The Golden Gate: A Bridge Too Deadly?

The cost is at the upper end of estimates for erecting a barrier to prevent the kind of leaps that killed more than 200 in the same period.

Advocates say the board's resistance reflects a widely held and deeply seated repugnance of suicide.

"Probably so," Stroeh said. "It's a sad commentary on humanity, but it's considered a weakness. I think that's changing."

The change coincided with a flurry of mortifying publicity. The bridge rail returned to the board's agenda after the 2006 release of the documentary "The Bridge." Stirred by a New Yorker article published three years earlier titled "The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge," filmmaker Eric Steel stationed camera crews on either end of the span for a year, training lenses on the walkways. The film shows more than a dozen people tumbling toward the water as the camera lurches to keep the falling body in frame.

"Makes you face it," Stroeh said.

'I Just Wanted to Go Away'

On Aug. 20, 1985, Baldwin had the Golden Gate firmly in mind.

"It was a long drive. I was thinking a lot," he said in a telephone interview from Angel's Camp, Calif., where Baldwin tells the story each October to students in the mechanical drafting classes he teaches at the local high school.

"The closer I got to the bridge, the happier I got, because all this was going to be over. And one of the weird things I thought about was, the day after I jumped people would go: 'All right, a new day. We'll go on with our lives.' There would be no pain, no loss, no suffering.

"It's a brutal thing to think of yourself as so minuscule in people's lives."

He parked in the public lot on the San Francisco side, walked onto the bridge and peered down at the rocks. "I didn't want to have to be a mess. I wanted it to be a clean break. I just wanted to go away.

"I got to the middle of the bridge, and I started going, 'Can I do this? Am I strong enough to do this?'

"I started looking around. I didn't want anybody to touch me. I didn't want anybody to be aware of me. This was a bona fide attempt."