Announcing the location of İstanbul’s third Bosporus bridge at a press conference in İstanbul on Thursday, Yıldırım said the new project, including the third bridge and a North Marmara Highway would cost the state a total of $6 billion. The minister said construction was already under way to the north of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet (FSM) Bridge, one of the two existing bridges straddling the Bosporus. The project is expected to be finalized in five years. The third bridge will be a suspension bridge spanning 1,257 meters.
The first bridge over İstanbul’s Bosporus was the Boğaziçi Bridge, which was opened in 1973 by then-President Fahri Korutürk, while the FSM began operating in 1988 when Turgut Özal was prime minister. The name of the future bridge has not been decided yet. The third bridge is expected to connect a highway starting in the Western province of Tekirdağ’s Kınalı with another highway starting from the Paşaköy neighborhood in İstanbul’s Asian side. This route extends to Gebze in Kocaeli, finally meeting with the İzmir highway. The project involves the construction of a 260-kilometer main road along with separate connections at different points along the route. The minister said the government expects a sufficient amount of traffic to utilize the route once it is finalized.
Recalling that the State Planning Organization (DPT) first started to discuss the project in 1993, Yıldırım said: “Since that year, relevant public institutions and some universities have carried out joint studies on the project. As part of studies since the year 2006, we have managed to define six separate possible routes for the third bridge and finally chose one of them,” he explained.
Environmental concerns vs. government’s promises
Yıldırım said the government has taken social concerns into consideration during the preparation of the project and that all the necessary precautions will be taken to minimize the bridge’s negative impact on the environment. Some parties and civil society organizations who oppose the construction of a third bridge in İstanbul argue it will pose a tremendous threat to the city’s forests and natural resources. They expressed environmental concerns regarding the city’s forests and water resources. Officials, however, stressed the significance of the project in terms of transportation in a city of millions. Some of İstanbul’s prominent forestry areas are along the third bridge route. Belgrade Forest, Fatih Forest, Polonezköy National Park and some historic sites are among these. The project is expected to be finalized with little damage to these sites.
The minister asserted that the cost of a comparatively poor transportation infrastructure to the city of İstanbul has reached TL 3 billion per year. “High carbon dioxide emissions due to certain shortcomings in the healthy infrastructure of the city are another part of the picture. All these negative indices force us to finalize the North Marmara Highway project in the shortest time possible.” “There are 3.3 million motor vehicles on road in the region that the North Marmara project covers. Land transportation shoulders 87 percent of İstanbul’s mass transportation burden. We have to find alternative ways to alleviate the city’s busy traffic,” Yıldırım argued.
