Captain Cook Bridge, Brisbane

So, I'm here at the Captain Cook Bridge, right over the Brisbane River. It's pretty impressive, actually. It was built just for cars and finished up in late 1972, with the naming ceremony happening that December. It officially opened for traffic in early 1973. Before that, though, there was a one-time pedestrian walk across it on January 21, 1973, organized by the Rotary Club of Stones Corner, which is kind of cool to think about.

This bridge connects Gardens Point in the CBD to Kangaroo Point and South Brisbane on the other side. It’s a multi-span, precast prestressed concrete bridge, and it's actually two separate bridges side-by-side, each carrying four lanes of traffic for north-south movement. It's part of the Pacific Motorway and the main route into the city center from the south. Apparently, when it was finished, its main span of 183 meters held the world record for this type of structure, though only for about three months before a Japanese bridge surpassed it. Back in 2007, it was Queensland’s busiest traffic bridge, with over a million vehicles crossing weekly.