The Rainbow Bridge, Tokyo Bay
This is the absolutely fantastic
Rainbow Bridge that crosses Tokyo bay, Tokyo. A 570 metre-long
suspension bridge, it has two decks that carry three transportation
lines - the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuto_Expressway Shuto
Expressway on the top, and on the bottom, Route 357 and the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurikamome New Transit
Yurikamome.
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The Yurikamome is actually an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_guideway_transit automated
guideway transit service, which looks like a monorail, but the
carriages run on rubber wheels instead. It’s a fully automated
system with no drivers, which carries 100,000 passengers a day to
the artificial island of Odaiba. The system has become a tourist
attraction in its own right, thanks mainly to the
spectacular 270-degree loop which the Rainbow bridge has to
make to get the Yurikamome up from ground level. Here’s a http://flickr.com/photos/thingsinjars/1328096695/ recent
ground level shot of the loop.
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See also our related posts on The
Lotus Bridge, a
Curly Bridge Over the Seto Inland Sea, Odaiba’s
Ferris Wheels, and Utah’s
Rainbow Bridge (which actually features in our book too!).
As always, you can read more about Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Bridge_(Tokyo) at
Wikipedia. Thanks to http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/bill/ Bill Kendrick,
Terry Foster, Christian Willman, and anyone else who submitted this
since I earmarked it for posting… 14 months ago!
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