China’s New Motorway is Built Over Water

Aug 19, 2015 9 comments

China has opened a new stretch of road that connects Xingshang County to the Zhaojun Bridge in central China’s Hubei province. A 4-km-long section of the 10-km route is built on top of an elevated bridge that runs along the middle of a river valley. The new route will cut down travel time from Xingshan to the Yiba Expressway to just 20 minutes, and at the same time treat drivers to a spectacular scenery. The journey originally took close to an hour along a steep and convoluted road.

According to the project manager of the road Chen Xingda, when the motorway was first proposed in 2013, there were three different possible routes. Two of the routes involved digging a tunnel through the mountains in the area. The third was a longer route and involved building on water. Engineers on the project chose the third option because that would enable them to protect the abundance of plants and woodland in the mountains. Those involved in the project claim this to be China’s first “ecological overwater road”. The overwater highway cost about 2 million yuan (US$320,000) to construct which was nearly half of the 4.4 million yuan ($700,000) it cost to build the entire thing 440 million yuan ($70 million) which is almost double of what it would have cost to build a traditional road with tunnels drilled through the mountains.

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Sources: Sina.com / Daily Mail / Rocket News / China Daily

Comments

  1. 10 km Highway for US$700,000 - sounds like a bargain. Can't get a house for that in some areas in North America

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    Replies
    1. A house?? the cost of this here would start with a $5,000,000 environmental assessment.

      Delete
  2. Remember back in the good ol' days when writers would proofread so that they could correct their grammatical/punctuation mistakes before their story was published? Not to mention facts...a 4KM long bridge for $320,000? Hardly. A quick Google search shows that the project cost 440 million Yuan, not 4.4 million. You might want to work on this story a bit more.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Remember back in the good old days when people didn't get their news from websites like amusingplanet.com? You might want to work on your free time some more.

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    2. Stories from China, as well as from Japan, are notoriously difficult to verify because of the lack of reliable news source. So we have to rely on websites such as RocketNews. However, it was really poor journalism on our part for not double checking that figure, and for which I apologize.

      Delete
  3. It looks like people are driving opposite directions on the same side of the road in picture 3?

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    1. No - black one has already 3 points for crossing line.

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  4. Interesting article, it may have saved the woodlands and landscapes, I think the fish species in the river will suffer from the noise. But I guess china is like most of the west. If it going to make life easier, quicker and somewhat more efficient than damn it, do it.

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  5. Every picture shows someone driving on the wrong side of the road. Classic.

    ReplyDelete

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