Construction on a new bridge over the Yangtze River at Hankou, a business district in Wuhan City, broke ground on Friday.
It will be the 62nd bridge over the Yangtze, and the seventh for Wuhan.
The new bridge will start from Jiang'an, Hankou, on the northern bank, and end at Qingshan of Wuchang, a district for government departments and universities, on the southern bank.
The new bridge will be a cable-stayed bridge with three piers and a total length of 6,500 meters. It will have the largest span of any three-tiered bridge in the world, according to its designer, the Institute of Surveys and Designs affiliated to China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group Co Ltd.
With a budget of 4.8 billion yuan (about 686 million U.S. dollars and a life span of 100 years, the new bridge is meant to be a key part of Wuhan's second ring road. It will stand 24 meters above the water surface and have six lanes, alongside paths for pedestrians totaling 2.25 meters.
The bridge will be finished in late July 2011, according to China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group Co Ltd., one of the builders.
The Yangtze, China's longest river, stretches 6,300 km, and from northwest China's Qinghai Province to the East China Sea.
Hanjiang, a major tributary of the Yangtze, joins the main stream of the Yangtze at Wuhan before surging head eastward into the sea. Both rivers split the city into three parts: Hankou, Wuchang and Hanyang.
Ferry services used to be the sole means of transport for across the river before October 1957 when the Wuhan highway-railway bridge, the first of its kind on Yangtze, was put into operation.
However, the bridge is overburdened with about 100,000 motor vehicles and 300 trains each day. The new bridge will share the heavy traffic flow on the Wuhan Yangtze River Highway-Railway Bridge.
Apart from this new bridge, five bridges are in use over the Yangtze in Wuhan, and one more is being built.
Source: Xinhua
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