Golden Gate Bridge Facts and Figures

Ten facts, one line each

1. The bridge is 8,981 feet long including approaches, which is 1.7 miles or 2,737 metres.
2. The main span between the towers is 4,200 feet; each side span is 1,125 feet.
3. The towers stand 746 feet above the water and 500 feet above the roadway.
4. Each of the two main cables is 36⅜ inches thick, 7,650 feet long and holds 27,572 wires.
5. Laid end to end, the wire in the cables would run 80,000 miles.
6. The deck is 90 feet wide with a 62-foot roadway, six traffic lanes and two 10-foot sidewalks.
7. In high wind the deck can move up to 27.7 feet sideways at mid-span.
8. Construction began on 5 January 1933 and finished on 19 April 1937, ahead of schedule.
9. Around a hundred thousand vehicles cross on a typical day; the toll is southbound only.
10. The colour is International Orange, chosen by consulting architect Irving Morrow.

The cables

Two main cables carry the deck, one on each side, draped over the towers and anchored at each end. From the cables hang 250 pairs of vertical suspender ropes, 50 feet apart, and it is those you walk beside on the east sidewalk. Stand under one at the south tower and look up: the cable at that point is thicker than your thigh.

The people

Joseph Strauss was chief engineer and got the statue. Charles Ellis did much of the structural design. Leon Moisseiff was consulting engineer, and Irving Morrow, the consulting architect, chose the colour and the Art Deco detailing on the towers. Eleven workers died during construction, ten of them on 17 February 1937 when a scaffold fell through the safety net. The history page tells the rest.

The name and the colour

The bridge is named after the Golden Gate, the strait it crosses, which John C. Frémont named in 1846 after the Golden Horn of Constantinople. The paint is International Orange. Nothing about it is gold, and the name page explains why the search engines get asked this so often.

Seeing the figures for yourself

The 220-foot clearance is easiest to grasp from the water, when the bay cruise passes beneath the deck. The tower height makes sense from the sidewalk, standing at the base of the south tower on the walk across. The full length is best understood from Battery Spencer, on the viewpoints page.

Frequently asked questions