BAY BRIDGE
Built just before the Golden Gate Bridge, the is composed of two segments and rests on the island of Yerba Buena.
Crossing the bay and connecting San Francisco to Oakland, the Bay Bridge is actually composed of two segments and rests on the small island of Yerba Buena. The toll bridge was conceived during the California Gold Rush, with Joshua Norton as its famous advocate, but construction did not begin until 1933. Opened in November 1936, six months before the famous Golden Gate Bridge, it is one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. The steel bridge is over 7,200 meters long, with five lanes of traffic in both directions and over 280,000 automobiles per day. Originally, the bridge accommodated automobile traffic on its upper deck and trucks, cars, buses and commuter trains on the lower deck, but after the Key System discontinued rail service, the lower deck was also converted to road traffic. In 1986, the bridge was unofficially dedicated to James Rolph, mayor of San Francisco from 1912 to 1931, and then governor of California until his death in 1934. In 1989, following the Loma Prieta earthquake, the upper deck of the eastern section collapsed and the link was cut for a month. The project to build a new seismically-qualified, single-story bridge next to the old one began in 2002 and was not completed until eleven years later at a cost of $250 million. The dismantling of the old part of the bridge started in 2014 was completed in the first half of 2017. It is now possible to connect Oakland to Yerba Buena by bike or on foot.
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