After four years of ongoing construction, the new Tappan Zee Bridge (or more formally, the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge) officially opened to Westbound traffic late on Friday night. So in case you haven’t yet made the scenic trek from Westchester into Rockland, take a look and see what $4 billion looks like in half-completed bridge form.
Related: Cuomo Commemorates New Tappan Zee Bridge in a Yellow Corvette
After 2 decades of dithering by government officials and 4 years of herculean drilling, pounding, hauling and lifting by 7,000 workers, a new bridge is set to open at the Tappan Zee this weekend. It’s the first crossing on that scale that has been built in the New York region in more than half a century. Last night, our staff photographer @nytchangster made this video of the new bridge, which cost of $4 billion and will eventually be able to carry 140,000 cars a day. It’s a sleek 2-span cable-stayed design, with the cables holding up its steel decks anchored to the tops of the angled central towers. On Friday night, as the traffic volume decreases, the state police will begin gradually shutting down lanes on the old bridge. And sometime after midnight, the first cars are expected to drive over the new #TappanZee bridge.
A post shared by The New York Times (@nytimes) on Aug 24, 2017 at 6:51pm PDT
Construction of the second span is expected to be completed before the end of 2018, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
