Bridges
Get to the other side
I could see the bridge gleaming in the sun. Or was it the dam? We were camped on Roosevelt Lake. A huge Arizona lake created by damming the Salt River — back in 1911 it was the biggest dam in the world.
But I know bridges. I look for them.
We drove over it in the morning and it was a beauty:
Growing up in LA, I didn’t see many bridges. So for my high school science project, I hunted one down, driving an hour south to San Pedro for a date with the chief engineer of the Vincent Thomas Bridge.
He took me up on the catwalk below the bridge. Glorious and dizzying and noisy. He told me the bridge is so big the painting never stops. When they get to the far side they just start over again.
Maybe bridges were part of my motivation to head north from LA up to the San Francisco Bay Area where I could spot this beauty every day. 1
The Bay Area is defined by its bridges — the Golden Gate crosses the mouth of San Francisco Bay and there are four that cross the Bay. From the top of the bay to north to south: the Richmond, Bay, San Mateo and Dumbarton bridges.
In Sneakers, Robert Redford and his crew sleuth out the bad guys by doing blind bridge math. Pick the wrong bridge during rush hour, there goes your evening.
I had graduated and moved back to LA when disaster struck. The Loma Prieta earthquake not only pancaked most of the 880 through Oakland but a massive section of the top lanes of the Bay Bridge (where you drive heading into San Francisco) fell onto the bottom lanes which head back to Oakland.2 I watched it go down on TV along with millions of others just as the 1st inning of the Giants versus A’s “Bay Bridge Series” was getting underway.
CalTrans patched up the old span, building a new bridge side-by-side and then finally blowing up the old pilings. I was commuting from Oakland into the City for a good part of that and watched it happen. Two decades and $7B dollars later the new eastern span opened, crowned by a massive 500 foot tall tower made in China.
A few years ago I biked over the new span. We met in Larkspur in the Ferry Building parking lot and first went over the Richmond bridge. That was not fun. You’re biking into traffic in a makeshift bike lane with temporary barriers —honestly, it’s terrifying.
But the new Bay Bridge has an official bike lane that’s big enough for double wide strollers and dogs.
It’s a climb to get to the top of the span. From the top we could see the ferry pulling into Treasure Island. You can’t bike across the old span so we needed to catch that ferry. We didn’t — it pulled away just as we made our way off the bridge.
The view wasn’t bad waiting for the next one.
The Ferry is bike friendly.
From the Ferry Building we biked down the Embarcadero, through the Marina, and joined up with a throng of tourists in Golden Gate Park biking and walking over the Golden Gate bridge.
65 miles and six hours later — we got back to Larkspur where we started.
Three bridges and a ferry.
I went back to LA after graduating from Berkeley, but I only stayed a few years before I moved to another water city — Seattle, the Emerald city — home to more beautiful bridges.
To get from Seattle to Redmond, you have to cross Lake Washington. It’s too big for an arch bridge or a suspension bridge. Enter a third type of bridge — floating. Once I drove over the old floating bridge in a storm. It was bucking like a sea serpent; I figured that was the end.
They’ve since rebuilt it and it’s the longest floating bridge in the world.
Bridges aren’t easy. For a minute, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was one of the longest suspension bridge in the world. Until a bit of wind hit the perfect resonant frequency that amplified the structure with every gust and blew the bridge down: 3
There’s one more type of bridge — and that’s a cable bridge. My hotel in São Paulo looked down on a fine specimen of this on my last International business trip.
This is the Ponte Estaiada bridge in São Paulo. Rumor has it I returned from Brazil in 2020 and brought COVID with me.
After I left Microsoft, we moved up to the Sierra Nevada mountains, just down the street from the famed Donner Summit Rainbow Bridge on old 40.
Many a car commercial has been filmed here. That’s Donner lake below. The rainbow bridge is another variant of an arch bridge. I’ve also biked this bridge down to Donner lake and back, but it’s sketchy down and torture up.
Sonoma county north of San Francisco is criss-crossed by rivers heading to the Pacific. A lot of the bridges — like Wohler bridge here — cross the Russian river.
We rode over Wohler last month, just before they closed it for repairs. My bike was feeling the miles and needed some work too, but I got it back from the shop yesterday so now it’s time to find more bridges.
Berkeley’s master campus planners built an axis from the Campanile watch tower direct to the Golden Gate Bridge so no buildings block the view. The Golden Gate Bridge is three times longer than the Vincent Thomas.
There’s a funny scene in the graduate where Dustin Hoffman is driving towards Oakland on the top and that doesn’t happen.
I used to show this video at the beginning of presentations about how large systems can fail.
Okay, I'm obsessed with bridges, too.
Without fail, whenever we drive south and pass by enormous concrete overpasses, i stop and wonder at them being built. Like, imagine the incredible audacity to think a bridge could be built all the way UP THERE, you know? Even the ugly bridges are awesome.