The Bay Lights Come Back to Life on Bay Bridge | Scott Benbow’s City Guide

Picture this: you’re in your starting corral at the San Francisco Marathon in July. You have trained well, but you’re nervous. It’s cold, dark, and very early in the morning. This year, you’ll have a massive piece of art to distract you from your pre-race jitters. Affixed to vertical wires on the Bay Bridge, you’ll see a spectacular installation called The Bay Lights.

Written by SFM Ambassador Scott Benbow
Edited by Pavlína Marek

The Bridges of the Bay

In almost any other city, the Bay Bridge would be hailed as an architectural beauty. However, in San Francisco, it’s always been overshadowed by the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s for good reason; the Golden Gate Bridge, just a few miles to the northwest, is an architectural masterpiece. The bridges opened 6 months apart (Bay Bridge in November 1936; Golden Gate Bridge in May 1937), but only one is synonymous with San Francisco.

The Bay Lights installation gives the Bay Bridge a deserved glow up. Originally installed in 2013, it stretched 1.8 miles with 25,000 individually programmable white LEDs. In an instant, an essential piece of transportation infrastructure became a nightly work of art.

The Bay Lights

What made The Bay Lights installation so compelling was its restraint. Leo Villareal, the artist chosen for the commission, used only light moving in sequences that never exactly repeated and gave the bridge a pulse. The piece mirrored in some ways the constant movement around it: the water, fog, current, weather, rhythm, and the vehicles heading east and west. Despite all of this movement and flashing lights, the installation was meditative.

The original installation was meant to be temporary, scheduled for just two years. But San Franciscans loved it. When the first run ended in 2015, the lights came down, only to return a year later. By then, The Bay Lights had altered the identity of the bridge itself, making the structure a defining image of the city.

Then the lights disappeared. Succumbing to years of exposure to harsh conditions and corrosion, The Bay Lights went dark in 2023.

The night didn’t stay dark for long. On March 20, 2026, San Francisco’s bright and beloved piece of art returned. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Villareal spent the early part of March on the waterfront testing the new system against winter weather.

The revived project is a complete rebuild, with about 50,000 LEDs engineered to withstand wind, salt air, vibration, and rain that doomed the original version. And this time, when complete, it will have lights on both the west and east sides.

So, while you’re standing in the starting corral imagining yourself running over the Golden Gate Bridge, take a look at The Bay Lights. Remind yourself that you’ll be running under the beautiful bridge in a few hours; the 26-mile mark is usually right under the Bay Bridge.

About Scott

Scott Benbow is a San Francisco Marathon Ambassador, attorney, nonprofit specialist, and passionate SFM runner. He lives in San Francisco and runs the hills of our incredibly beautiful city with us every year.

Scott’s website: FoundationTrail.com