You’ve seen them. The Bay Lights. From the Embarcadero. From the hills. From the living room window of the apartment you pay too much for because the view is supposed to be worth it. Forty-eight thousand LED lights on the west span of the Bay Bridge. Blue-rich. High glare. Pulsing. Moving. Flashing. Not steady. Never steady. The light doesn’t stay still because the light isn’t supposed to stay still. It’s art. It’s animated. And if you’re one of the people whose neurological system can’t tolerate that kind of light, you don’t get to look away.
A person can’t avoid the lights. Even if they have photosensitive epilepsy. Even if they have autism. Even if they have PTSD, migraines, traumatic brain injury, or photophobia. They can avoid certain movies. They don’t go to clubs. They don’t use certain apps. But they can’t avoid the Bay Bridge if they live in San Francisco. The lights are there. Every night. Pulsing across the water. The lawsuit calls them what they are: “neurologically intolerable.” The suit also calls them a “neurologic hazard” for people who suffer from certain disabilities. “Many individuals with disabilities are now confined to their homes and unable to travel because of their severe reactions to LED lights.” Confined. To their homes. Because the art on the bridge doesn’t care if they can survive it.
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires local agencies to perform a self-evaluation anytime they implement a new policy or introduce a new technology, to ensure that the changes don’t create discriminatory barriers. 28 CFR 35.105. Specific. Mandatory. No self-evaluation was done for the Bay Lights. LED flashing lights trigger seizures. They trigger migraines. They trigger panic attacks for individuals with neurological disabilities. The law says evaluate before you install. The agencies installed first. They didn’t evaluate at all. They’re not a collateral damage case. They’re a civil rights violation that hasn’t been counted yet.
The state of California has proclaimed that October 10 is Blue Light Awareness Day. The state acknowledges that blue-rich light is a health hazard. The state ignores its own acknowledgment. The lights on the bridge are blue-rich LED. The state that says blue light is dangerous installed blue light on a public bridge and called it art. The contradiction doesn’t bother them. Why would it? Nobody’s making them explain it.
Ketchikan, Alaska. A small town that eventually took disability seriously. A resident with a brain injury couldn’t tolerate the LED streetlights. The city didn’t listen at first. The city fought. For five years. The resident fought back. And they won. The city replaced three LED streetlights with Low Pressure Sodium lights as an accommodation. LPS has the highest lumens per Watt of any light source. It’s safe. It’s comfortable. It doesn’t cause the glare that blue-rich LED causes. It took five years. The city fought every step. But the disabled resident won anyway. That’s what accountability looks like when it’s dragged into existence. The Bay Lights are what it looks like when accountability never shows up at all.
Now ask how this happened. How did 48,000 animated LED lights end up on a public bridge without a safety study, without an ADA evaluation, without the public being asked if they wanted them? The answer is fraud. Documented. Procedural. Structural. The fraud is the only reason the lights are there.
The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission exists to protect the Bay. That’s the title. That’s the mandate. The name says conservation. The name says development. The commission is supposed to guard the water and the shoreline from the exact kind of private exploitation this project represents. And the Executive Director of that commission, Larry Goldzband, issued a permit for an $11 million, 1.8-mile light installation on a public bridge by claiming the project doesn’t exceed 1,000 square feet. One point eight miles. A thousand square feet. The permit says it. The math doesn’t. The 27-member BCDC Commissioners were bypassed. The commission that’s supposed to protect the Bay from exploitation opened the door and let it walk through.
Caltrans owns the bridge. That’s not disputed. Under the California Environmental Quality Act, Caltrans is the Lead Agency. Only the Lead Agency can file a Notice of Exemption. BATA filed it anyway. The Bay Area Toll Authority. They claimed to be a local public agency. They’re not. BATA is a state agency. State agencies are required to file the NOE with the State Clearinghouse to allow public review. BATA filed with the County Clerk. No public review. No transparency. No opportunity for the public to see what was being done to their bridge. The delegation of Lead Agency authority from Caltrans to BATA is prohibited under CEQA. The California Court of Appeal said so in Planning and Conservation League v. Department of Water Resources. “So significant is the role of the lead agency that CEQA proscribes delegation.” The law is clear. The delegation happened anyway. CEQA requires an Environmental Impact Report. The National Environmental Policy Act requires an Environmental Impact Statement. Neither was done. The NOE was supposed to replace the EIR. But the NOE was void. So the EIR requirement still stands. Unfulfilled. The project was exempted from CEQA analysis with administrators arguing that the new installation was not meaningfully different from the original. The original had 25,000 LEDs on the exterior cables. The new one has 48,000. On both sides. Including inward toward drivers. Not meaningfully different. The administrators said it. The math doesn’t.
The BATA Oversight Committee never approved the project. The committee that exists to provide oversight never provided any. BATA staff member Bockelman signed the NOE on July 21, 2023. She had no authority to sign. The committee never authorized her to sign. The NOE is void. The project approval is void. The entire permitting structure collapses if anyone with the power to care actually cares.
Ben Davis signed the permit application as an authorized agent of BATA under penalty of perjury. He’s a private citizen. He doesn’t work for BATA. He doesn’t work for the state. He founded a nonprofit called Illuminate. He conceived the project. He raised the money. He signed a government document claiming to represent an agency he has no connection to. That’s perjury. The application was processed anyway. The state accepted the signature of a private citizen claiming to be a public employee. The project went forward.
Caltrans’ own procedures manual prohibits kinetic art. The Bay Lights are animated. They move. They pulse. They flash. Caltrans issued a waiver. For Ben Davis. They didn’t waive it for safety. They waived it for art. Caltrans’ procedures also require public input and a resolution by a local public agency approving the project. This never happened. The public has never had a say.
Four lawsuits. Baker I. Baker II. Baker III. And a NEPA case filed against Caltrans and the Federal Highway Administration. The courts don’t want to look at the evidence. They’re dismissing on procedural grounds. Standing. Statute of limitations. Vexatious litigant designations. The fraud is never adjudicated. The judges say too late. Wrong door. You don’t live close enough. They never say not true.
In Baker III, BATA had already been dismissed from the case. Then they filed a motion to have Mark Baker declared a vexatious litigant. A non-party filed a motion. A defendant who’d already been dismissed. You can’t do that without the court’s permission. The court allowed it anyway. Allowed additional briefs. Allowed oral argument. All from a non-defendant, non-party with no legitimate interest in a case they’d already been dismissed from. Baker was declared a vexatious litigant. He was required to post a $75,000 bond. He has appealed. The NEPA case is against Caltrans and the FHWA. The government is attempting to dismiss on standing grounds. They claim Baker doesn’t live close enough to the Bay Bridge to have any say. The FHWA claims they have nothing to do with this project. This is the same FHWA that issued a Roadway Use Agreement on October 15, 2024, requiring Caltrans to perform a safety study on the very project they claim no involvement with. The same FHWA that has regulatory authority over the bridge. The same FHWA that now holds the project’s future in its hands. A federal agency says it has nothing to do with a project it issued a binding agreement for, just a couple of years ago. The contradiction doesn’t bother them. Why would it? Nobody’s making them explain it.
The interior lights are not currently enabled. The $11 million installation that was supposed to have 48,000 lights has only 24,000 operating. The other 24,000, the ones that face inward toward drivers, can’t be turned on. The FHWA’s RUA requires Caltrans to perform a safety study. The study must determine the threshold for crashes, injuries, and deaths caused by the project. Caltrans has confirmed to Baker that they’re continuing the project. But they’re not. Nothing is happening. The interior lights are dark. The safety study hasn’t been completed. Neither Illuminate nor Caltrans will be able to show the FHWA that the inward-facing lights are safe. They’re not safe. The California Highway Patrol explicitly wrote that they’re concerned about driver distraction from the inward-facing lights. Nobody has shown any concern for the outward-facing lights. Nobody is tracking crashes or injuries caused by glare. Nobody is asking the public if they want these lights. Nobody is asking whether the lights are comfortable to look at.
$11 million paid for 48,000 lights. Only 24,000 are operating. The donors were promised 48,000. They got 24,000. Do the donors know? Do the politicians who championed this project know? How long is Caltrans going to continue claiming the project is continuing when nothing is happening? The bridge has half a light installation sitting on it and the agency responsible is pretending everything’s fine.
The money trail goes deeper than the lights. Illuminate wrote a $10,000 check for BCDC permit fees. The check was sent to Caltrans employee Robert Solotar at his private residence in Oakland. Not to BCDC offices. Not to Caltrans headquarters. His home. Solotar coordinated the correction when the check was made out incorrectly. He acted as the conduit between three state agencies for the benefit of a single private individual. A government employee receiving private permit fees at his house for a project he’s supposed to be regulating. That’s not a process. That’s a pipeline.
Insurance policies on the project are expiring. Who insures 48,000 lights on a public bridge in a seismic zone? Who pays when something goes wrong? The insurance is expiring and nobody’s talking about it.
Ben Davis was supposed to “gift” the lights to Caltrans. He never did. The gift never occurred. A gift of that magnitude requires approval by the California Department of Finance. That approval was never obtained. The lights sit on the bridge, owned by a private individual, on public infrastructure, without the required state approval for the transfer. He owns the hardware. The public owns the bridge. The private individual decides what goes on the public structure. The state never received the gift they were promised.
Any project over $3,000,000 requires a Project Initiation Document. This was never created. An $11 million installation with no Project Initiation Document. The money came in. The lights went up. The paperwork was skipped. No insurance clarity. No gift transfer. No Department of Finance approval. No Project Initiation Document. Each failure is separate. Each failure is specific. Together they form a pattern. The project was never properly approved. It was never properly documented. It was never properly insured. It was never properly transferred. It was imposed.
BATA has spent over $250,000 of public money defending Baker’s lawsuits. A public agency spending a quarter million dollars to protect a private individual’s art project from legitimate legal challenge. That’s not oversight. That’s collusion. That’s your money. That’s the money of every taxpayer in the Bay Area. Being spent to protect a private citizen who signed a government document claiming to be a public employee. From a citizen who’s trying to make the government follow its own laws.
The permit prohibits advertising and messaging. Special Condition II.D. “At no time shall the light sculpture be configured to convey advertising, notifications, or other messaging.” But Ben Davis and Leo Villareal control what the lights say. They control the patterns. They control the animation. They control the art. And art is messaging. The Soft Lights Foundation has submitted multiple requests for equal access to the Bay Lights to display their own messaging. Messages about protecting natural darkness. Messages about disability rights. Messages about the harm caused by blue-rich LED light. Caltrans has ignored every request. Ben Davis and Leo Villareal get to shout their light pollution message from a public bridge every night. The Soft Lights Foundation is denied equal time for messages that would protect the public from that very pollution. The permit says no messaging. But Davis and Villareal’s art is allowed. The Soft Lights Foundation’s messages are not. That’s not a prohibition on messaging. That’s a monopoly on messaging. The private individuals who own the hardware get to decide what the public sees. The public gets no say. The disability community gets no say. The people who are harmed by the lights get no say.
The counter-argument is simple. The project is art. It’s beautiful. It brings joy to the city. The bureaucratic hurdles are just red tape blocking a public good.
But art doesn’t require perjury.
Beauty doesn’t require a fraudulent square footage claim.
Public good doesn’t require routing government permit fees through a state employee’s private residence. Public good doesn’t require waiving safety prohibitions. Public good doesn’t require a private individual signing as a state employee. Public good doesn’t require skipping the Project Initiation Document. Public good doesn’t require spending $250,000 of public money to defend against legitimate legal challenges. Public good doesn’t require ignoring the disability community. Public good doesn’t require a monopoly on messaging. Public good doesn’t require half the lights sitting dark because the federal government says they might kill people.
If the project is good, it should survive honest review. It was never subjected to honest review. It was laundered through three agencies by a private citizen who signed as a state employee, processed by a commission director who pretended a 1.8-mile installation fits in a closet, and approved by a staff member who lacked the authority to sign the form.
The art is real.
The fraud is real.
Both things are true.
Who gets hurt when the glare pushes a person with epilepsy back inside their own home? Who pays when the insurance lapses and the private individual who owns the lights can’t cover the damage? Who decides what goes on a public bridge?
Ben Davis. Leo Villareal. Not you.
The hardware sits on the bridge. Half the lights are dark. The safety study hasn’t been done. The insurance is expiring. The gift was never given. The Project Initiation Document was never created. The ADA self-evaluation was never performed. The courts refuse to look. The politicians cheer. The agencies cover for each other. And the public is told to look at the pretty lights and stop asking questions.
The system is designed to protect itself and the private individual at its center.
The system always protects itself.
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Excellent article! “The state that says blue light is dangerous installed blue light on a public bridge and called it art.” It seems like there is something missing from this sentence.