Long Beach International Gateway Bridge

The bridge it replaced was falling apart, wrapped in netting to catch crumbling concrete. The Long Beach International Gateway Bridge fixed that, opening to traffic in October 2020 as California’s first long-span cable-stayed bridge and a far taller, wider crossing over one of the busiest ports in the United States.

Project Scope

The six-lane, roughly two-mile crossing carries Interstate 710 over the Port of Long Beach’s back channel, replacing the 1968-era Gerald Desmond Bridge. Two single-mast towers rise about 515 feet, making it one of the tallest cable-stayed bridges in the country, and the main span gives ships a navigation clearance of roughly 205 feet, well above the old bridge’s 155. The deck measures about 166 feet wide, with room for emergency lanes and a bike-and-pedestrian path the old structure never had.

A design-build team known as the SFI Joint Venture, made up of Shimmick Construction, FCC Construction, and Impregilo, delivered the project, with engineering and design support from firms including Arup and HNTB. The build had to keep port traffic and the freeway moving the entire time, since I-710 is a primary truck route feeding the national supply chain.

Why It Matters

Roughly 15% of U.S. containerized imports move across this stretch of road, so the crossing isn’t just a local commuter route, it’s national freight infrastructure. The taller navigation clearance lets the newest, largest container ships reach port terminals that the old bridge’s height had effectively capped, protecting the port’s competitiveness against deeper-water rivals.

The bridge also stands as a proof of concept for cable-stayed design in a high-seismic region, engineered to flex and survive a major earthquake while carrying relentless truck loads. It sits in the same class of trade-and-mobility megaprojects as the country’s largest transit builds, including California’s high-speed rail program, and it shows what modern goods-movement infrastructure looks like when an aging crossing finally gets replaced rather than patched.

Project Team & Details