The Golden Gate Bridge near San Francisco is one of the great architectural icons of the United States, but people have been facing a nightmare called rush-hour traffic on the bridge for decades. So when a person comes across a roadway like the one on top of this bridge, there is some heavy traffic that needs to find its way through. Naturally, a situation like that calls for some creative designing to make sure that everything runs smoothly. With the help of some handy movable barriers, it all works out like a charm. However, there is nobody to go out there and move those barriers by hand, so that’s where the Road Zipper steps on the scene and gets into action.

On the following video you are about to see some close ups of the Road Zipper Machine as it repositions the new Moveable Median Barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge.

The system is nearly 13,340 feet long, consisting of steel clad units that are filled with high density concrete and pinned together in order to form a semi-rigid median barrier. Here you can see two vehicles, known as “zipper trucks” that transfer the barriers from one place to another.

The Road Zipper is produced by the company Barrier Systems Inc., based in Rio Vista, California.  The Road Zipper straddles the median as it drives across the whole bridge, repositioning the barriers laterally across the width of one lane.

This system is a huge improvement comparing to the old system which used yellow plastic pylons to form a divider, which as it can be seen on the video is still in partial use to block off some lanes at the toll plaza.

Check out one of the zipper trucks doing its job in the video below and give us your opinion on this attempt to make the traffic on the bridge as efficient as possible.