The original four-lane roadway was designed for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey by Swiss master bridge-builder Othmar Ammann and architect Cass Gilbert.

The new roadways opened on May 24, 2019, with each carrying two lanes of unidirectional motor traffic plus shoulders for disabled vehicles, in addition to a separate path for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Bayonne Bridge was designed by Swiss master bridge-builder Othmar Ammann and architect Cass Gilbert.

It spans the Kill Van Kull between Port Richmond in Staten Island, New York, and Bayonne in Hudson County, New Jersey.

[3]: 12  The bridge originally featured a mid-span clearance above the water of 151 feet (46 m), adequate for the United States Navy's tallest ships at the time.

[11][9] The arch is influenced by the Hell Gate Bridge in New York City, designed by Ammann's mentor Gustav Lindenthal.

To do this, engineers used hydraulic jacks to support the two sides of the arch while the two pieces, consisting of prefabricated truss segments that were made up of high-strength alloy steel, were being built toward a point in a middle.

[13][20] Time referred to the symmetric detail of the bridge as "impressive and haunting", while the commune of Bayonne in France sent a congratulatory telegram.

[23]: 174 [4] Between 1939 and 1942, during World War II, the space under the Bayonne Bridge's Staten Island approach became the Archer Daniels Midland Manhattan Project Storage Site, utilized for storing uranium.

[3]: 19  To save energy during the 1973 oil crisis, the decorative lighting across the arch span was shut off temporarily that year.

[27][28] On October 2, 1990, heavy truck traffic was temporarily banned after a crane being towed by a tugboat struck the center span.

[30] On October 12, 1991, the bridge was closed for inspection and repair after a container ships loading boom damaged five of the arches' stringer beams.

new lighting was installed on the plazas and approaches, and improvements were made to the Morningstar Road off-ramp under a separate contract.

Later that same year, permanent maintenance and construction platforms were built beneath the roadway and the approaches to allow for easier inspection.

[21] In the late 2000s, the Port Authority began to plan a project to allow larger container ships to use the Kill Van Kull.

[34] In August 2009, the Port Authority started a planning analysis to determine how to fix the air draft problem.

[38]: PDF p. 4  The quickest option they identified, and the one ultimately chosen, was a $1.7 billion project to raise the bridge's roadway to increase its height by 40 percent, which could be accomplished by 2019 at the earliest.

Despite its duration and cost, which precluded the start of construction until 2013, it was one of the Coast Guard's quickest environmental reviews for such a major project.

[48] Extending the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line to Staten Island over the bridge has been proposed,[49] though final design plans do not include a rapid transit component.

[50] Finally, the project would support nearly 2,800 jobs[46] and $240–380 million in wages throughout the construction industry,[7] as well as $1.6 billion of economic activity.

[51] The Port Authority believed that it was possible to build the new roadway without interrupting traffic flow between Staten Island and Bayonne.

[55] In this timeline, removal of the existing roadway would be completed by late 2015, in time for the opening of the widened Panama Canal.

[33][59] On April 24, 2013, the Port Authority's Board of Commissioners awarded a $743.3 million contract to a joint venture of Skanska Koch and Kiewit Infrastructure Company.

[51][60] The construction involved building support columns first, then adding prefabricated road segments using a gantry crane that rolled on top of the arch.

[59] Temporary bridge closures allowed new floor beams to be attached to the arch's ropes in order to support steel stringers that would hold up the new roadway.

The delays in the project meant that, with the expansion of the Panama Canal being completed in mid-2016, larger ships would not be able to serve Newark, thus possibly negatively affecting traffic to other ports on the United States' East Coast.

Also on February 20, the Bayonne Bridge became the first Port Authority crossing to use a fully automated and cashless electronic toll collection system.

[75] After they were implemented on the George Washington Bridge in December 2023, the 11 K1 call boxes on the pedestrian path were upgraded to utilize the Knightscope Emergency Management System (KEMS) in March 2024.

The route's termini are the Hylan Boulevard bus terminal in Eltingville, Staten Island and the 34th Street Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Station in Bayonne.

[7][100][101] The bridge and surrounding Bayonne community was also featured in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind and the HBO prison drama Oz.