New Developments in Road Bridge Construction in Germany

The reunification of Germany in 1990 not only characterised a turning point in the development of the country in a political, economic and social manner, but it also had an impact on development in many other areas. One of the biggest challenge was, for example, the modernisation and upgrading of the infrastructure in the so-called new federal states in a short period of time in order to provide the basis for an economic upswing and to establish better links with less developed regions. The 17 German Unity Transport Projects (Verkehrsprojekte Deutsche Einheit = VDE) constituted one of the major tasks. The Federal Government in 1992 had already taken the decision to extend and upgrade the road, rail and inland waterway infrastructure. For the VDE road projects alone, more than 1000 km of motor way had to be rehabilitated and extended and approximately 950 km of motorway had to be newly built. After a period of almost 15 years of planning and building, about 85% of the projects are now complete and in operation. This gave bridge construction engineers the unique opportunity of realising an extraordinarily high number of engineering structures within a relatively short time-span. Approximately 1500 bridges were planned and built during this time, out of which about 180 are large bridges with overall length of more than 100 m. In this context, and in addition to proven types of construction, interesting technical progress was made and innovations were initiated and implemented.