Bayside Bridge (Pinellas County, Florida)

About

The Bayside Bridge (officially known as the Dillinger McCabe Bayside Bridge) is a girder bridge in Pinellas County which crosses over the northwesternmost end of Tampa Bay, connecting Clearwater, Florida and Largo, Florida. Construction began in the early 1990s and was completed in the summer of 1993, officially opening for traffic on June 2 of that year. Originally conceived in the 1970s as the 49th Street Bridge, a toll-levied part of the 12-mile (19 km) Pinellas Parkway, the current six-lane twin-span bridge provides direct, unmitigated access from eastern Clearwater to St. Petersburg/Clearwater International Airport by connecting McMullen Booth Road to 49th Street North and also serves as a bypass for heavily congested US 19. The speed limit is 55 mph (or about 88 km/h) until McMullen Booth. Due to cambering differences, cars experience bouncing when traveling in the northbound lanes. This occurs for the first (southern) half of the northbound span. It features a SPUI interchange at State Road 60 and a diamond interchange on the south end of the bridge. Along with the bridge, a $12 million interchange was built at the intersection of 49th Street and Roosevelt Boulevard. The bridge was completed before McMullen Booth Road was widened, dumping up to 36,000 cars a day onto the two-lane road. On streets such as Marlo Road, drivers could wait as long as 15 minutes before being a

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.