bay bridge

SAN FRANCISCO--I'm standing behind Leo Villareal, watching the well-known artist calibrate settings in the software running on his screen. Each time he moves a slider, one of the world's largest art installations -- mounted on one of the world's most-famous landmarks -- changes in an instant.

It's a gorgeous evening on the Embarcadero, San Francisco's eastern waterfront, with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge dominating the landscape in front of us, and a near-full moon doing its best to overcome the typical evening fog cover. Lights from the city, and from Oakland on the other side of the bay reflect brilliantly in the water. And with just the most subtle adjustments in his custom-designed software, Villareal makes thousands of LEDs strung out over the 1.8 mile-long western span of the bridge almost instantaneously change what they're doing, and how they're interacting with each other. … Read more

The Golden Gate Bridge turned 75 this past weekend, with a spectacular fireworks show to celebrate.

Unfortunately, some of us were home with spring colds and could only listen mournfully to the endless booming while imagining the historic show that was passing us by. Luckily, though, there's another bridge birthday happening in the Bay Area, with a related light-based extravaganza which, if all goes according to plan, should be pretty amazing -- and pretty hard to miss.

As our friends at Wired noted recently, artist Leo Villareal and his supporters want to honor the neighboring Bay Bridge on its 75th birthday by festooning it with 25,000 individually programmable white LED lights. "The Bay Lights" project will create a gigantic, shimmering "light sculpture" that responds to environmental stimuli such as the underlying water, the overriding traffic, and the surrounding weather, and will remain in place for two years.… Read more

OAKLAND -- Last week marked the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, and the end of the golden era of zeppelin passenger travel.

But anyone who lives in or around the San Francisco Bay Area is no doubt aware that these days, zeppelin travel is alive and well. That's thanks to Airship Ventures, a company run out of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., which operates one of the world's three airships, all of which were build by Zeppelin NT, a company located in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Today, during an event hosted by the cloud storage … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Starting this Memorial Day, drivers heading east across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will encounter a detour that radically changes patterns developed over many years. But now they have an iPad or iPhone app with which they can practice the new route.

At a briefing today held at the Autodesk Gallery here, the institutions running the construction of the new eastern span of one of the busiest bridges in the world--CalTrans, the Bay Area Toll Authority, and the California Transportation Authority--unveiled Bay Bridge Explorer, an iOS app that lets people "drive" the detour as a way of … Read more

During the Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17, 1989, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge nearly collapsed. Just one or two seconds more of shaking along the San Andreas fault zone, says Caltrans' Bart Ney, and the whole bridge would have come down.

Today, the seismic innovations being incorporated into the construction of the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge are far more advanced. The construction is a race against the clock, and engineers say the new bridge, once built, will be secure enough to survive a "massive level earthquake--the largest you would … Read more

This week, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) announced a partnership with Google to bring the planned Bay Bridge to Google Earth. The bridge, under construction since 2002 and slated to be completed in 2013, will be mapped in Google Earth, with the currently-under-construction and completed portions visible in varying opacities.

We rode along with Google Earth co-founder Michael Jones to take a look at the live site construction in the San Francisco Bay. Take a look into the future in Google Earth, here (zipped file).

You can get more details on the new Google Earth feature in our story, &… Read more

OAKLAND, Calif.--Google on Friday introduced an interactive view of the San Francisco Bay Area's Bay Bridge to users of its Google Earth mapping software.

The new view (zipped file), which can be seen by all Google Earth users who have 3D buildings turned on, provides a sneak peak at a completed version of the bridge. This includes a live representation of ongoing construction of the self-anchored suspension span, the final piece that will cross the divide between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island, connecting the East Bay to downtown San Francisco.

Google and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) … Read more

SAUSALITO, Calif.--At last, I'm home. After 25 days, 4,891 miles and a huge number of motels, Road Trip 2007 is over.

I can barely type at this point, but it has been an amazing run. I was in six states (California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado--even if the latter was only for about 30 seconds at Four Corners), several national parks, some great museums, and I got to look at a heck of a lot of airplanes.

Along the way, I went to three hot springs, ate a whole lot of really bad food, listened … Read more