Humber Bridge July 1981. With a centre span of and a total length of , the Humber Bridge was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world for 17 years, until Japan's Akashi Kaikyō Bridge opened on 5 April 1998. The road-distance between Hull and Grimsby was reduced by nearly as a consequence of the bridge. The bridge's surface takes the form of a dual carriageway with a lower-level foot and cyclepath on both sides. There is a permanent speed limit on the full length of the bridge. Each tower consists of a pair of hollow vertical concrete columns, each tall and
Ralph Freeman (1911–1998) projects: the M2 and M5 motorways, the Forth Road Bridge, the Severn Bridge, both Bosporus bridges, and the harbour tunnel and mass transit rail systems in Hong Kong. He served as president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1966-7. The pinnacle of his career was the Humber suspension bridge which, when it opened in 1981, was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, 1410m between its two 155m-high pylons. His son, Ralph (but known as Anthony), who also took up civil engineering, died in July 1998 after an accident on the Vasco da Gama bridge in Lisbon. Ralph