in the Bay Area for a few years and crossed the Golden Gate at least several times a week.  It was understood that many people died jumping off the bridge, but newspapers rarely reported on the phenomenon.  My guess at the time was that editors feared that stories would encourage vulnerable people to try to kill themselves.  This may have had the unintended consequence of dampening public discussion about a lamentable situation.

Now, finally, there is serious talk of doing something.  A coalition of Bay Area transportation authorities has committed most of the estimated $66 million needed to place strong nets under the walkways that edge both sides of the bridge.  People who jumped would be caught in the nets and pulled back up onto the bridge.  The belief is that many fewer people would attempt suicide under the circumstances.

Efforts to prevent Golden Gate suicides have been proposed since at least 1948. Several were shot down by public, and officials' fears that views would be obstructed.  The current proposal seems to answer this concern because the nets would be set below the bridge railings.  The idea received landmark approval in 2010 from the directors of the bridge authority.

In fact, if the bridge had been built according to its original design, the suicides might not have happened. According to the website of the Bridge Rail Foundation, which has lobbied for a suicide barrier, the original engineer, Joseph Strauss, sketched out a 5'6" safety rail with a top cap designed to frustrate attempts to climb over the top of the rail.  Later the bridge architect changed the specifications and redrew the plan for the existing, much lower railing that so many people have straddled on their way into the San Francisco Bay.

This is a gruesome piece of history for  a beautiful city.  People who have opposed barriers -- and there have been many over the years -- insist that mentally disturbed people will continue to find ways to kill themselves.  There is some truth to this, but a number of the very few survivors of Golden Gate Bridge jumps report they regretted their action before they hit the water.

It strikes me as grotesque that no action has been taken for 77 years while a known attraction has allowed so many people to kill themselves with relative ease.  Preventing suicide in all cases is impossible, of course, but efforts to make suicide more difficult seem to me worthy and humane.

Over the last 20 years, suicide barriers have been placed on bridges in Toronto, Washington, D.C, Auckland, New Zealand, and Augusta, ME.  There have been no suicides off those bridges since the structures were put in place.  In Augusta, authorities report a lower rate of local suicide overall.

I say do it.  Do it now.

Note

A moving documentary about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge was released in 2006.  The filmmakers trained cameras on the bridge for a year, documenting many suicides and preventing a few, and then followed up with friends and family members of those who died.  It argues for no point of view.  The Bridge is available for streaming. 

Update

Funding for construction of a safety net under the Golden Gate was approved in 2014.  Work on the project, whose cost had nearly tripled to $200 million, began in 2017.  It is expected to be completed in 2021.  

Construction of the bridge itself -- setting footings in bedrock under the bay, erecting the iconic metal metal structure, stringing suspension cables and laying roadway to meet the bridge on either end -- took four years in the 1930s.