SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
China's president has opened the World's longest sea bridge. The giant infrastructure is 55km total, including 3 suspension bridges, a causeway, a 6.7km undersea tunnel between two artificial islands, and another 1km tunnel, all designed at great cost to resist the local typhoons and earthquakes. It links Macau and ZhuHai (Guangdong province) on one side of the Pearl River, to Hong-Kong new airport on the other.
President Xi Jinping opened the long-delayed and over-budget Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge on Tuesday, billed as a major step forward in China's plan to turn the Pearl River Delta into a technology hub to rival Silicon Valley.
But critics worry the 55km-long bridge connecting the mainland city of Zhuhai with the semi-autonomous territories of Hong Kong and Macau is as much about politics as it is business.
Hong-Kong independentists see the $2.2B investment as another sign of progressive assimilation into the mainland, with the 45 minute link replacing the 4-hour ferry commute.
China is stepping up initiatives to increase trade across the region and at home - the opening of the mega-bridge comes a month after a new high-speed rail link started carrying passengers from Hong Kong to the mainland.
Perhaps tellingly, cars will drive on the right on the 6-lane bridge, as in China, and switch to the left when entering Macau or HK.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 25 2018, @01:14AM
Horseshit, the fast ferry makes it to Macao in less than an hour from Central. From there, depending on if and where in Zhuhai you want to go, you could walk through Macao and get there in less than 3 of the remaining hours.
They are international border crossings though, so the bridge is somewhat more interesting for mainlanders. The mainland controls access to the road too, no HK private cars are allowed, even though HK paid ~50% of the cost to build the thing.
More practically, there's been a huge bridge over the Pearl River for 15 years that alleviated much of the pain of travel between Zhuhai and Shenzhen.