Satellite photo of the Strait of Messina, taken June 2002. Image courtesy of NASA.
The Strait of Messina Bridge is a suspension bridge that is being planned to cross the Strait of Messina—a narrow section of water between the eastern tip of Sicily and the southern tip of Italy. If completed, it will be the largest in the world.
The bridge will be an alternative to ferry service between Messina (Sicily) and the mainland at Villa San Giovanni in Calabria and hydrofoil service from Messina to Reggio di Calabria.
Current plan
The current plan calls for single-span suspension bridge with a central span of 3,300 m (about 2 miles). This would be more than 60% larger than the Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge in Japan (1,991 metres), currently the largest suspension bridge in the world.
Plans call for six traffic lanes (two driving lanes and one emergency lane in each direction), two railway tracks and two pedestrian sidewalks. The height of the two towers will be 382.6 metres in order to provide a minimum vertical clearance for navigation of 65 metres. The Bridge suspension system relies on two pairs of steel cables, each with a diameter of 1.24 metres and a total length, between the anchor blocks, of 5,300 metres.
The new design includes 20.3 km of road links and 19.8 km of railway links to the Bridge. On the mainland, the Bridge will connect to the new stretch of the Salerno-Reggio Calabria motorway (A3) and to the planned Naples-Reggio Calabria High-Speed railway line; on the Sicilian side, to the Messina-Catania (A18) and Messina-Palermo (A20) motorways as well as the new Messina railway station (to be built by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana).
A construction consortium is scheduled to be chosen in 2005, with actual construction beginning the following year. Completion is projected to take six years, at a projected cost of € 4.6 billion.
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