Famous Bridges of America
How often do you actually stop in wonderment of these simple, yet incredibly beneficial pieces of infrastructure? Bridges can be found in every city and town across America, but let’s take a look at some of the more famous bridges that span over bodies over water and rushing rivers to help American travelers to reach the other side.
The Busiest Bridge In America
The George Washington Bridge is not only the busiest bridge in America, it’s the busiest bridge in the world! It let’s a whopping quarter of a million vehicles pass over it every single day! The two level bridge (because how else would all those cars get over it!?) has an average of 103 million vehicles pass over it annually. When you look at how high the tolls are to cross the bridge you can see that it makes a pretty penny off all that traffic, roughly $344 million a year.
The Tallest Bridge In America
The tallest bridge in America is one of it’s most famous, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. It stands at a 746 feet tall, or 68 stories to paint a better picture of it’s massive size. As for why this behemoth bridge is orange? Well when they were building the bridge the steel arrived with an orange coating to help protect it from corrosion and an architect for the bridge liked the color so much he decided that it should be painted orange, International Orange in fact.
The International Bridge In America
Speaking of International, that leads us into our next bridge — the London Bridge! This bridge was originally located in London for over 100 years when it was discovered to quite literally be falling down (hence the song). Renovations we deemed impractical so a replacement was built. A city councillor wanted to see if they could sell the crumbling bridge to the United States and he successfully found a buyer. The buyer was an American entrepreneur who had the bridge relocated, brick by brick, to a small town in Arizona where it was hoped to be an attraction.
The Longest Bridge In America
The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is not only the longest bridge in America, it is also the longest continuous bridge over water in the entire world (according to the Guinness World Records). The bridge has a whopping length of 23.82 miles long as it stretches from one end of Lake Pontchartrain to the other. The next longest bridge in America is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel at 17.6 miles long.
