The bridge, while very interesting as a large infrastructure project is laughably useless for many stakeholders.
Own a car in Hong Kong and want to drive across it to Macau? You need to get vehicle registration plates (some "electronic" or temporary) in 3 jurisdictions. You also need insurance for 3 jursidictions. Also, you can only drive to a parking lot outside of Macau and then transfer to public transit to enter the city. And you need to register for a parking space 12 hours before your trip. Watch this hilarious HK government video on the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO3bNlB9j9o
But you don't own a car! Like most Hong Kongers, you take public transit. Surely this bridge will make it faster than the 1 hour ferry ride that leaves from 2 ferry piers in the middle of the city every 15 minutes or so all day and night. Unfortunately this isn't the case. The buses across the bridge from Hong Kong leave from the airport and take 40 minutes. You'll have to take another bus from the airport to the city at the cost of another 45 to 60 minutes.
This is a political project to show that Hong Kong and Macau are being integrated into China.
As political projects go, this certainly isn't the worst of them. It's better than the other things governments do to bolster domestic support like wars or locking up people you don't like. At least we'll all get to have a fun day trying out the bridge and something for tourists to take pictures of as they land in Hong Kong and Macau.
Perhaps in the future policies will change and it will become easy to us the bridge as a normal bridge.
I would have greatly appreciated this bridge being open when I stayed in Macau for a few days and had to fly home out of Hong Kong. There was a lot of overhead time with the ferry -- even with the Skypier transfer (and ferries to the airport do not run every 15 minutes). We left our hotel at noon for a 6:15pm flight.
... while a graphical representation pops up of three government authorities in three jurisdictions together with a three-step application process that takes only 12 business days to process, after which you need to purchase the required insurance from each of the three jurisdictions... yup, crossing a bridge has never been simpler.
>Surely this bridge will make it faster than the 1 hour ferry ride that leaves from 2 ferry piers in the middle of the city every 15 minutes or so all day and night. Unfortunately this isn't the case. The buses across the bridge from Hong Kong leave from the airport and take 40 minutes. You'll have to take another bus from the airport to the city at the cost of another 45 to 60 minutes.
If you are going to the HK airport from the Shekou port in mainland China, the ferry requires you to arrive something like 3 hours ahead of your flight, even though the ferry ride itself if only 30-40 minutes. I assume a bus wouldn't dictate your schedule in that way.
> The bridge, while very interesting as a large infrastructure project is laughably useless for many stakeholders.
Given the current situation you are probably right, but I'd assume the construction of the bridge is an indication that something around Macau's status or SARs in general is maybe about to change?
It's not about people leaving hong kong/macau, but going the other way. It's for the Chinese to roll in tanks and troops in the event of an insurrection. The border routes are circuitous and easily blocked, this route is easily controllable and can be secured with little manpower.
This is a bizarre claim to make. This route would be much easier to block than any land route - it's a single bridge disappearing into a tunnel shortly off the coast of Hong Kong. It is about as easy of a choke point to block as you can get. The bridge the island goes to also only has a single bridge leading off it into the rest of Hong Kong.
It's a single bridge, going over water and underground, into an area that requires blue water presence. Choke points work both ways, easy to choke but also easy to secure. The permanent garrison of PLA in Hong Kong would be able to secure the HK side of the bridge long enough for reinforcements to get through.
China's biggest worry in this area is civil unrest, not hostile foreign powers and most of the bridge is inaccessible to potential rioters or dissidents. It's a huge game changer for the region, allowing China to move initial response troops into the area much faster. (30 min vs 4 hours)
Right, who has even heard of amphibious landing ships. Not like they need them in any case, since they happen to have the fastest amphibian armored vehicle in the world.
But you are either trolling here or way too deep into conspiracy theories to care for facts.
Expensive, and looks like a military invasion to the outside world as compared to moving troops over a bridge. China isn't stupid, they built this bridge for a very good strategic reason.
>You need to get vehicle registration plates (some "electronic" or temporary) in 3 jurisdictions. You also need insurance for 3 jursidictions.
well, the bridge does put a political pressure on that situation. One China in all senses would make it more convenient.
Until that, the Uber Roaming with autonomous cars, one is taking you to the border, the another is already waiting to pick you up, a convergence of taxi and rental, will solve that issue in the meantime.
> Until that, the Uber Roaming with autonomous cars, one is taking you to the border, the another is already waiting to pick you up, a convergence of taxi and rental, will solve that issue in the meantime.
I highly doubt that 'in the meantime' includes the present. Autonomous cars are science fiction, not fact.
This bridge actually seems like a reasonable place to put self-driving cars. It's a closed road with no intersections, just get in a car on one side, and jump off at the other. Just like a bus, but private and on demand.
I'm sure that the current generation of self driving technology could handle that fairly well.
FWIW, here on the East Coast of the U.S. we have the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. It’s 23 miles overall (17.6 miles shore to shore), two lanes each direction, and includes two tunnels of one mile each. The tunnels are part of the original construction and are only one lane each direction so traffic has to merge for the tunnels.
I cross the bridge twice a year. It’s a long way. The Zhuhai bridge at 11 miles longer and double the tunnel distance must be quite something. I think I might be a little nervous driving in a tunnel that length.
One thing I’ve noticed in the CBBT is that cars inevitably slow down on the upgrade out of the tunnel which is a hazard. I wonder if this will be a more significant hazard for the Zhuhai with the longer tunnel and more lanes.
I used to regularly cross the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway [1] which was for many years the longest bridge in the world at 23.83 miles. It is a soul-crushingly boring drive and dangerous given how monotonous and narrow it is.
A friend used to have this interesting strategy for staying awake when crossing at night. There are two lanes going each way. He would straddle the pair and take up both lanes. That way, if he fell asleep and started drifting, the Botts' dots [2] on the centerline would wake him up as his wheels drifted over them. Probably not the smartest technique.
I've driven across the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway a couple times. I didn't recall it was that long. I've also driven the overseas highway many times.
I don't know if there's any truth to it, but I've heard claims that the original Seven Mile Bridge which was built on railroad trestles and was therefor very narrow had fewer fatalities than the modern bridge that replaced it. The idea was that on the old narrow bridge, drivers obeyed the speed limit and paid much better attention than on the modern wider bridge which lulled drivers into being less careful.
I cross it a few times each week. It isn't too bad—you get across in about 20 minutes at 70mph (speed limit is 65), assuming you're not in rush-hour traffic or there isn't an accident closing one of the lanes. Except in the case of extreme weather, compared to the rest of the GNO, it's a pretty safe drive.
There's a crossover every 3-5 miles (7 in total) that's staffed with (very active) Causeway-specific police, which makes the story about the "Botts Dots" pretty unbelievable at any time of day.
You may find the Gotthard road tunnel (Switzerland) interesting. It's also one lane each way and is a continuous 16.9km/10.5mi in length, though it's so well-lit and well-signed (as with virtually every tunnel in Switzerland, certainly compared to those in its neighboring countries) that it may not be very anxiety-inducing. It's probably far more comfortable than the mountain pass alternative!
Unfortunately, "fun" on a mountain pass tends to approach deadly, especially in winter time. I'm in BC - the Coquihalla is foggy already, and in midwinter it can and will be incredibly treacherous.
It's a gorgeous drive in good summer conditions, but I think people would handle boring and monotonous far better than the snow, or the fog where you can only see maybe 20m ahead.
I drove several times 25-km tunnel in Norway. It is the single tunnel for traffic in both directions with one line in each direction. It is not scary especially after driving through several older narrower tunnels before. The biggest problem is that it is very borring to drive through. To make driving less borring it contains 3 huge caves lit by light with different colors. It helps, but not much.
Another thing, bridge's weird trajectory is reflecting decades long conflict of Shenzhen municipality's and economic planners in Beijing. For long, they tried to maximally deprive "Shenzhen upstarts" from economic benefit from them neighbouring Hongkong.
The bridge was more about diverting economic influence of HK's away from Shenzhen, than providing an economic benefit to HK.
Once Shenzhen–Zhongshan bridge will be operational, it will completely jeopardise Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge economically.
On top of that, there is a persistent rumour that there is a political will to do a tunnel to Nei Lingding island, and add another connection to Zhuhai from there (so called revived Lingdingyang tunnel.) This is also the very reason why Beijing has declared the tiny Lingding island a "National Level" natural reserve, thus depriving Shenzhen's officials jurisdiction over it.
My, completely amateur, idea would be that, there are two major regions in China for centralised power. Beijing and Shanghai. Now with the massive growth in the Peal River Delta region, there is a base for a third major region. Currently it is not, because there is no one leader, you have Macau, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and a large number of other cities in the region.
If Shenzhen, and the people in charge there, are able to become the defacto leaders of the entire region, then you have another centralised regional base, away from Beijing. Which means less power in the central government.
One possible reason: Shenzhen is an economic behemoth that's also a new city (it was basically a fishing village until the 80s), which mean it has fewer 'old hands' there and is relatively free of corruption and socially more liberal (by Mainland standards). In other words, the Communist Party is less influential there than in other major urban centers. Under the reign of Uncle Xi this might be frowned upon.
How would you explain the high speed train between Shenzhen and Hong Kong then? It was built recently and would make the two cities powerfully connected.
yes it's really access for HKG to the full Chinese HSR system - you can commute to Shenzhen, I'm told it's still a sl,owish process (only been open a month or so)
A good chunk of the travel time savings is mostly just shuffling the process around; rather than travel to the border Lo Wu and go through border checkpoint there, you do border clearance in West Kowloon.
I've never heard of this dynamic between the individual cities/regions and the central planners before. But it makes complete sense. Most of my reading on the Pearl River Delta is about re-integration Hong Kong and Macau.
Do you have any recommendations for further learning about it?
Your responses give me the most interesting glimpse behind the curtain on how's the real life working in China I've ever had; super interesting, thanks a lot for this! :) I'll have to try to ask my parents in what ways it was similar or different in "communist" Poland. Though I think the situation may have been much more loose there then, from what I understand I think nobody really took the communism seriously in their hearts in there; at least after some point in history. But I may be totally wrong on this full well.
China's going to have a hell of a time maintaining all this infrastructure they're building in a few decades. Maintaining things currently in use is a lot harder than building new, just ask the US.
Swiss maintain their road and tunnel infrastructure just fine. They have more tunnel miles per capita than the US. A lot depends on the fraction of value non-producing population that the value producing population has to appease.
The thing is that building in China is way cheaper than in the US, so for them it makes sense to just keep demolishing stuff and build new stuff. I saw it happening several times all over China. In Shanghai for instance, they are building a new Maglev station next to the old one, so there is no upgrading old stuff there.
In my experience from travelling through third world countries, they tend to build impressive projects, and then never maintain them and they fall apart.
I guess getting money for maintenance is politically harder, and saying "hey, we have this well maintained infrastructure" is much less impressive than "hey, we built this impressive new piece of infrastructure".
Vietnam seems particularly bad for it. They have some very nice new roads, but after a few years they're filled with potholes and an absolute pain to drive/ride through. It doesn't help that they aren't actually that well built either. They look nice when new, but there's actually very little under the tarmac, so when monsoon season comes through the roads just wash out.
Vietnam is a special kind of stupid (maybe not the right word, but best I can do). The whole country is filled with partially finished and failed projects (not just the roads), right next to brand new construction. I actually consider all of this part of the charm of living here. Makes for excellent urban exploration!
Becamex IDC is a company founded in 1976 to build a whole city north of Saigon in Binh Duong. There is nice wide and well-paved roads, sidewalks, schools, multiple golf courses, churches, car dealerships, hospitals, power plants... it is literally sim city in real life. The only twist is that it is still nearly empty. The only people out there are factory workers. The factories even import managers from Korea and Japan, who spend their days playing at the golf courses. The locals either live in factory housing or in really inexpensive places. There is whole communities of housing built up where only a few people live. It is kind of amazing really... the whole country is full of half finished places like this.
Fun fact: I've heard from a friend working in trains that the Norwegians are envious of how efficient we Swedes are in regards to trains. To them, we have struck the perfect balance of maintaining an OK railway in relation to the very few krona we spend.
Only 9200 vehicles per day, that’s really small. The SF-Oakland bridge does a quarter million vehicles daily. I wonder how they can justify the cost for so little.
I imagine it will be a much higher share of commercial vehicles (busses and trucks) vs. the bay bridge that is largely a commuter bridge. Macau and Zhuhai are too far away for people to commute. And politically, Macau's population is too small to matter as a source of people who might work in HK, while the mainlanders in Zhuhai likely don't have appropriate immigration status to work in HK. (Yes, mainlanders need visas and permits to be in HK.)
On the other hand, their cost per mile is a third of the SF-Oakland bridge, meaning we could have had three bridges for the same price if we let Chinese build them.
> At $7.2 billion, it will be one of the most expensive structures ever built. But California officials estimate that they will save at least $400 million by having so much of the work done in China. …
> [Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Company] put 3,000 employees to work on the project: steel-cutters, welders, polishers and engineers. The company built the main bridge tower, which was shipped in mid-2009, and a total of 28 bridge decks — the massive triangular steel structures that will serve as the roadway platform.
I agree that not having a rail link is absurd though, particularly given that both HK and Macau are incredibly dense and would be perfectly suited to one.
The US still has some great engineering projects happening, we just don't have the political climate to celebrate them, and to some extent have simply grown used to them/stopped seeing the wonder in them.
(A small, unusual benefit of being in a primarily civil engineering company is seeing a weekly email from a US manager celebrating all the cool projects around the world, but especially in the US, the company is contributing to.)
The World's Fair still exists, but maybe it has been far too long since the US has hosted one outside of Epcot's attempt to be a permanent one. Generating some fresh "gee whiz, engineering" excitement seems like a good idea this decade.
I suppose the easiest stuff to share is what's highlighted on the company's website. (Obvious disclaimer: my opinions on this site are my own, not my employer's. I don't speak for my employer. I do think my employer is involved in a lot of really interesting projects.)
Water projects are the closest to what I work on (though as a software developer my role is often indirect a bit from these projects), so ones I'm slightly more familiar with how much work and importance they have, simply from hearing coworkers talk about them (including the aforementioned manager's internal "Good News Friday" emails). Here are a few US Water project highlights from the company website:
There are interesting sidebar links to more detailed articles there, and more projects if you explore further. The company is HQed in Edmonton, Alberta so you will find for obvious reasons there are also a lot of Canadian projects highlighted.
Also the Chicago Deep Tunnel system is pretty massive
"Phase 1, the creation of 109.4 miles (176.1 km) of drainage tunnels ranging from 9 to 33 feet (2.7 to 10.1 m) in diameter, up to 350 feet (110 m) underground, was adopted in 1972, commenced in 1975, and completed and operational by 2006."
Locals like to call it the "big handout." It was a boondoggle project that just showcased the fact that anyone whos connected can get a slice of the government spending pie. They should have just upgraded the central artery. There's a reason Boston is the goto example worldwide for why you don't put your highways underground.
It cost a ton more than any other way of delivering a similiar result. Operating costs are higher than a raised highway because it's underground. The only pro is that a bunch of rich progressives who don't actually live in Boston get to pat themselves on the back about how the old eyesore of a raised highway that "divides the city" (or some mumbo jumbo like that) is gone. That's not enough to be worth the price. It was a boondoggle. They should have just rebuilt the raised highway.
Basically need a dictatorship to pull this off. No environmental checks, no vetos or petitions. And, as correctly pointed out in another comment - building greenfield is one thing. Maintaining and expanding is a whole other ballgame. Just like refactoring a legacy code base which is in heavy production use.
Well, if you group monarchy into this, most of what we consider world wonders where created by those systems. Don't benefit the individuals, but make for spectacular tourist attractions. Great Wall, Pyramids, Cathedrals, ...
A dictatorship is useful for quick taking of lands, hiding deaths of workers who are killed in construction projects, and manipulation of currency to make the projects cheaper.
A look at a satellite view shows the bridge pretty much empty - maybe 3 trucks. And no backup at the 'customs house' on the end - totally empty lanes. Maybe it was a holiday or the weekend; but still.
Fascinating and creepy: The surveillance tech on the bridge attempts to detect sleepy drivers so "yawn three times and the authorities will be alerted". [OP]
That’s not the most efficient heuristic, however. The best predictor before people crash is a motion of one trying to keep their eyes open, basically with their face opening up.
Source: I know people working on automated machinery to detect this in pilots.
Even if yawning and face opening are predictors of a sleep crash, given that they are both methods people use to help keep themselves awake, does creating an environment where drivers feel they are not allowed to perform them actually lead to fewer accidents?
I don't have a good source at the moment, but I think steel is somewhere around 97% iron by weight. The rest is carbon. Stainless steel has about 10% chromium.
Having made the ferry trip from HK to Zhuhai several times by ferry, I have to admit I'd take a more comfortable bus or shuttle limo ride any day. The advantage will be that now investors who do have the dual residency will be more willing to travel to Zhuhai which is lagging economically with it's neighbors
> Special cameras will be on the look-out for drivers on the
bridge who show signs of getting sleepy, among other checks - yawn three times and the authorities will be alerted, local media report.
I've been trying to see how that works for 15 minutes now and the furthest I get is to Tuen Mun, which is still in Hong Kong. I'm probably missing something trivial.
A skeptic in me makes me suspicious that there isn’t another function for such bridges: making it easier to roll tanks into HK if there’s an uprising one day.
I am sorry but your comment is dumb on so many levels. You do know HK is directly connected to mainland China, right? No bridge is needed if they want tanks over there.
I know, I’ve been to Hong Kong many times. Maybe you should take a look at the map, only part of Hong Kong is directly connected.
Of course, there’s tons of bridges already that can be used. But remember, one justification for the US national highway system was easy troop movement,
My comment simply reflects on historical justifications of infrastructure having a military purpose.
Own a car in Hong Kong and want to drive across it to Macau? You need to get vehicle registration plates (some "electronic" or temporary) in 3 jurisdictions. You also need insurance for 3 jursidictions. Also, you can only drive to a parking lot outside of Macau and then transfer to public transit to enter the city. And you need to register for a parking space 12 hours before your trip. Watch this hilarious HK government video on the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO3bNlB9j9o
But you don't own a car! Like most Hong Kongers, you take public transit. Surely this bridge will make it faster than the 1 hour ferry ride that leaves from 2 ferry piers in the middle of the city every 15 minutes or so all day and night. Unfortunately this isn't the case. The buses across the bridge from Hong Kong leave from the airport and take 40 minutes. You'll have to take another bus from the airport to the city at the cost of another 45 to 60 minutes.
This is a political project to show that Hong Kong and Macau are being integrated into China.
As political projects go, this certainly isn't the worst of them. It's better than the other things governments do to bolster domestic support like wars or locking up people you don't like. At least we'll all get to have a fun day trying out the bridge and something for tourists to take pictures of as they land in Hong Kong and Macau.
Perhaps in the future policies will change and it will become easy to us the bridge as a normal bridge.
If you're interested in learning more, here's a great article with more background: https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/10/23/explainer-hong-kongs-t...