Shrinking Distance | Giant ‘sea creature’ will join two sides of Pearl River

Every day thousands of people take the jetfoil from Hong Kong to Macau. As they approach the harbor, they see the legs of a new bridge arising out of the water, like a giant sea creature.
This remarkable structure, 42 kilometers long, will be the longest bridge in the world built over water. It will connect Hong Kong with Macau and Zhuhai at the other, with a giant man-made island at both ends. The work began in mid-December 2009 and is due to be completed on schedule in 2016, at a cost of 70 billion yuan.

Artist’s rendition of the Y-bridge (near Macau)

It will cut the time by road between Hong Kong and the two cities from two to four hours to 30 minutes and join the east and west sides of the Pearl River. It will bring cities in the western delta within a three-hour radius of Hong Kong.
“The bridge will expand co-operation between Guangdong and Hong Kong and Macau in logistics, finance, high technology and services,” said Zhao Yufang, vice-governor of Guangdong. “The province will join the two special administrative regions to build a world-class metropolitan cluster.”
It will join the three places together in a way they have never been connected before.
The bridge is a remarkable feat of engineering. It is being built across one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and a river with strong currents; it is in an area that suffers every year from typhoons and severe rainstorms. Those pose the most testing technical challenges for the architects and engineers. Among them is global company Ove Arup, which is involved in bridge and tunnel design, as well as design of the artificial islands’ foundation.
Of the total length, 35.6 kilometers consists of bridge and tunnel. The main bridge is 30 km long, with 23 km of viaducts, 20-110 meters high. The tunnel will run for nearly seven km, at a depth of 27 meters, one of the longest and deepest in the world. It will have six vehicle lanes, three in each direction, but no railway.
The tunnel is necessary because the bridge crosses the Pearl River; every day dozens of containers and cargo ships pass through it from Guangzhou and other ports in the delta to the Pacific Ocean and destinations around the world. The tunnel required 220,000 tons of cement, while the two man-made islands required 100,000 tons.
There are three cable-stayed bridges, with spans ranging from 280 to 460 meters; they have one or more towers or pylons, from which cables support the bridge deck; and it has viaducts spanning 75-100 meters. The design of one bridge evokes the two sails of a Chinese junk and other a traditional Chinese bow.
In addition, at each end there is a large man-made island on which giant car parks, basic retail services and immigration facilities are being built to process the vehicles and travelers entering the three destinations.
The one northeast of Hong Kong international airport has an area of 130 hectares. The government is researching construction of hotels and commercial space on the site. Due to its proximity to the airport, the buildings can be no higher than 50 meters and hotels no more than 10 storeys. There is likely to be a large commercial space underground.
The island close to Zhuhai and Macau was completed in December 2013 and is 4.8 meters high. To create it, the builders dumped 20 million cubic meters of sand into the sea, at a cost of 2.386 billion yuan. It is designed to withstand high waves and typhoons and has a landing strip.
Wei Dongqing, executive director of the bridge authority, said last November that not all the work had gone smoothly. “Many new technologies are being used that required applications for patents. This brought some difficulties.”
The bridge is being designed to last 120 years. It is a complicated project, which has to meet the design, construction and environmental standards of the three jurisdictions. There are also height restrictions close to the airports of Hong Kong and Macau.
The total cost of the project is 70 billion yuan, split between the governments of Guangdong province, Macau and Hong Kong; a consortium led by the Bank of China is providing a syndicated loan.
The economic case for this ‘pharaonic’ spending is to cut the driving time between Hong Kong and the western side of the Pearl River Delta to 30-45 minutes.
The greatest beneficiaries will be companies and factories in Zhuhai, Zhongshan, Jiangmen and other cities on the western side. They will be able to deliver goods to the air and seaports of Hong Kong more rapidly than now. This will be especially important to manufacturers of time-critical, high-value cargo, like cameras and other consumer electronics and components, that need to be shipped quickly to the buyers.
The bridge will also make these cities more attractive to outside investors, domestic and foreign. Firms in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other cities on the east side will be able to move to obtain lower wages and cheaper land prices. Hong Kong accounts for about 75 per cent of Guangdong’s overseas investment and is its largest trading partner.
The bridge will also have a major impact on the property markets of these cities, especially Zhuhai and Zhongshan, the closest to Macau and Hong Kong. Residents of both have bought thousands of apartments and townhouses in the two cities; but their use of them is limited by the time needed to go there and the need to pass through immigration.
The cities of Zhuhai and Zhongshan hope that the bridge will cause a sea change, making their properties so accessible that residents of Hong Kong and Macau consider moving there – able to live in one and work in the other.
The bridge will facilitate the movement of tourists in both directions. Currently, they must take a ferry or jetfoil to cross the Pearl River delta, a journey of 60-70 minutes. In future, the majority will take tourist buses.
Gamblers will be able to fly to Hong Kong airport and take a bus or limousine from there to the casinos of Macau.
It is not clear which of the three places will benefit most. Both Macau and Hengqin are investing heavily in new hotels and other tourist facilities, with the expectation of attracting more tourists via the bridge. The shortness of the journey may persuade travellers to stay in Zhuhai, where hotels are cheaper than in the other two cities, which they can visit in the daytime. Lantau Island is the area of Hong Kong closest to it.
Ha Wing-on, chairman of the Lantau Island Development Alliance, said  the bridge represented a great opportunity. “Macau is working hard and building new hotels and casinos. By 2020, there will be over 50,000 hotels rooms. Hengqin is doing the same and will have 15,000 hotel rooms by 2015. But Lantau has only 3,000 hotel rooms and the government has not come up with a detailed plan.
“The Shizimen Central Business district in Hengqin will have 11 million square metres of space by 2015, equal to 100 times that of Times Square in Causeway Bay. But Lantau has only 125,000 square meters of commercial space, 70 per cent of that of Times Square. The government should not develop Lantau for housing but for hotels and commercial space,” he said.
The project is competing with another bridge, between Shenzhen and Zhongshan, that will cross the Pearl River about 45 km to the north. Costing 33.4 billion yuan, the 24-km route is due to open in 2020 and will cut driving time from Shenzhen to Zhongshan to 30 minutes from two hours now.
The greatest drawback of the new bridge is the lack of a railway that could have carried a large volume of passengers and cargo.
The company building the bridge said that the option of including a railway had been critically examined, considering factors such as demand forecast, engineering requirements, attraction to passengers and compatibility with the rail network in the Pearl River Delta.
But it decided against it because it would have created many design and engineering difficulties and sharply increased the cost.

Artist’s rendition of the Y-bridge

Another outstanding issue is license plates that can be used in the three jurisdictions. None of them want a large number of vehicles from the other two on their streets.
According to the Shenzhen Daily, 28,100 cars had cross-
border plates as of the end of May 2013. Of them, 25,900 were owned by the Hong Kong government and Hong Kong companies and the rest by mainland government bodies and firms. The average price of such plates on the black market reached 700,000 yuan, 600,000 more than the average price a few years ago, it said.
The traffic management bureau of Guangdong only issues such plates to those who invest US$400,000 in a business in rural Guangdong and pay an annual tax of 150,000 yuan or US$1 million in a business in urban Guangdong and pay an annual tax of 300,000 yuan.
This raises the question of how many vehicles will actually use the bridge. The most likely outcome is that the main users will be tourist buses and company vehicles carrying personnel and delivering goods.
As things stand, the number of private cars will be limited; if they use the bridge, they will have to park on the two man-made islands and continue their journey through local buses, taxis and other vehicles.
MDT/Macauhub Exclusive

Louise do Rosário