The Road to an Even More Efficient Port

The Gerald Desmond replacement bridge will open in 2018.

LOS ANGELES—The Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles are now well underway on the Gerald Desmond Bridge replacement project. The new bridge will be both wider and taller to allow for improved traffic flow and for larger ships to pass underneath the bridge. The $1.5 billion project is part of the port’s $4 billion modernization improvements, which have included changes to operations and sustainability as well as infrastructure.

“We opened the bridge in 1968, which doesn’t seem that long ago, but it is actually a long time ago in terms of the kind of job that we expect this bridge to do,” Lee Peterson, communications lead at the Port of Long Beach, tells GlobeSt.com. “It is a bridge for motor vehicles that connects the Long Beach Downtown area to Terminal Island, which is right in the middle of the biggest seaport in the United States. This bridge really serves traffic containers, and the bridge was simply not built for the growth of these ports and the job that it has to do today. We are building a bridge that is higher to allow larger ships to pass underneath, and that is wider and safer to facilitate vehicular traffic. We got together with Caltrans and other funding partners and other funding partners to rebuild this bridge.”