History
The bridge was built to replace the ferries that connected San Pedro and Terminal Island, in anticipation of increased traffic volume accompanying growth of the port. State legislator Vincent Thomas, representing San Pedro, was the bridge's champion. A special act of the legislature was required in order to name the bridge after Thomas while he was still in office.
Throughout the bridge's construction and in the early years after its opening, it was derided as a "bridge to nowhere". In the 1970s, however, its importance drastically increased as the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach displaced those of the San Francisco Bay Area as the principal port on the U.S. West Coast. Today, the Vincent Thomas Bridge carries a considerable volume of truck traffic from the southernmost slips of the Port of Los Angeles, in San Pedro, onto the Terminal Island Freeway and eventually to the southern end of the Long Beach Freeway; from there, freight goes from the port complex to the rail yards of East Los Angeles and the Inland Empire.
In January 2005, after 17 years of planning and fundraising, the bridge was illuminated with blue LEDs, powered by solar panels. There are 160 lights on the bridge and it is the first combined use of solar power and LEDs in a bridge lighting installation.
Read more about this topic: Vincent Thomas Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)