ADDITIONAL CROSSINGS OF THE BAY
After little more than a decade of service, the great bridges spanning San Francisco Bay were reaching their capacities. Following the end of World War II, regional officials responded to the increasing vehicular traffic by designing and studying plans for additional crossings of the Bay.
Plans for crossings between San Francisco and Marin included a twin Golden Gate Bridge, a bridge crossing from the Presidio to Point Diablo, a subaqueous tube between Aquatic Park in San Francisco and Sausalito, and several designs for bridges along the Tiburon Peninsula corridor, which would link San Francisco and Marin County by way of Angel Island.
By 1947, eleven different crossing locations between San Francisco and Alameda County had been proposed. The plan that received the most attention was known as the Southern Crossing and had its westerly terminus in the vicinity of Third and Army Streets in San Francisco, and its easterly terminus on Bay Farm Island in Alameda, just north of the Oakland Airport.
That none of these various schemes came to pass can perhaps best be attributed to a general lack of public consensus over choosing a route that made sense financially and environmentally. Today, over a half century later, consensus remains elusive, and, in the near term, a renewal of ferryboat fleets on the Bay seems more likely than any grand scheme to cross its waters with additional bridges.
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