FactSheet: George Massey Tunnel BRIDGE is being built because Shanghai's Sutong Bridge was built for 23,019,148 residents

Building a bridge for no other reason than to dump more cars onto the streets of Vancouver doesn't make sense.  Of course there is one other reason: To reward those that donated to the BC Liberal Party.


Metro Vancouver population    2,463,000

Metro Shanghai population    23,019,148

Premier Christy Clark

Massey Tunnel Bridge Replacement

Factsheet

March 31, 2017

Can a bridge be built on a river delta?

Bridging major rivers through soft deltaic soils is a challenge that bridge engineers have developed and honed over centuries of bridge foundation design.

A recent bridge engineering feat of note, the Sutong Bridge - the world's second longest cable stayed bridge - crosses China's Yangtze River delta over soft soils to depths of 240 meters, with piles installed to depths of about 100 meters.

Like the Sutong Bridge, the George Massey Tunnel replacement bridge will span a river delta with deep, soft soils. While the George Massey tunnel replacement bridge will be considerably smaller than Sutong, the geotechnical similarities of the Yangtze River delta to the Fraser River delta offers assurances of the feasibility and effectiveness of the deep pile foundation planned for use here.

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Sutong Bridge

1. Introduction

The Sutong Bridge is located in the southeast of Jiangsu Province, China, which is in the lower reaches of theYangtze River having width varying between 6km and 14km wide, and a maximum depth of approximately 50m.

At a cost of approximately US $920 million dollars, this visionary project was motivated by the need for a highway route crossing the Yangtze River and linking Nantong City and Changshu, a satellite city of Suzhou of Jiangsu province at the opposite banks. This project is an important project with the aim of reducing the economic gap between Suzhou and Nantong city and promoting balanced development in the area. Completed in the summer of 2007, Sutong Bridge is the longest cablestayed bridge in the world till 2012 after Rusky Bridge. The total length of the cable-stayed portion of the project is 2,088 meters with a 1,088-meter main span and a pylon height of about 300 meters. At the same time its deep water approaches are also made up of prestressed concrete.

Road Traffic Technology
 

Finance
The total cost for construction of the Sutong Bridge is estimated to be $6.45bn ($750m). $2.2bn ($266.12m), amounting to 35% of the total, was collected by the local governments of Jiangsu province (78.5 million) (60%), Suzhou City (10.58 million) and Nantong City (7.283) (20% each). The remaining funds were sourced via loans from domestic banks. The bridge is being tolled and the fares received are being used to pay back the loans.

The 2010 census put Shanghai's total population at 23,019,148, a growth of 37.53% from 16,737,734 in 2000. 20.6 million of the total population, or 89.3%, are urban, and 2.5 million (10.7％) are rural.

Fraser Delta to the right just like Yangtze

Bridge building China