The 24 kilometre-long Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link will open to the public at 3 pm this Sunday, The South China Morning Post reports. An inauguration ceremony has been scheduled for Sunday morning.
The new bridge system cost 44 billion yuan to build and was seven years in the making. It is set to cut travel time between the two Greater Bay Area (GBA) cities from from two hours to just 20 minutes.
The link crosses the Pearl River Delta via two bridges, two artificial islands and one 6.8 kilometre-long undersea tunnel.
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According to GBA tourism experts, the bridge is expected to boost visitor numbers to Zhongshan by between 10 and 50 percent in the short-term.
“In the past, it was difficult to do a same-day round trip from Zhuhai to Zhongshan because you had to sit on the bus for six hours to go back and forth,” said Timothy Chui Ting-pong, executive director of the Hong Kong Tourism Association.
“Now it’s truly possible to have some one-day itineraries.”
