The Betancourt Bridge is a fixed cable-stayed bridge in St. Petersburg across the Malaya Neva and the Zhdanovka River, passing between the Decembrist Islands of the Vasileostrovsky island and the Petrogradsky Islands of the Petrogradsky District through the Petrovsky (with a congress) and Sulfur Islands.
The bridge is one of the objects of the transport bypass of the center and provides practically no traffic lights from Pulkovo Airport to Gazprom Arena.
It is named in honor of Agustín de Betancourt, a prominent engineer of Spanish origin, who worked on many architectural structures in Saint Petersburg.
The bridge was opened to traffic on May 13, 2018, however the works were still in process. The official commissioning permit of Rostechnadzor was issued only on March 26, 2019.
The project of the Betancourt bridge received several architectural awards for innovative design and technologies. However, critics point out its winding S-shaped route fails to comply with city roads safety regulations, the turns to road interchanges are very sharp. 6 lanes of the bridge stuck into 3-4 laned city streets provoking bottleneck traffic jams.
The Betancourt Bridge is a non-bascule cable-braced S-shaped bridge with the following technical characteristics:
length — 923 m;
total length (with approaches) — 1.25 km;
width — 37 m;
lanes — 6;
height — 16 m;
shipping span — 100m;
bracing wires — 48;
bracing wires length — from 31.7 up to 99.3 m.
There are several viewpoints, a bike lane and a sidewalk for pedestrians.
Upstream is the Tuchkov Bridge, below is the Bridge across the Petrovsky fairway.