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Japan has some pretty interesting and complex roads. Browsing around with Google Earth, you might find, for example, the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line (東京湾アクアライン):

The Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway, also known as the Tokyo Bay Aqualine, is a 15.1 km marine crossing through the middle of Tokyo Bay… With the journey from Kawasaki [川崎] to Kisarazu [木更津] now taking just 15 minutes, the highway plays a vital economic role in integrating these two areas of prime industrial importance. The areas are otherwise separated by a 100-km journey through the heart of metropolitan Tokyo, so the Aqualine also eases traffic congestion in the broader metropolitan road network.

Apparently, the 31-year, $11.2 Billion project is sinking further into debt:

Traffic across the bridge (around 10000-15000 daily) is only about 1/3 of that originally planned. The toll was 4000 yen originally, but was lowered to 3000 yen in 2000 to increase traffic. Together with the high construction cost and high maintenance costs, the project is reportedly going further into debt each year.

See it for yourself:

Following a tunnel a short distance north from here, you’ll find Haneda Airport (羽田空港), where the access roads seem unnecessarily complicated:

Actually, Narita Airport (成田国際空港) has pretty complicated access roads as well. The designers must have really liked curvy roads.

The taxiways are also pretty impressively paved. But really, one can only speculate as to the constraints placed on the designers. I mean, when you have to build one of the world’s busiest airports around people like these guys…:

…it’s gotta make your job difficult. But I bet the engineers enjoyed building the following interchange near Nagoya (名古屋). Plenty of space, plenty of steel and concrete:

This next one must have been fun, too. Looks like a double-decker interchange still under construction:

Unfortunately, if you give construction companies too much money, they come up with something like this thing (also under construction):

Or concrete spaghetti like this in New Jersey:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 1:08 am and is filed under All, Global Explorer, Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.