Gephyrophobia

B. and I both have this. Here's an article in today's New York Times. This picture looks like something out of my nightmares. It's the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which traverses Tampa Bay. We drove across it once when I was a kid (the older version of it). I remember my mother being terrified.

From the article:

The Verrazano-Narrows bridge has been called a study in grace.

For Jan Steers, it was a study in terror.

Even thinking about driving across the 4,260-foot suspension span made her start to feel dizzy, made her heart race, her breath tightening into short rapid gasps. . . .

The Tappan Zee Bridge, rising more than 150 feet over the Hudson River, appears to inspire particular panic — so much so that New York State offers the skittish a chauffeur who will transport them across the span.

Similar rescue measures are provided in other places around the country with especially fearsome bridges. Authorities at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, for example, will dispatch a tow truck to pull panic-stricken drivers to the other side. The Mackinac Bridge, connecting Michigan’s Lower and Upper Peninsulas, provides a transport service like the Tappan Zee’s. [See here also regarding the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.] Mrs. Steers’s phobia was so severe that she was virtually trapped on Staten Island for 13 years. She missed her brother’s wedding in Brooklyn. She sent her husband and two children off on family vacations without her. She had never seen her sister’s house at the Jersey Shore. . . .

On Sept. 20, Mrs. Steers took a small dose of Ativan, a tranquilizer, and got in the car with Mrs. Guardino, who was the driver, and a nurse. She was armed with a video recorder to tape her ride. “I went off Staten Island for the first time in 13 years, and I did O.K.,” she said. . . .

There are very few bridges I drive (or bike) across in Miami, and I'll never drive to Key West again (the last two times I went there, I flew--in no time). Here's the Seven-Mile Bridge in the Keys (a brief stretch of it). It's just a two-lane bridge (older one at right, which is now a fishing pier--what a terror that was):

This is the Mackinac Straits Bridge in Michigan: