Turkey opened a third bridge connecting #Istanbul’s Asian and European sides on Friday. #The_Yavuz_Sultan_Selim_Bridge stretches across the Bosphorus Strait, which flows between the two continents.
The $3 billion bridge is part of $200 billion worth of construction initiatives pushed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Spanning the northern part of the Bosphorus, the bridge is 4,620 feet long. With a width of 192 feet and a height of 1,056 feet, officials describe it as the world’s tallest suspension bridge.
“This bridge puts Turkey among the world leaders,” Michel Virlogeux, one of the project’s lead designers, told Agence France-Presse. “It’s the most spectacular to have been built in the last years.”
Erdogan and architects have championed the new construction, which holds eight lanes for vehicles and two for transit rails, as a way to ease heavy traffic in Istanbul, a city of more than 14 million people. The Associated Press reported that heavy trucks must use the new bridge, which could ease congestion because it is located farther from the city than the two other bridges.
“It not only alleviates traffic in Istanbul, it speeds movement of goods across Turkey and, as Syria stabilizes, the importance of the link will increase,” said Paolo Astaldi, chairman of Astaldi, a construction group that helped build the bridge.
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