The construction of the third bridge across the Bosphorus in Istanbul is to start by May, but the motoring public in Istanbul needs to be patient. Huge infrastructure projects like this don’t happen overnight.
Plans to complete the project reveal that building the new bridge will take as long as 10 years, from early approvals to final ribbon-cutting. That means that the third Bosphorus bridge would open to traffic around 2023.
Seven Turkish banks have agreed on supplying a total of $2.4 billion for 10 years of funding, İbrahim Çeçen, chairman of the IC İçtaş company that was part of the winning consortium, has announced.
The construction of the third bridge was awarded to the Turkish-Italian venture İçtaş-Astaldi construction consortium. They will complete the construction of the bridge in 36 months at a total cost of about $4.5 billion. The bridge should be ready for use by the end of 2015, Turkish Transportation Minister Binali Yıldırım has said.
“This bridge will be a millennium engineering masterpiece,” Çeçen said, without giving any further information about the project as it will be presented by the Prime Minister. He said all aspects of the project are ready and only hinted that the legs of the bridge will look like the letter “A.” Drilling on the construction of the bridge is ongoing, he added.
İçtaş İnşaat-Astaldi won the bid, proposing plans to complete the project in the shortest period of time – 10 years, two months and 20 days – while its only final challenger, the Cengiz İnşaat-Kolin İnşaat-Limak-Makyol İnşaat-Kalyon İnşaat Consortium, submitted a much longer timeframe of 14 years, nine months and 19 days. The large time gap between the two proposals – four years and seven months – was seen as controversial.
