Spanning 1.7 miles, the Mackinac Bridge is the world's third longest suspension bridge. The Mighty Mac, as Michiganders sometimes call it, spans the Straits of Mackinac, connecting Michigan's two non-contiguous Peninsulas, beginning in Mackinaw City in the Lower Peninsula and ending in St. Ignace in the Upper Peninsula. While Engineer David B. Steinman began envisioning the bridge in the 1880s, construction did not end until 1957, when the bridge was opened to the public for the first time.
The Golden Gate Bridge spans a strait that connects the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean and connects the city of San Francisco to Marin County, California. When the bridge was completed in 1937, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world at 1.7 miles. While eight bridges surpass the Golden Gate in length today, many still consider it a beautiful piece of architecture and an important symbol of the city of San Francisco and the state of California.
Today the longest suspension bridge in the world is the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, spanning two and a half miles connecting the city of Kobe, Japan on the main island of Honshu to Iwaya on Awaji Island. Construction of the bridge began in 1986 and finished in 1998. Before then, people took ferries which often sunk due to storms, killing hundreds of people; this outraged many in the Japanese government, prompting them to allocate funds to construct a bridge.
The Danyang--Kunshan Grand Bridge is not a suspension bridge but rather a rail viaduct between Shanghai and Nanking in eastern China. According to the "Guinness Book of World Records," this bridge currently claims the title of the world's longest bridge, covering 102 miles between two of China's largest cities. Construction of the Danyang--Kunshan Grand Bridge took only one year, beginning in 2010, and opening to the public in 2011.
