California’s James “Sunny Jim” Rolph Bridge, more commonly known as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge or just the Bay Bridge, is a five-lane toll bridge spanning 8.4 miles from San Francisco to Oakland via Yerba Buena Island. The bridge opened six months before the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1936. It didn’t become the most expensive bridge in the world until recently, however.
The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, a 15 second quake that measured 6.9 on the moment magnitude scale and, coincidentally, the most expensive natural disaster in the US at the time, collapsed a section of the Bay Bridge and caused serious concerns over the bridge’s safety in the event of another major quake.
A series of controversies, ranging from whether to retrofit or entirely replace the offending section of the bridge to whether funding for the project should come from the Bay Area or the entire State of California, delayed construction on the bridge. Finally, it was decided that the Eastern span of the bridge would be replaced and the project would be funded in part by a toll increase from $3.00 to $4.00. As approximately 280,000 cars cross the bridge per day, this is a rather significant source of funding for the project.
Construction of the replacement span began in January of 2002. The project will cost an estimated 6.3 billion dollars, making it second only to Boston’s Big Dig as the most expensive public works project in the US, and is scheduled to be completed in 2012.
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how much money was this bridge
Most expensive bridge is in Germany: Baukosten 1,520,940,901,926,024 Mark
Verazzanos bridge is 13.50