It sounded very cheap, and then I looked up what these types of bridges normally cost, and now it sounds expensive. The former world's longest pedestrian bridge, the Charles Kuonen Suspension Bridge in Switzerland, cost 720k Francs - and that was built in the Alps, with Swiss labor costs (Switzerland has the highest minimum wage in the world.)
By contrast, the minimum wage in Portugal is the lowest in Western Europe by far, at 665 euros (!!!) per month.
It's not like this bridge was built in particularly inhospitable terrain or something - it ends less than 300 meters from a paved road. The Swiss bridge appears to be 1750 meters from the closest road.
The bridges are very similar lengths - 494m vs 516m - and similar construction.
You won't find any good builing workers at that price though. You're talking Switzerland, most of the construction work in Switzerland is foreign Portuguese workers. So the price in Portugal has to adjust slightly towards to Swiss prices if they want to hire any good people. Europe!
Well the other comments might be jumping to conclusions (which might have had an impact of course).
But the Portuguese bridge is over a river, this one is over a valley (though sure, the alps are a complication). They're also built slightly differently if you see the photos.
But yeah I think it's not only due to simple reasons.
Is it tho?
Or could it be the massive building boom in Portugal right now raising the prices?
Or the fact that kind of "alpine" construction is very rare in Portugal and probably required a lot of foreign expertise?
Or perhaps because there weren't many contractors biding on it, leading to a less competitive price?
Or maybe because they're totally different designs?
Or maybe there's a ton of factors you have no idea about and did no research on?
Corruption is really not as common in southern Europe as the media would make it out to be. Incompetence is a far bigger problem and also far harder to persecute, sadly.
To quote myself from a comment on high speed trains the other day “[The French] build high speed lines for between 1/5th and 1/20th of the cost of the one the UK is building. Just to prempt the France is flat and land is cheap arguments. 1/5th is the cost of the section of line between Lyon and Marseille that crosses the Massif Central with 50 tunnels and bridges and plenty of earthworks. The cost of land acquisition is only £8bn of the £100bn+ cost of HS2.” So if we conclude this kind of cost difference is corruption, we clearly have a much bigger problem in Britain.
Or could it perhaps just be that the requirements of the bridges are different? Things like oscillation tolerance, minimum width etc. Perhaps dictated by local laws and/or the kind of target public they want to attract, the average number of days a year the weather would permit transit etc etc ?
You are pretty much exactly describing how corruption works in a well regulated country. Since officials can't just pick the contractor but have to take the cheapest bid for the given requirements, they have to doctor the requirements until the contractor they want to hire has the best chance of making the best bid (or be the only contractor that effectively make a bid at all). This is exactly how it works from the lowest up to the highest level of government.
Since actual corruption is so hard to measure, we rank countries along a line of "corruption perception", i.e. how confident are people. Germany has an extremely good reputation. I believe you have to look at individual projects though and use a first principles approach: how much should it cost? What level of incompetence is believable vs plain corruption? Does the project make sense given larger government policy in the first place? Airport Berlin-Brandenburg, Wirecard, Nordstream are just the larger known cases, where corruption is the only possible explanation, there are tons of smaller projects as well, on which nobody bothers to put the spotlight.
It sounds like you are describing monopolies or regulatory capture. And sure enough, the US and Germany have some of the least competitive infrastructure construction markets.
The answer is corruption? Was that comment necessary? Do you have information that we don't have?
Also, it's not like corruption doesn't happen everywhere. For instance, not so long ago the Estonian government (that would be Northern Europe, I think) resigned because a corruption scandal (1).
A 110 foot (33.5m) long pedestrian bridge in Atlanta cost over USD$23 million. Part of the cost was to get it ready in time for the Super Bowl. Due to security concerns, it was cordoned off and no one was permitted to use it during the Super Bowl.
It does sound awfully cheap to me. For reference, if you ever been to Las Vegas and walked on those pedestrian bridges on the strip , the approximate price tag of those 15 years back was around $20 million.
They all have multiple elevators and escalators, are sturdy enough to handle hundreds of people simultaneously, and were constructed over some of the busiest roadways in the world. Not really apples to apples.
In comparison, a 300 meter utility pipes and pedestrian suspension bridge in Canada cost $12M CAD (approx €8M) a few years ago.
It was wider and stronger than this one to support the pipelines, and also required larger towers to support it on either end, which are surely a large part of the cost.
Doesn't sound too unrealistic. It's long but not very big. 1.2m in width. That does make quite a big difference in cost. So it's more of an walkway than proper bridge.
Yes and no. It's certainly something to think about when you have an 'interesting' design that pushes the limits somewhere, and pedestrian bridges often are have that sort of arty component. Or, you don't and it's embarrassing if there's a resonance in the 1-2 second range.
Most road bridges just aren't that interesting. They're a concrete slab on a girder, either steel or precast, depending on your local construction environment.
(As my bridge wasn't structurally terribly interesting in the end, the biggest issues were clearance with the railroad below while fitting into the height profile we needed for the surface, given the 100yr old elevated structure we were connecting to. That and the extremely low quality soils at the site)
I opened the comments specifically to see if anyone else thought the price was unrealistic.
I'd be surprised if that price would even cover the cost of materials.
Article says 1700lf and looks about 4ft wide, so that’s 6800ft of bridge deck. At $2.8M that would mean they spent $412/sf of deck. Where I live, the state DOT spends about $150/sf of bridge deck for traffic rated bridges. I’ve gotten prices for prefab ped bridges as low as $110 delivered (still have to pay a half-dozen guys for labor and the cost of a crane to place).
I guess there were some special construction challenges, but $415/sf is hardly a bargain for a bridge at first blush.
That may be low in some places where capital improvement costs are basically just graft.
