Why the Crimean bridge is important for Russia – Picture of the Day – Kommersant

On October 8, at six in the morning, a truck exploded on the Crimean bridge, which caused the collapse of two spans of the roadbed leading from Krasnodar to Kerch, and also damaged the railway line. Authorities are treating the incident as a terrorist attack. The history of the construction of the Crimean bridge and its special place for Russia – in the help of Kommersant.

The first bridge across the Kerch Strait was built during the Great Patriotic War, in the autumn of 1944, but already in February 1945 it was destroyed due to the movement of ice from the Sea of ​​Azov. In September 1954, a ferry crossing was launched across the Kerch Strait. In the future, the issue of building a bridge was raised in the 1970s and 1990s, but was not resolved due to lack of funds. Since the mid-2000s, the construction of the bridge has been regularly discussed jointly by the Russian and Ukrainian authorities.

After the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, President Vladimir Putin instructed the Ministry of Transport to build a road and rail bridge across the strait. The Taman Administration of Federal Highways was responsible for the construction, Stroygazmontazh LLC (part of Arkady Rotenberg’s SGM group of companies) was chosen as the general contractor. The cost of the project amounted to 227.9 billion rubles. It was decided to build the bridge not at the narrowest point of the strait, as was the case with the 1944 bridge, but from the Taman Peninsula to Kerch across the island of Tuzla. In December 2017, as a result of online voting, the bridge was named “Crimean”.

The actual construction began in 2015. In June 2017, the assembly of the navigable arch of the railway part of the bridge was completed, in July the assembly of the road part of the bridge was completed. In August of the same year, the railway arch span was raised to the design height, and in October the span of the road arch was installed. By the beginning of 2018, piles were installed under the road and rail sections of the bridge; by April, asphalt laying was completed on the road section. The opening of the road bridge took place in May-October 2018, the railway bridge – in December 2019-June 2020.

The bridge with a length of 19 km became the longest in Russia. It has a capacity of 40,000 vehicles per day in four lanes (the bridge has two lanes in each direction) with a maximum permitted speed of 90 km/h, as well as up to 47 pairs of trains per day. In general, the bridge can carry up to 14 million passengers and 13 million tons of cargo per year. For navigation, arched spans 35 m high were built.

After opening, the bridge became the main transport hub between the Crimean peninsula and the rest of Russia. In the four years since its opening, over 21 million vehicles have crossed the Kerch Strait, including 3 million trucks and 233,000 buses. In August 2022, a daily traffic record was set on the bridge: 38.3 thousand cars. In January-August 2022, more than 5.26 million tourists arrived in Crimea across the bridge: 83% used cars and buses, 17% – by rail. President Vladimir Putin, in his speech at the opening of the bridge in 2018, called this day “historic” and said that the bridge was dreamed of being built “even under the tsar father.”