Bridges

Oxford City Council has granted planning permission for the Oxpens River Bridge over the Thames in the West End of the city.

Nottingham councillors have given the green light to what will be the first new crossing built over the River Trent in the city in more than 60 years.

The Government has given Hammersmith and Fulham council nearly £3m to provide a new cycle lane on Hammersmith Bridge but funding for a £250m permanent repair appears to have stalled.

The latest RAC Foundation 'state of the nation' bridges survey has recorded the lowest proportion of substandard bridges since the poll began in 2016.

Newport City Council has agreed to pay the extra costs for the Transporter Bridge transformation project after the original contractors went into administration.

Environmental activists have invited West London residents to imagine the ‘fantastic possibilities that could be in store’ if Hammersmith Bridge remained permanently closed to motor traffic.

Stabilisation works under the Hammersmith Bridge Restoration Project will start this month, Hammersmith & Fulham Council has announced.

More than 10,000 people have signed an online petition objecting to Highways England’s plans to infill or demolish more than 100 disused railway bridges, which campaigners say could be needed for new rail or active travel routes.

The number of substandard road bridges managed by councils across Great Britain is increasing, new research shows.

Ministers have asked the council responsible for Hammersmith Bridge to pay £64m towards its restoration, it has been reported.

The squabble between ministers and London’s City Hall over Hammersmith Bridge has continued, with the Government claiming to have ‘required’ Transport for London to procure a ferry service.

The UK’s first stainless steel road bridge has officially opened – nearly five years after its predecessor was swept away in a storm.

The Hammersmith Bridge Taskforce has announced plans to launch a temporary ferry service for residents while the bridge is out of action for urgent repairs.

Hammersmith Bridge in West London is now closed to pedestrians, cyclists and river traffic after engineers discovered ‘a sudden deterioration in key parts of the suspension structure’.

The condition of Transport for London’s major structures could be at risk as the cash-strapped authority considers the future of its Surface Transport Asset Renewals Programme.

The San Giorgio bridge in Genoa is set to open just 15 months from the start of construction work and less than two years since its predecessor, the Morandi Bridge, collapsed with the loss of 43 lives.

A transport minister has warned Transport for London and the local council not to expect special treatment over its bid for cash to re-open Hammersmith Bridge.

Local authority leaders have said there is a ‘chronic need’ for investment in local roads in response to a report on the number of substandard road bridges in Great Britain.

London mayor Sadiq Khan has shelved plans for a walking and cycling bridge between Canary Wharf and Rotherhithe as the projected cost of the scheme threatened to hit £600m.

London’s transport commissioner has revealed serious concerns about political decisions taken by former mayor Boris Johnson as he prepared to leave office.

London Assembly members have accused the charity behind the Garden Bridge project of an ‘an outrageous evasion of scrutiny' after it failed to turn up to a hearing on the fiasco.

Balfour Beatty Group has been fined £600 after a worker died on a construction site in Scotland.

The final cost of the failed Garden Bridge project was £53m, according to Transport for London (TfL), with the majority of the cash (£43m) coming from the public sector.

Suffolk County Council is set to shelve plans to build three bridges on the River Orwell in Ipswich, despite having already spent £8.3m in development costs.

The Department for Transport (DfT) has called on Suffolk County Council to explain why costs on a bridge project across the River Orwell ballooned so much that the scheme collapsed.

Anyone reading the Government's 2017 consultation on reducing tolls on the Severn crossings would have realised that abolishing them altogether was out of the question. And yet...

New research has found that a natural oil used for hundreds of years by blacksmiths to protect swords and other metalwork could be used to replace toxic paints in maintaining historic metal bridges.

A council covering one of Britain’s wettest areas has said it needs a ‘miracle’ to solve its highways structural maintenance problem.

HGV drivers are still not checking the height of their vehicles as Network Rail claims it has had its worst year for bridge strikes in five years.

Highways England has issued a statement in the wake of the Genoa bridge tragedy, seeking to reassure the public of the safety of the structures on England's strategic road network.

A motorway bridge has collapsed near Genoa in north west Italy, killing at least 22 people.

Auditors have praised Transport Scotland for its management of the project to build the new Queensferry Crossing, which opened late last year but came in at least £110m under budget.

The trustees of the Garden Bridge Trust may have broken charity law in their management of the failed project, a legal expert has said.

The Second Severn Crossing is to be renamed The Prince of Wales Bridge at a ceremony later this year.

Ilyass Meslek, engineer at CCL, a specialist in engineered solutions for structures, discusses the design considerations for a road-over-rail replacement project in Blackpool.

There are now nearly 3,500 substandard council-maintained road bridges in Great Britain, with only one in 10 likely to be repaired in the next five years.

English Heritage has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £25,000 towards its £3.6m project to repair the world famous Iron Bridge across the river Severn in Shropshire.

The new £600m Mersey Gateway Bridge opened at the weekend, ‘on time and under budget’.

Highways England has appointed Knight Architects, along with engineering consultant WSP, to design bridge crossings for the proposed new A27 Arundel Bypass.

Tolls for drivers using the Severn Crossings will be cut from January ahead of the complete abolition of charges at the end of next year.

The Garden Bridge Trust has announced that it will be winding up the project to build a bridge across the Thames and blamed London mayor Sadiq Khan, who in turn blamed predecessor Boris Johnson.

The Queen will officially open the Queensferry Crossing on 4 September, after which an additional 10,000 people from local communities will walk the new link across the Forth.

The new Queensferry Crossing across the Forth will finally open at the end of August, the Scottish Government has announced.

London Bridge station has re-opened following the terror attack that left seven members of the public dead and dozens injured while barriers have been installed on some bridges in the capital.

West Sussex County Council and Balfour Beatty Living Places (BBLP) are trialling the use of drones to inspect bridges in the county.

Sadiq Khan has said he will not provide guarantees for the Garden Bridge across the Thames, which is likely to spell the end of the controversial project

The controversial Garden Bridge across the Thames should be scrapped if a capital funding gap of £70m cannot be filled, a highly critical independent review has recommended.

The number of substandard council-maintained bridges has shot up by more than a third in two years, reaching 3,000, with a price tag of nearly £1bn to bring them back to perfect condition.

Six electronic warning signs have helped Network Rail and Transport for London (TfL) cut the number of oversized lorries hitting a notorious railway bridge on London’s South Circular Road by more than a third.

Network Rail has issued a plea for lorry drivers to stop hitting the same bridges... over and over and over again.

Thousands of residents of neighbouring areas will have to pay to use the new Mersey Gateway Bridge, the Government has said.

Work to re-open the Forth Road Bridge has been voted Britain’s greatest civil engineering achievement of 2016.

The Garden Bridge Trust has warned that plans for the controversial bridge across the Thames may not be viable and that delays have increased the cost of the project.

The Forth Road Bridge reopened on Wednesday evening (11 January) after a lorry that had overturned in high winds that morning was recovered.

A giant bridge-building machine has finished work on another milestone for the Mersey Gateway project in Widnes.

Following one of the most complex projects of its kind, extremely detailed 3D scans of the Forth Bridges could be used in interactive games promoting engineering skills to school children.

The Welsh Government is discussing whether the proposed third Menai Strait road crossing could carry power cables for the planned Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station.

Dr Robin Sham, global long span and speciality bridges director at infrastructure services firm AECOM, talks about designing a Guinness World Record-breaking suspension bridge, and the joy of connecting communities.

Scottish engineering has once again set standards for the world to follow, after the announcement that the Queensferry Crossing has made it into the Guinness World Records.

Ministers twice increased the Government’s exposure to losses under the Garden Bridge project against the advice of officials, a National Audit Office (NAO) investigation has revealed.

It is ‘mystifying’ that plans for a Garden Bridge across the Thames have got so far with such a poor transport case, a Green Party member of the London Assembly has told Transport Network.

Former chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Dame Margaret Hodge, will lead a review into the £185m Garden Bridge project after saying that questions remain over its procurement.

The M20 in Kent reopened fully on Sunday afternoon, ahead of schedule, following a successful operation to remove a section of footbridge damaged the previous weekend.

Plans for a new M5 junction and bridge over the River Severn in Gloucestershire have been backed by two councils, it has emerged.

The Garden Bridge Trust has confirmed it asked the transport secretary Chris Grayling to extend a £15m guarantee, following a series of ‘hold-ups’ that have delayed construction work.

With the RMT union striking because Southern Railway won’t delay changes to the role of guards and ministers delaying a decision on the Hinkley C nuclear plant, here are our Top 5 procrastinations in transport and infrastructure. As Saint Augustine might have said, give me new transport schemes, but not yet.

A row has broken out over a five-month delay to the opening of the new Forth Crossing, which contractors have blamed on ‘ongoing effects of weather’.

New London mayor Sadiq Khan will ‘review the merits’ of the Silvertown Tunnel project, particularly user charging, in parallel with the statutory planning process.

Railways, bridges, airplanes and concrete - where would we be without them? And where would we be without the men and women, who have designed and invented our transport infrastructure over the centuries? Here's our top five transport engineers.

London Labour MP Kate Hoey has written to the head of the National Audit Office (NAO) to demand a full review of the controversial Garden Bridge and for the project to be halted in the meantime.

Here in Britain, we can certainly devise some controversial transport schemes but when it comes to boondoggles, white elephants and generally bad ideas, we can’t really compete on a global level. Here are our top five.

New London mayor Sadiq Khan has said it would now cost taxpayers more than twice as much to cancel the controversial Garden Bridge as it would to complete it.

The new London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has given his support to the controversial Garden Bridge across the Thames, but demanded more accessibility and transparency.

Suffolk CC will spend £20m over three years to develop plans for new crossings in Lowestoft and Ipswich.

Highways England has spectacularly demolished the old Merafield Bridge at Plympton, near Plymouth, beginning the final stage of a £6.3m maintenance project on the A38.

Freyssinet’s Matthew Dronfield has arrived at an exciting time in terms of expansion and product innovation. He talks to Dominic Browne about his firm’s latest achievements.

An eye witness report on flood recovery work in Cumbria.

Engineers repairing the Forth Road Bridge have revealed they are aiming to reopen the bridge on 4 January, provided their work is not disrupted by bad weather.

More than 2,300 council-maintained road bridges in Britain are sub-standard and incapable of carrying some of the heaviest vehicles, new research has revealed.

Sunderland City Council has officially launched a £117.6m new bridge project to cross the River Wear.

Images for London’s Garden Bridge have revealed plans for thousands of trees, shrubs and grasses that will flower all year round.

A watchdog’s investigation into a former chief executive’s pay off and a disagreement over the accounts for Cleddau Bridge will cost Pembrokeshire CC more than £55,000.

Engineering firm Spencer Group has completed the largest repair job on the Humber Bridge since it opened in 1981.

As building information modelling starts to find applications in the bridge sector, Massimo Mantoan explains both the complexities of the process and the issue of software interoperability.

A lack of long-term planning for river crossings has damaged local economies and left many UK regions poorly connected, MPs have warned.

Plans for new river crossings in east London have been met with overwhelming public support, paving the way for fresh bridges or tunnels.

The boom in high speed rail projects in China has led to the use of launching gantries for bridge construction becoming commonplace but greater emphasis is needed on maintenance and machine reconfiguration to reduce risks and improve reliability, Yabin Liu and Fuchun Yuan explain.

A £10m Transport Scotland investment package to replace nine bridges along the A830 has seen contractor Bear Scotland shift to using stainless steel reinforcements.

The use of drones, satellites and lasers is set to revolutionise bridge inspection and monitoring, experts have claimed in advance of the 2015 Bridges conference and exhibition on the 25 March.

The Forth Bridge celebrated its 125th anniversary this week with an event recalling one of the most dramatic days in the life of the iconic Scottish landmark - when it was plunged centre stage in a second world war air battle.

Funding arrangements behind the £1.86bn Mersey Gateway bridge project, which saw Halton BC appoint the Merseylink consortium as the project company, have scooped two international awards.

One of the most significant bridge projects in the world, the new £790m Queensferry Crossing spanning the river Forth in Scotland, is set to enter a major new phase as work progresses on schedule and on budget.

Both towers at Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge are to be restored under a ‘high priority’ repair project.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are increasingly being recognised as invaluable tools for bridge inspections, but operators must stay within the law. Lisa Russell reports.

East Sussex CC has installed the first Fibre Reinforced Polymer (FRP) bridge to be manufactured in the UK.

As part of our build up to the 2015 Bridges conference, Transport Network takes a look at how an automated system was used to carry out a visual inspection of the cables on a highway bridge in Switzerland.

A set of outlandish designs for a new Thames pedestrian crossing have been unveiled, including rainbow colour schemes, waterfalls, tentacles and glowing lights.

A video-based hazard perception test for young drivers, co-developed by groups including consultancy TRL and Reading University, has won the 2014 Prince Michael Premier Award for International Road Safety.

The Mersey Gateway Bridge will be free to use for all Halton residents chancellor George Osborne confirmed today.

Glasgow’s new cycle and pedestrian ‘Smartbridge’ across the River Clyde is now in place.

London mayor Boris Johnson has unveiled plans for a £6bn rail “super-hub” that would see links for Crossrail and High Speed Rail 2 converge on a proposed north west London development dubbed ‘mini-Manhattan’.

The UK’s first new deep-water port for more than two decades opens for business this week when the MOL Caledon, a 58,000-tonne container ship from South Africa, docks at the London Gateway.

Engineering firm Spencer Group has won an a-frames contract for a £3.9m project on the Humber bridge.

The Department for Transport (DfT) has signed off a £40m cash injection for new bus stations and improvements across the Pennine Reach bus network.

Thousands of residents living close to the Dartford-Thurrock Crossing are set to recieve unlimited trips across the Thames for £20 a year, it has been announced.

Concern has been raised about a giant banner which could be placed on Forth Road Bridge as part of the structure’s anniversary celebrations.

New technology has been implemented by West Midlands transport authority Centro to make planning journeys easier, it has been claimed.

Improvements to the M4 and possibly a £1bn relief road for the motorway could be financed by tolls on the Severn crossings if the bridges are devolved to the Welsh Government, Welsh finance minister Jane Hutt has revealed.

Fast track planning procedures previously retained for nationally significant infrastructure projects are being widened in a bid to boost local investment.

The Welsh Affairs Committee has held an extra session with transport minister Stephen Hammond to discuss the management and economic impact of the Severn crossing tolls regime.

Transport looks set to be the big winner in this month’s Spending Review with ministers expected to announce a multi-billion pound long-term commitment to major projects.

A £60m repair deal to strengthen the Hammersmith Flyover has been given to contractor Costain by Transport for London (TfL).

The Scottish Parliament has passed a Bill to set up a new company to manage the Forth Road Bridge, the new Forth Crossing and the surrounding roads.

Suppliers of transport infrastructure to London are benefiting commercially from the capital’s lack of long-term funding certainty, London Mayor Boris Johnson has complained.

A Conservative member of the London Assembly has called on mayor Boris Johnson to rule out plans for a possible Thames road bridge in east London, stating the surrounding road network could not take it.

A study has been launched into whether travel times could be slashed between Cardiff city centre and Penarth by operating a bus service across the Cardiff Bay barrage, offering some of the most scenic views in south Wales.

Surveyor's Bridges 2013 conference and exhibition has been awarded Continued Professional Development (CPD) status by the Chartered Institution of Highways & Transportation for the first time.

Sustainable transport charity Sustrans is set to celebrate the opening of Britain’s longest cycling tunnel built on the former Somerset and Dorset railway line - 50 years since the Beeching cuts forced the line to close.

Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin has approved £4.4m of government funding for plans to replace the ‘sub-standard’ bridge carrying the A6 London Road over the Derby to Birmingham railway line.

Excluding councillors from the management of the Forth Road Bridges in Scotland is the right decision, influential MSPs have said.

Transport Network wants to know your opinions on City Deals. Please leave a comment below if you have any insights on what they mean for UK transport. We particularly want to hear from any councils that are developing their own growth plans, after all why wait for Whitehall? Let us know what you have up your sleeve...

One of the most demanding parts of the construction work for the Forth Replacement Crossing is under way, reports Helena Russell.

The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) has called on the Government to use its next Budget on 20 March to speed up delivery of the National Infrastructure Plan.

The Government could more than double its return on transport investments if local authorities were given more freedom to drive projects, ministers were told this week.

Attempts local campaigners to receive a judicial review for the Bexhill-Hastings Link Road have been quashed after the High Court rejected an appeal.

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