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Boris Johnson's bridge across the Channel


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Boris Johnson's proposal for a bridge linking Britain to France has been greeted with scepticism by representatives of the UK's shipping industry.

The Foreign Secretary floated the idea of a cross-Channel bridge between during talks between the UK and France on Thursday.

He said "good connections" were important between the two countries, and suggested the Channel Tunnel might simply be "a first step."

https://www.itv.com/news/2018-01-19/boris-johnson-bridge-uk-france-channel/

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I wonder who will pay the lion's share for this link this time? 

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47 minutes ago, Ozymandias said:

I wonder who will pay the lion's share for this link this time? 

He should get together with Trump then they can discuss Walls and Bridges  

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They are more than well matched, the clowns.

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A Channel Bridge is an excellent idea!  It will give the truck drivers somewhere to park while queueing for their post-Brexit customs checks.

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16 hours ago, Ozymandias said:

I wonder who will pay the lion's share for this link this time? 

Well we know it won't be the French. They usually get other European countries, especially Britain and Germany, to pay things for them.

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coming from Boris who campaigned against EU integration this idea of greater integration must seem very strange and I'm sure the rest of the EU is quietly smiling.  

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The Channel tunnel is under used and has spare capacity. In fact its never reached its daily, monthly or yearly designed capacity levels. So, a economic model for a bridge doesn't exist.

Was Boris Johnson using the Bridge as a metaphor for our future friendship with France? After all Boris and the French President had just finished a meeting whereby they discussed and agreed a partnership in future infrastructure projects, - major projects together. so he put the idea of a bridge. The way some people react you'd think he'd proposed Leaving the EU. oh, erm.... 

Boris, keep up the good work, i love the way his words wind people up. good old British eccentricity. 

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13 hours ago, Captain Risky said:

coming from Boris who campaigned against EU integration this idea of greater integration must seem very strange and I'm sure the rest of the EU is quietly smiling.  

Building a bridge from one country to another in no way implies greater intebgration between those two countries.

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I think this is quite a clever tactic, if possibly a little under discussed by cabinet.

Having another, easily accessible route to the continent would certainly present a fresh perspective to any firms thinking of looking for alternate freight routes out of the UK post Brexit.

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Firstly; Boris was not making a serious suggestion for a bridge, it was mentioned in a "passing" remark. I've got to say there was quite a bit of disappointment in UK that a rail tunnel only was to be built because it was evident that France and UK would use it to extract as much money as possible from the travelling public and it would be prone to strikes etc

That aside, there have been serious suggestions for a bridge for decades (if not a couple of centuries) this from The Guardian 2007:

 

Quote

 

Suspension bridge planned for Channel

· Toll route to France would have set world record 
· Commercial consortium sought Thatcher's backing

Mon 2 Apr 2007 14.21 BSTFirst published on Mon 2 Apr 2007 14.21 BST

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday April 9 2007 

We stated in error in the article below that the proposed Channel bridge would have been a single span. In fact it would have rested on 15 piers with spans between each of them. 

It would have been the longest suspension bridge in the world by far: a single, 21 mile span linking Britain to mainland Europe over the grey waters of the Channel.

Five years before work began on the Channel tunnel, engineers submitted detailed plans to Margaret Thatcher's government for a motorway bridge between England and France.

Motorists would have paid £5.60 and lorry drivers £8 to drive across the bridge, suspended 67m (220ft) above the Channel, according to files released today by the National Archives.

Dismissing the option of tunnelling under the water as "impractical", the engineering group LinktoEurope said the bridge could be completed for about £3bn. The consortium said it had raised backing from private financiers - attracted, no doubt, by the forecast that toll charges would bring in up to £220m a year.

Similar in design to the Severn Bridge, the Channel span would have been reached from near Dover or Folkestone.

Building the bridge would have involved planting huge pylons in the water, and LinktoEurope admitted that the project was likely to create some difficulties for shipping. But the structure would have been strong enough to leave road traffic unaffected if a boat had ploughed into one of the struts.

This was not the first time a permanent link between Britain and France had been proposed. Albert Mathieu, a French engineer, won support from Napoleon Bonaparte to build a tunnel which would have allowed horse-drawn carriages to make the crossing. An artificial island halfway across would have provided ventilation.

Plans for a tunnel were revived over the next two centuries and on various occasions digging was started on both sides of the Channel.

Following the UK's membership of the European Union, the French and British governments supported another attempt to complete the tunnel. Construction work continued for two years before the project was abandoned.

The LinktoEurope blueprint - complete with artists' impressions - was submitted in April 1981, but there is no record of how it was received by the government.

Three years later, the idea of a cross-Channel link was revived by the two governments. Five plans involving various combinations of tunnels, dykes and suspension bridges were considered before the current tunnel design was chosen.

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7 hours ago, stevewinn said:

The Channel tunnel is under used and has spare capacity. In fact its never reached its daily, monthly or yearly designed capacity levels. So, a economic model for a bridge doesn't exist.

Was Boris Johnson using the Bridge as a metaphor for our future friendship with France? After all Boris and the French President had just finished a meeting whereby they discussed and agreed a partnership in future infrastructure projects, - major projects together. so he put the idea of a bridge. The way some people react you'd think he'd proposed Leaving the EU. oh, erm.... 

Boris, keep up the good work, i love the way his words wind people up. good old British eccentricity. 

I completely agree, he's saying though we're leaving the EU we can still build bridges.

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9 hours ago, Black Monk said:

Building a bridge from one country to another in no way implies greater intebgration between those two countries.

hang on that doesn’t read right. a bridge by its very definition is a physical connection between two points. 

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Leaving aside the fact that its proponent is an idiot, there wouldn't seem to be any practical reason why it shouldn't be possible; obviously it wouldn't be a single span bridge (I'd like to see who could construct a single span capable of spanning 20 miles), but by building a viaduct with supports on sandbanks like the Goodwin Sands and with spans wide enough to accommodate shipping it would probably be feasible. Obviously it'd need to be pretty damn high to allowe ships to pass underneath, and there might be questions about the maximum strength of winds it'd be sensible to allow it to be used in, but even if the Supreme Tory Twerp's idea, it doesn't seem to be absolutely absurd or impossible. 

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18 hours ago, Black Monk said:

Building a bridge from one country to another in no way implies greater intebgration between those two countries.

and god forbid we should ever be on any terms other than glowering at each other over a wall, preferably topped with machine guns, with the Frogs.  

 

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A bridge would be so unambitious, why not dyke the Channel and part of North Sea to revive Doggerland. :P

Edit:

Résultats de recherche d'images pour « doggerland »

Edited by Gingitsune
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1 hour ago, Gingitsune said:

A bridge would be so unambitious, why not dyke the Channel and part of North Sea to revive Doggerland. :P

Edit:

Résultats de recherche d'images pour « doggerland »

You would need the EU's agreement! Or at least that of France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

You would not be able to do this unilaterally.

Edited by Ozymandias
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5 hours ago, Gingitsune said:

A bridge would be so unambitious, why not dyke the Channel and part of North Sea to revive Doggerland. :P

Edit:

Résultats de recherche d'images pour « doggerland »

Having a tunnel is one thing allowing the French to just walk here is pushing it to far.

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3 hours ago, Ozymandias said:

You would need the EU's agreement! Or at least that of France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

You would not be able to do this unilaterally.

Britain could do half of it on her own, and then talk with people from the other shore. Anyway they'll have to do the same to build a bridge. and like I said, since there's already a tunnel, why add a simple bridge over it when you can go land bridge. ;)

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9 minutes ago, hetrodoxly said:

Having a tunnel is one thing allowing the French to just walk here is pushing it to far.

But Johnson is not satisfied with a tunnel, he wants a bridge over it. I say, it's not ambitious enough. ^_^

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2 hours ago, Gingitsune said:

But Johnson is not satisfied with a tunnel, he wants a bridge over it. I say, it's not ambitious enough. ^_^

You've not seen the full plans, the end of tunnel's going to turn onto the bridge back to France.

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