The Rainbow Bridge, Tokyo Bay
Friday, 21st September 2007 by Alex Turnbull
This is the absolutely fantastic Rainbow Bridge that crosses Tokyo bay, Tokyo. A 570 metre-long suspension bridge, it has two decks that carry three transportation lines - the Shuto Expressway on the top, and on the bottom, Route 357 and the New Transit Yurikamome.
The Yurikamome is actually an automated guideway transit service, which looks like a monorail, but the carriages run on rubber wheels instead. It's a fully automated system with no drivers, which carries 100,000 passengers a day to the artificial island of Odaiba. The system has become a tourist attraction in its own right, thanks mainly to the spectacular 270-degree loop which the Rainbow bridge has to make to get the Yurikamome up from ground level. Here's a recent ground level shot of the loop.
See also our related posts on The Lotus Bridge, a Curly Bridge Over the Seto Inland Sea, Odaiba's Ferris Wheels, and Utah's Rainbow Bridge (which actually features in our book too!).
As always, you can read more about Tokyo's Rainbow Bridge at Wikipedia. Thanks to Bill Kendrick, Terry Foster, Christian Willman, and anyone else who submitted this since I earmarked it for posting... 14 months ago!
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
Tokyo is packed with amazing transportation system structures, be it roads, railroads or other stuff.
I already spent hours on google earth “in” Tokyo, just trying to follow some of them. Just one example: Go to the airport, find the monorail and then follow its rail to the other end.
i luv tokyo !!!!