Bay Bridge

Went out tonight with glamorous friend Si, who’s over for the week covering a conference. I’m moderating a panel session for her so we went out for a business dinner (in expense account speak) to go over strategy.

Actually it was very good, the food and company excellent, and helped by views of the Bay Bridge, which to my mind is by far the most interesting bridge in the bay, and particularly pretty at night when it’s all lit up.

The Golden Gate Bridge gets far too much attention in my opinion. Yes, it’s an engineering masterpiece and without it San Francisco would be a non-entity dependent on a ferry services, like some godforsaken medieval village. Sure, without it people would pass the city by and go up the eastern side of the bay.

But it’s also really ugly in a lot of respects, particularly the off red colour and it’s so popular a suicide spot that the city has just voted to string a net underneath it to catch the depressed and give them a second chance to think it over before they crawl to the edge of the net and finish the job.

But the Bay Bridge is what connects the city to Berkeley, Oakland and, eventually, to the state capital Sacramento. It’s used by far more people (over a quarter of a million a day) and is something of a quiet engineering marvel itself. Not to mention that its real name is delightfully silly - The James "Sunny Jim" Rolph* Bridge - and thankfully is almost never used.

The tunnel connecting the two spans that bores through Yerba Buena Island is the largest bore tunnel in the world, at 76 feet (23 m) wide, 58 feet (18 m) high, and extends over half a kilometre. The contents of the tunnel were dumped on the other side of the island and now form the bedrock of the Treasure Island residential area, which has some of the best views in the city.

I briefly considered moving there myself, until some research showed that living on loose landfill in the middle of a frigid bay was not the smartest move in an earthquake zone, due to a phenomenon called ground liquefaction.

Because the bay is so deep, and the distance so great, entirely new engineering techniques were used to build it, and it is also twin level to allow two roadways, one outbound and one inbound. One of these suffered a partial collapse in the ’89 earthquake so the eastern span is being rebuilt, slowly but surely.

All in all it’s a fascinating, and very useful structure. But to the rest of the world it’s almost invisible, and Golden Gate is the icon of the city. It all seems a tad unfair, so if you do come to the city make sure you take a picture of it.


*James Rolph, the 27th governor of California and 18 year Mayor of the city, commissioned the bridge in 1931, but died before it was constructed. He also pardoned anyone involved in California’s last lynching – to my mind the bridge deserves a better name.