A steel truss cantilever design by John Alexander Waddell. It is 205 m long (672 feet) central span, 2,621 m long (8,600 feet) in total, 18.9 m wide (62 feet), has a clearance of 41.15 m (135 feet) and has four lanes for traffic. It is named after the Port Authority engineer George W. Goethals, who died before the dedication. The authority had $3 million of state money and raised $14 million in bonds to built the Goethals Bridge and the Outerbridge Crossing, the Goethals bridge construction began on September 1, 1925 and cost $7.2 million. It and the Outerbridge Crossing were opened on June 29, 1928. The Goethals Bridge replacing three ferries and augmenting the existing Arthur Kill rail bridge, its unusual mid-span height was a requirement of the New Jersey ports.
Connecting onto the New Jersey Turnpike it is one of the main routes for traffic between there and Brooklyn via the I-278 and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Until the bridge to Brooklyn was completed in 1964 the Goethals Bridge never turned a profit. The total traffic in 2002 was 15.68 million vehicles. A new parallel bridge is planned - dividing the west- and eastbound traffic between the old and new bridges.