DENMARK Great Belt bridge opens

DENMARK

Great Belt bridge opens

Denmark’s splendid Storebaelt (Great Belt) bridge, opening June 14 will be one of the world’s engineering marvels — 17.5km total length (vs the San Fran-Oakland Bay Br 6.8km) with a 1624m main suspension span, elegant aerodynamic deck and soaring cleanlined 254m towers. The bridge will provide the first fixed crossing between the major Danish population on the island of Zealand, where the capital and major city Copenhagen is located, and the mainland of western Europe. It will be second bridge in main span length only to the 1990m long Akashi Kaikyo bridge in Japan’s Inland Sea which opens this year also. (America’s longest bridge is the Verrazano NYC 1298m opened in 1964, just 18m longer than the Golden Gate built in 1937.)

Denmark and Sweden are also building the Oresund bridge/tunnel connecting Copenhagen with Malmo in Sweden consisting of 3.5km immersed tube tunnel, a 4km artificial island and 7.8km of bridging. The two new links will dramatically change Scandinavia and integrate it more closely with Germany, Belgium, Holland and France, they say.

Tolls on the new Great Belt crossing are shown on the toll ticket. DKK Danish Krone is nearly 7 to the $, so the flat rate toll for a car is $30, with monthly ticket $12/trip. Tractor-trailers making single trips pay c$100 but the bridge company is negotiating discount deals for bulk buys. The DSV group, Denmark’s largest trucker has bought a year’s toll tickets (72,000) for its tractor-trailers at about 10% off. DSV sends 100 trucks across the Great Belt by ferry at present but expects traffic to increase greatly as businesses take advantage of the economies and greater convenience of a fixed crossing to buy and sell further afield. Scandlines which ferries 800 of its trucks a day presently also expects to increased business.

The bridge tolls are in the range 50% to 70% of existing ferry charges, but the greater speed and simplicity of a fixed crossing are an attraction as well as the price advantage. Statoil, the largest oil company in Denmark says it plans to completely revamp its operations with the opening of fixed links. Presently it does no direct distribution of finished product by ferry, operating tanker-trucks only on Zealand. With the opening of the fixed links tanker-trucks will regularly take finished products back and forth, allowing refining and storage costs to be driven down, and opening up the area to competition.

Official forecasts are that the bridge will have 10k veh/day in its first year rising to 17k veh/day after several years. The bridge deck has 24m of roadway, enough for an eventual 6-lanes but will run with 2x2 travel lanes for the forseeable future.

The highway suspension span is paralleled by rail tunnels. $5.6b debt has been incurred for construction plus financing, of which $4.2b is construction — which has taken 5 years.

The Great Belt will toll by payment to a toll collector, self-swipe of a credit card in an unattended lane and via an electronic toll tag from Saab Combitech marketed under the name BroBizz — some kind of play on the Danish translation of ‘busy’ and ‘business.’ The BroBizz e-toll system will operate in a dedicated lane marked for roll through at max speed of 10km/hr.

The self-swipe payment lane will issue, single direction, two-way and 10-trip magstripe tickets for use in the unattended lanes. (Contact Jacob Vestergaard 45 3393 5200)