The Lotus Bridge
Monday, 14th November 2005 by Alex Turnbull
Have you ever wondered what happens to traffic at a border between two countries that drive on opposite sides?
The Lotus Bridge between mainland China and the former Portuguese colony of Macau was completed in 1999 and is a fantastically elaborate construction, featuring three lanes in each direction and dual bridges which loop around each other by 360° to swap the direction of the traffic. Amazing.
There's much more on this subject available on the rather good Wikipedia page about the rules of the road.
Many thanks to Nicholas Hodder and Todd Day.
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
Its is just me or does it look like a very elaborate bridge to nowhere?
Is it just me or is this a very elaborate bridge-to-nowhere.
What is this bridge for? Farm Equipment? It looks like Farmand for miles on each side. Am I missing something. Why would they build an elaborate bridge like this (3 lanes) for a small amount of traffic. Maybe Im to used to southern californias lack of roads.
Also, it would really confuse me to come from the other side and then hit a round-about right away (assuming you would have to go the oposite direction on the roudabout.
Stoopid. Why not simply cross the lanes of traffic with one bridging over the other…sorta like the iPod shuffle logo?
It occurs to me that the elaborate loop allows backup at the border gates to be held on the loops instead of on the bridge over the water.
At least, that would make sense on the China side.
According to the maps at Wikipedia, the Lotus bridge is built going to recently reclaimed land called Cotai. And according to the Wp article on Cotai Strip this land will be used to develop “the Asian Las Vegas”. The bridge is no doubt intended to help make that happen.
There is already access to Macau from the north (the three bridges north of this island connect to the northern part of Macau). Also note the very Western-European-looking developments on the north half.
What’s really odd to me is that it doesn’t see that they’d need any crossed bridge at all. I mean, on the left side of the bridge it splits to opposite sides of a building, presumably to go through customs. So you loop and loop just to make sure you get on the correct side of a building, not the correct side of the road.
Perhaps the straight-crossover idea doesn’t work for pragmatic reasons, such as traffic backups. Or perhaps they want the nature of the bridge to highlight the metamorphosis in driving paradigm. Or maybe they just like something that’s pretty.
–j, a fan of pretty.
Nice tower on the north island of Macau (the lotus bridge links mainland and the south island, which is in fact two separate island). Look a bit like the CN tower in Toronto…
View Placemark
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macau
The airport to the northeast corner of the island is really interesting. The terminal and gates are on the island, then there are two long taxiways on causeways to the runway on reclaimed land out int he ocean.