Lake Pontchartrain Causeway
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Categories: Articles with trivia sections from February 2008 | Bascule bridges | Toll bridges in Louisiana | Bridges completed in 1956 | Bridges completed in 1969 | Structures affected by Hurricane Katrina | Jefferson Parish, Louisiana | St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana | Greater New Orleans | Causeways
Not to be confused with the Pontchartrain Expressway, a section of Interstate 10 and U.S. 90 Business in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, or the Causeway, consists of two parallel bridges that are the longest bridges in the world by total length.[2] These parallel bridges cross Lake Pontchartrain in southern Louisiana. The longer of the two bridges is 23.87 miles (38.42 km) long. The bridges are supported by over 9,000 concrete pilings. The two bridges feature bascule spans over the navigation channel 8 miles (13 km) south of the north shore. The southern terminus of the Causeway is in Metairie, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. The northern terminus is at Mandeville, Louisiana.
HistoryThe idea of a bridge spanning Lake Pontchartrain dates back to the early 19th Century and Bernard de Mandeville, the founder of Mandeville. He started a ferry service that continued to operate into the mid-1930s. In the 1920s, a proposal called for the creation of artificial islands that would then be linked by a series of bridges. The financing for this plan would come from selling homesites on the islands. The modern Causeway started to take form in 1948 when the Louisiana Legislature created what is now the Causeway Commission. The original Causeway was a two-lane span that opened in 1956 at a cost of $30.7 million. A parallel two-lane span, 1/100th of a mile (20 m) longer than the original, opened on May 10, 1969 at a cost of $26 million. The Causeway has always been a toll bridge. Until 1999, tolls were collected from traffic going in each direction. To alleviate congestion on the south shore, toll collections were eliminated on the northbound span. The standard tolls for cars changed from $1.50 in each direction to a $3.00 toll collected on the North Shore for southbound traffic only. The opening of the Causeway boosted the fortunes of small North Shore communities by reducing drive time into New Orleans by up to 50 minutes, bringing the North Shore into the New Orleans metropolitan area. Prior to the Causeway, residents of St. Tammany Parish had to go around the lake, either the east side via the Rigolets Bridge on U.S. Route 90 near Slidell, Louisiana or on the west side via U.S. Route 51 through Manchac, Louisiana. After Hurricane Katrina on August 29th, 2005, videos collected showed damage to the bridge, but the damage was mostly on the unused turnaround on the older southbound span; the structural foundations remained intact. The Causeways have never sustained major damage of any sort due to hurricanes and other natural occurrences, a rarity in the causeway community. The existing fiber optic cable plant was blown out of the tray but remained intact per OTDR analysis. With the I-10 Twin Span Bridge severely damaged, the Causeway was used as a major route for recovery teams staying in highlands to the North to get into New Orleans. The Causeway reopened first to emergency traffic and then to the general public, with tolls suspended, on September 19, 2005. Tolls were reinstated by mid-October. AccidentsThe Causeway has been struck by barges on three occasions that have caused structural damage resulting in the collapse of portions of the roadway.[3]
Regulations
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