As planned and planned, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is closed for the next four days. The bridge that we took for our entire lives will be no more, as the detoured route will be in place starting Tuesday morning.

We captured a little history in the making, with the very last cars making their way on the old Eastern Span over to Yerba Buena Island.  Here are screenshots taken from 8pm through 9pm tonight.  You can see the last passenger cars, no traffic at all, construction vehicles arriving, and apparatus lighting up and settling in…below.

The weekend activities will be fascinating to behold, because of the sheer project scale:  the Oakland Bay Bridge undergoes its very own bypass surgery.  While the new section of bridge is a “temporary fix” for the next few years, this replacement takes a highly-orchestrated feat of engineering ingenuity.

Construction’s supposed to wrap up by the wee hours of Tuesday, and we are holding our collective breaths that the bypass succeeds.  Maybe the bridge karma is good right now, and this project will even finish up early like the smaller project two years ago.

In the meantime?  See what’s happening live at the Caltrans construction video, which works really well.  Also some of the local TV stations have nice video streams:  CBS5 video cam – KTVU2 video cam – ABC7 video cam – KRON4 video cams.

For any Oakland-to-San Francisco commuters, please feel free to share your war stories tomorrow.  We feel for you.  The rest of us will avoid that other city for now, thank you.