Why is the Coronado Bridge Curved?

Tonight I found a new location to photograph the Coronado Bay Bridge.  A place with just a little bit more light than trying to photograph it from the Island of Coronado itself.  If you go a little bit west of Chicano Park (which can be dangerous for a white boy hanging out alone), you’ll find a small bridge the juts out over the water.  It is near the various naval shipyards so it provides some unique views of the bridge.  A little known fact is the Coronado Bay Bridge has two reasons why it was designed with its beautiful curves rather than going straight over the water.  The relatively short distance of between the mainland and Coronado is so short that if they built a straight bridge it would have been too low for the Navy ships to go underneath so they needed to create a curve so that they could make the bridge longer and higher.  The second reason is that in order to qualify for a city bond the bridge had to be a certain length, so they had to put the curves into to make the bridge longer.