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The San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge is a pair of bridges spanning San Francisco Bay of California, in the United States. As part of Interstate 80 and the direct road route between San Francisco and Oakland, it carries approximately 270,000 vehicles per day on its two decks. It has... one of the longest spans in the world. The toll bridge was conceived as early as the gold rush days, but construction did not begin until 1933. Designed by Charles H. Purcell, and built by American Bridge Company, it opened for traffic on November 12, 1936, six months before the Golden Gate Bridge. It originally carried automobile traffic on its upper deck, and trucks and trains on the lower, but after the closure of the Key System, the lower deck was converted to road traffic as well. In 1986, the bridge was unofficially dedicated to James B. Rolph. The bridge consists of two main spans of roughly equal length, a western span connecting downtown San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island and an eastern span connecting the island to Oakland. The main part of the western span is a suspension bridge while the main part of the eastern span is a cantilever bridge.
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Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724. Incorporated in 1852, Oakland is the county seat of Alameda County and is a central hub city for a region of the San Francisco... Bay Area known as the East Bay. The city lies directly across the bay from San Francisco. Oakland's territory covers what was once a mosaic of coastal terrace prairie, oak woodland, and north coastal scrub. Oakland served as a rich resource when its hillside oak and redwood timber were logged to build San Francisco, and Oakland's fertile flatland soils helped it become a prolific agricultural region. During the California Gold Rush, Oakland became the main staging post for passengers and cargo journeying between the Bay Area and the Sierra foothills. In the late 1860s, Oakland was selected as the western terminal of the Transcontinental Railroad. It continued to grow into the 20th century with its busy port, shipyards, and a thriving automobile industry.
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San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.6 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland. The only consolidated city-county in California, it encompasses a land area... of about 46.9 square miles on the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, giving it a density of about 17,179 people per square mile . It is the most densely settled large city in the state of California and the second-most densely populated large city in the United States after New York City. San Francisco is the fourth most populous city in California and the 13th most populous city in the United States, with a population of 805,235 as of the 2010 Census. The San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metropolitan area has a population of 4,335,391. In 1776, colonists from Spain established a fort at the Golden Gate and a mission named for Francis of Assisi a few miles away.
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