It's billed as the longest bridge of its kind in the Western Hemisphere, took 8 years and $240 million to build, and will knock an hour off the trip across the Colorado River. It's an absolutely stunning engineering accomplishment and I believe U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's prediction that it will become an iconic landmark just as has Hoover Dam. I've watched it grow over the past 5 years and been in awe every time I see it.
For Arizona, the Hoover Dam bypass bridge will do something more than cut an hour off the drive from Phoenix to Las Vegas (note, there is no Interstate connecting two of the nation's largest and fastest growing cities). Kingman and surrounding areas are expecting a building boom as people move in to live in northwest Arizona and work in Las Vegas. Talk of hundreds of thousands of new homes around Kingman has faded in the past couple years as the nation's housing problems grew, but long term, the new bridge is a game changer. The houses will come sometime, and with them, demands for groundwater.