Sunshine Skyway Bridge

In June, 1982, construction began on this 4 mile (6.4 km) bridge across Tampa Bay, Florida.
The main span is a cable-stayed structure with a precast deck superstructure. The Sunshine Skyway Bridge has a main span of 1200 ft, and a vertical clearance of 193 ft. Completed in April, 1987, at a construction cost of approximately $245 million, the bridge safely carries four lanes of traffic (20,000 cars a day) back and forth from Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) to Manatee County (Bradenton), Florida.
The Sunshine Skyway Bridge is the world's longest cable-stayed concrete bridge. It is probably the best known of the several dozen cable-stayed bridges that have been built in the United States since the late 1970s.

Its popularity may be due to its unique color:

Twenty-one steel cables support the roadway. The cables are sheathed in steel pipes, nine inches in diameter. The pipes were painted a brilliant yellow to reflect its location: the Sunshine State.

Or it may be because the bridge also boasts an interesting history:

The Sunshine Skyway isn't the first bridge to span the broad mouth of the Tampa Bay. In fact, a four-mile steel cantilever bridge used to be where the new Sunshine Skyway now stands. But during a violent thunderstorm on the morning of May 9, 1980, the freighter Summit Venture plowed into the cantilever bridge. More than 1,000 feet of the bridge fell into the bay, killing 35 people (most of them in a Greyhound Bus) instantly.The Florida Department of Transportation began construction on a safer Sunshine Skyway Bridge only days later. The accident, one of the worst bridge disasters in U.S. history, forever raised a nation's consciousness about protecting bridges from wayward ships. Supports for the new Sunshine Skyway have a state-of-the-art design that is supposed to keep such a tragedy from happening again. More than 300 precast concrete segments were linked together with high-strength steel cables to form the roadway. Protecting the new bridge from ships was a big priority, so they installed large concrete islands, called dolphins, around each of the bridge's six piers to absorb unwanted impact. The dolphins around each pier were designed to withstand the impact of an 87,000-ton ship traveling at 10 knots. Since it opened to traffic in 1987, the sleek, new Sunshine Skyway has won dozens of engineering and design awards. Forty-foot-wide roadways run on either side of the cables. This design allows drivers to have unobstructed views of the water. Tampa is a busy shipping port. To ensure that navigation would not be blocked, engineers designed the bridge to soar over 190 feet above the water.

Removal of the old bridge was one of the largest bridge demolitions in Florida's history.

The sheer height of the span also make it popular for darker reasons as well,
it's the #3 bridge in the country for jumpers. The plunge to the water lasts about 3.5 seconds. Most people are killed when they hit the water at 75 mph, breaking their necks and rupturing their organs. Some live for minutes before they drown.


Bridge Fee NOTE:

The Bridge is a toll bridge and as of the time of the posting the toll to cross is $1.50 in each direction. Which translates to $3 round trip.