Squeezed between two states with different geologies and between above-and-below clearance limits due to marine and air traffic, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey’s Goethals Bridge, which spans Staten Island’s Arthur Kill strait, represents the agency’s first use of a public-private partnership on a bridge project. More than halfway finished and scheduled to open in 2018, the crossing is competing with the Kosciuszko Bridge replacement over Newtown Creek in Brooklyn and Queens to become New York City’s first major bridge in more 50 years.
The twin cable-stayed structure over the Arthur Kill strait will replace a nearly 90-year-old cantilevered steel truss named for U.S. Army General George Washington Goethals, who supervised construction of the Panama Canal. Linking port facilities and Interstate 278 between Staten Island and Elizabeth, N.J., the old crossing carries some 30 million annual vehicles but has no shoulders; its four 10-ft-wide lanes are functionally obsolete.