“It seems like they intentionally neglected the ferry system just to create enough discontent so that people would accept construction of this bridge,” says Maria José Pacheco, executive secretary of the Bahia Fishermen’s Protection Council. Passengers making the crossing between the Brazilian city of Salvador and the island of Itaparica in Todos os Santos Bay on the Atlantic have a litany of complaints about the ferry service: delays, dirtiness, mechanical problems, even collisions. One of the previous operators was accused of overbilling and poor management; the current operator has already been hit with millions of reais in fines for similar problems. The ferry crossing across the mouth of the bay takes about 50 minutes. A proposed bridge would cut that time down to just 15 minutes. Construction is expected to start in 2025, and once completed in four years’ time, the 12.4-kilometer (7.7-mile) span will be the second-longest bridge in the Southern Hemisphere, after Rio de Janeiro’s 13.29-km (8.26-mi) Niterói bridge. A consortium of two Chinese companies won the bid for the Salvador-Itaparica bridge in 2020. The public-private partnership has a price tag of 9 billion reais ($1.5 billion). The companies’ portfolios include similar grand public works projects, including the world’s largest maritime bridge in the Sea of China, and railway lines in Ethiopia and Nigeria. The 35-year concession for the Salvador-Itaparica Island Highway Bridge System, as it’s known, involves the construction phase, operation and maintenance, as well as works including roads, tunnels, viaducts and toll plazas. The bridge between…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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