Longest Bridges in The World
It's more than 100 miles long incorporates half a million tons of steel and took just four years to build there are bridges there are very long bridges and then there is Longest Bridges in The World and therefore greatest bridge but where is it what does it carry and has it recently been overtaken by an even longer bridge
join us now as we rock up to the metaphorical toll booth for a good long look at the world's longest bridge our journey today takes us to the people's republic of china where historically unprecedented public spending and a single-minded nation-building approach to infrastructure planning means the
Chinese now consume a whopping 50% of all the world's steel and as much as 70% of its cement every single year china's frantic development program means the country's vast construction industry can nowadays boast some pretty impressive kit not least the world's largest crawler crane a device that
literally builds skyscrapers and the world's most powerful pumped concrete truck not to mention another miscellaneous insanity such as this SLG 932 bridge building biomoth fondly nicknamed the iron monster but forget about the tools themselves the actual projects china is building from colossal airports
Highest Bridge in The World
to world-beating dams are monumental on a scale that could scarcely have been imagined just a generation ago like for instance our subject today the Danyang Kunshan grand bridge recognized by Guinness world records as the longest bridge on earth the Danyang Kunshan grand bridge is situated in
china's Jiangsu province and while it's certain only, not the most beautiful or elegant span ever dreamt up by engineers it's nonetheless remarkable in its ambition and utterly breathtaking in scope extending some 164.8 kilometers that's 102.4 miles from end to end it carries an important high-speed rail link
connecting the city of Nanjing with the futuristic megalopolis the futuristic megalopolis of shanghai as such it runs broadly parallel with the almighty Yangtze river which meanders anywhere from 8 kilometers to 80 kilometers proximity from the ground project as you'd probably expect from such a
lengthy bridge it crosses a startling array of different habitats stalking variously across rice paddies farms winding streams busy canals rushing rivers broad lakes undulating hills and yawning chasms you've probably figured out by now that the Danyang Kunshan grand bridge doesn't consist of just one
gaping 100 miles span instead it's built on the model of a viaduct which allows it to rise and fall with the terrain and even factor in the curvature of the earth itself as such 9500 concrete pilings march across the Chinese landscape connected by the slender concrete bridge sections that carry the all-important
the railway itself it's not just empty countryside passing underneath by the way the Danyang Kunshan grand bridge also grazes the northern edges of significant population centers including Kunshan Suzhou Wu Xi Jiangsu and Banyan when the bridge builder reached Suzhou the project encountered its single greatest
obstacle the Yangcheng lake here the bridge is forced to stride a full 9 kilometers or 5.6 miles across open water a section that in itself required 2,000 pillars and countless steel cables not to mention a complex naval ballet of barges and submarine construction platforms that were required to build this
challenging stretch apparently this section can withstand the impact of an errant naval vessel weighing as much as 300,000 tons weather typhoons and even survive a magnitude 8 earthquake official figures released by the Chinese government suggest the overall cost of the grand bridge which was completed
in 2011 come to an eye-watering 8.5 billion dollars that's roughly 51 million dollars for each individual mile of the bridge still the builders reported being china road and bridge corporation CRBC a subsidiary of china communications construction company need to remain constantly vigilant even today as the
the bridge is located within the ancient Yangtze River delta the soil it sits on is soft and so necessitates constant monitoring and even periodic reinforcement it's all apparently worth it from the end user's perspective though with the journey times on the route apparently slashed by hours and even halved on
same stretches and despite the project's mind-blowing scope incorporating 500, 000 tons of steels and fully 2.5 million cubic meters of concrete it was completed in just four short years the bridge has even become something of a tourist attraction in its own right and during construction employed an estimated
10, 000 local workers impressive as the Danyang Kunshan grand bridge no doubt is it's arguably been exceeded if not quite in length but sheer grandeur by another recent Chinese bridge project this recently opened megastructure spanning the pearl river estuary has been dubbed the longest sea spanning bridge
in the world connecting Hong Kong and Macau with the city of Zhuhai on the Chinese mainland this vast project called the hong kong Zhuhai bridge by western commentators cost around 20 billion dollars took 9 years to build and used 400, 000 tons of steel that's roughly 8 times of the amount of steel in
sydney's iconic harbor bridge or 80 Eiffel towers its pillars are embedded into the seafloor itself and the crossing incorporates not one but two artificial islands connected by a four-mile-long submerged tunnel designed to allow all-important heavy shipping to pass over the crossing unimpeded it was
opened in 2018 by Chinese premier Xi Jinping and represents part of the regime's grand plan to forge a so-called greater bay area in the south of china think of this as a new-minted population hub with a population of some 68 million and intended to potentially rival California's silicon valley the new
the bridge incorporates revolutionary tech such as cameras that monitor yawns in drivers and even blood pressure checks which hope to prevent tragic and costly tiredness related accidents on the structure critics of the project point to the fact 10 workers died during construction and that the scale of works
unacceptably endangered wildlife most notably the dwindling local white dolphin community down to less than 50 dolphins from a population of some 188 individuals in 2003 it's also been suggested that the bridge is part of china's controversial ongoing quest to integrate reluctant hong kong ever closer
into the mainland eroding the freedoms and democracy that have long made hong kong unique and special the bridge isn't even open to the public as such to use the crossing folks from hong kong require a special permit for which they need to meet some pretty strict criteria this could be issued for paying
significant taxes on the Chinese mainland donating large sums to charity or official membership of select political cultures it's reported that there will be no public transport crossing the bridge it's further been argued by critics that the hong kong Zhuhai Macau bridge wasn't even needed from an
infrastructure point of view another bridge is currently being built between nearby Shenzhen and Zhongshan just north of Zhuhai it's been suggested that by 2030 that newer bridge will mean traffic on the hong kong's you Macau bridge will drop significantly basically it's redundant remarked hong kong
democracy advocate Eddie chu our guess is Chiba will simply cross that bridge when they come to it what do you think does a viaduct technically count as one long bridge or lots of little bridges all stuck together Longest Bridges in The World .
