I wrote an article about battery developments in China, and in that article related our first out of town trip in our EV1. In that article, I referred to a Substack article which detailed more about the solid state battery developments in China. That same Substack article also referred to a bridge built in Guizhou, one of the poorer provinces of China2.
The bridge goes across the Huajiang Canyon, at the bottom of which is the Beipan River, some 625 metres below the bridge deck. The bridge opened to the public in late September, 2025, having taken three years and eight months to complete, at a cost of 2.1 billion RMB (~US$300 million)3. To get from one side of the canyon to the other used to mean a drive of an hour or so, now it takes a minute or two. It was built to bolster the local economy by connecting major tourist spots in the region, as well as becoming a destination in itself2,4.
I think that comparing this to the repair of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed in March, 2024 after being struck by a ship, may be instructive. The repair of that bridge, was initially estimated to cost about US$1.8 billion, is now likely to blow out to as much as US$5.2 billion and is unlikely to be completed before the end of this decade5,6.
While the situations are very different in that China was building a bridge from scratch, whereas the bridge in Baltimore had collapsed, and the debris needed clearing, pylons needed to be driven into the riverbed, the bridged needed to be redesigned, and more safety structures added. However, it seems to me that a cost of about 17 times the cost of the Chinese bridge is exorbitant. It makes me wonder if, when then President Biden stated that the federal government would pay the full cost of reconstruction, some people in boardrooms smiled with glee and rubbed their hands together in anticipation of record profits for their companies.
Sources
- https://blotreport.com/2025/11/29/range-anxiety/
- https://cyrusjanssen.substack.com/p/china-just-invented-a-battery-that
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huajiang_Canyon_Bridge
- https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/17/key-bridge-rebuild-cost-increase-00654425
- https://marylandmatters.org/2025/11/17/key-bridge-replacement-costs-soar-as-high-as-5-2-billion-opening-delayed-to-2030/
And all being paid for by the ignorant, misguided, misinformed taxpayers who keep voting for “servants of the people”. Disgusting!
Although my Bachelor of Engineering was the Production stream of the Mechanical Engineering course at RMIT, I can appreciate significant differences between the bridges, and the societies that were the communities they were built in. The Chinese bridge needed supports a long way down, which brings issues of Euler’s theorem, and buckling of relatively long and slender structural items under compression, but all greenfield site, and atmospheric access, whereas the USA repair and reconstruct was a lot less height, but a very different construction, along with into a wet substrate, and potential working below water level, whether diving, or excluding the water with a caisson, a form of very localized “dam” around a small subsection as a contained worksite.
There are also the wages, and sourcing the materials in a “planned economy” as opposed to a profiteering unregulated “open” market, and the costs of the supposed “safety” cultures. It can cost to provide the safety in the USA, even if it is more “lip service” than real. There are very good reasons to take the official costings with a rather large “pinch of salt” in both instances, but also recognize that there will be other “costs” that neither are prepared to acknowledge and account for.
There are also significant matters for discussion and consideration about the siting, and sizing, of both bridges, and how they impact the local communities in many ways. Such are rarely even acknowledged, let alone addressed, along with considering the future benefits, and significant downsides.