For a decade, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge did something that no infrastructure project is supposed to do: it made people feel wonder. Twenty-five thousand white LEDs danced along 1.8 miles of suspension cables, creating patterns that never repeated -- abstract sequences inspired by water, traffic, and weather that shifted from dusk to dawn. The Bay Lights was not just public art. It was a nightly argument that the Bay Bridge, perpetually overshadowed by its more photogenic neighbor to the west, deserved to be seen.
The idea originated in September 2010, when Ben Davis of Words Pictures Ideas, a PR firm hired by Caltrans to publicize the new eastern span construction, looked at the Bay Bridge and saw a canvas. Davis contacted light artist Leo Villareal, who had an exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art. Both men traced their creative instincts back to Burning Man, the annual art and music festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Villareal had attended since 1994 and eventually joined its board of directors. His first light sculpture was modest -- 16 blinking lights arranged in a grid, meant as a beacon for finding his camp at night. From that prototype to 25,000 LEDs spanning a bridge, the leap was enormous, but the impulse was the same: make the darkness beautiful.
Installation was an exercise in creative engineering under brutal constraints. Construction workers attached each LED individually to the vertical steel cables connecting the bridge deck to the suspension cables overhead, spacing them every 12 inches and securing them with 60,000 zip ties. Caltrans closed a lane of traffic late at night so electricians could work. The installation required 100,000 feet of special cabling for power, networking, and communications with the control computer. Villareal programmed the lights to create abstract patterns ascending and descending the cables, sequences that appeared to ripple across the bridge. The system ran from dusk to dawn, costing roughly $30 per day in electricity -- about $11,000 annually. The opening ceremony on March 5, 2013, drew crowds along the waterfront, and an estimated 50 million people saw the lights before the initial installation ended in March 2015.
What was intended as a temporary commemoration of the Bay Bridge's 75th anniversary became something San Francisco could not let go. When the initial two-year permits expired in March 2015, Caltrans took the lights down for bridge maintenance. A crowdfunding campaign raised less than hoped, but organizers pivoted to larger donors and ultimately secured the $4 million needed for permanent, weather-resistant fixtures. The lights were re-lit on January 30, 2016, and gifted to the state of California. The Bay Area Toll Authority agreed to allocate up to $250,000 per year from toll revenues for maintenance. But the Bay's harsh conditions -- wind, salt, moisture -- eventually won. By 2023, dark patches proliferated where LEDs failed faster than they could be replaced, and on March 5, 2023, exactly ten years after the opening ceremony, the lights went dark.
An $11 million fundraising effort launched to bring the lights back, drawing million-dollar donations from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, and investor Jerry Dodson. The new version was engineered with 48,000 LEDs -- double the original count -- using a purpose-built system designed to withstand the bridge's demanding marine environment. On March 20, 2026, the lights returned to the Bay Bridge in a grand relighting ceremony, three years after going dark. A second phase, dubbed Bay Lights 360, is planned to expand visibility to additional Bay Area communities. The Bay Lights proved something its creator knew from his first night at Burning Man: there is a deep human hunger to see the darkness transformed.
The western span of the Bay Bridge stretches between Yerba Buena Island (37.819N, 122.349W) and San Francisco. The LED installation covers the north-facing cables of the suspension span. Spectacular at night from the air. Nearest airports: KSFO (13nm south), KOAK (8nm east). Best viewed at 2,000-4,000 ft AGL after sunset.