"The Fehmarn Strait bridge is
coming," proclaimed German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee,
referring to a 19-kilometre Baltic Sea link between Germany and Denmark.
To make sure it does, Tiefensee is scheduled to travel to Copenhagen on
Wednesday to ink the final agreement together with his Danish counterpart,
Carina Christensen.
The signing will cap years of talks that at times seemed headed nowhere. If all
goes well, in 10 years cars and trains will be rolling between Puttgarden, on
the German island of Fehmarn, and Rodby, on the Danish island of Lolland.
Tiefensee reached agreement on building the giant bridge with Christensen's
predecessor, Flemming Hansen, a little over a year ago.
Denmark, a kingdom whose population is almost 20 times smaller than Germany's, will shoulder 4.8 billion of the estimated 5.6-billion-euro price tag. Germany's costs are practically limited to highway and railway links to the bridge on Fehmarn and
south toward Hamburg.
"It's clear that our interest in this project is greater than that of the
Germans," remarked Hansen in explaining his country's disproportionately
large financial stake. The bridge will cut an hour from a drive between Copenhagen and Hamburg, now about four-and-a-half hours.
Because of chronically empty state coffers and strong resistance from eastern Germany, the German government was long lukewarm toward the project, whose appeal is
greatest in the northwestern state of Schleswig-Holstein, of which Fehmarn is
part.
As for Denmark, its tax revenues are so plentiful in the wake of a nearly
15-year economic boom that no one there seems fazed by the huge investment and
high risk to taxpayers.
Danes' optimism is driven in part by the massive flow of traffic across the Great Belt Bridge between the main Danish islands of Zealand and Fyn, and, since 2000, across
the Oresund Bridge between Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmo.
Christensen said the costs of the Fehmarn Strait bridge, to be borne by private
investors and guaranteed by the Danish government, would definitely be recouped
within a few decades.
Construction of the bridge, whose design is still largely undecided, is
expected to start in 2011 and be completed in 2018.
But a number of hurdles will remain even after Tiefensee and Christensen sign
the agreement.
The biggest is opposition by German environmental protectionists, who say the
bridge will adversely affect birds and marine mammals such as porpoises and
seals in the Fehmarn Strait.
"We'll take every opportunity to block the project," Leif Miller,
managing director of the Berlin-based environmental protection organisation
NABU, told Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung, dpa
reported.