Banpo Bridge, Seoul, South Korea

Banpo (Chinese pinyin: Bànpō) is an archaeological remain discovered in 1953 and located in the Yellow River Valley just east of Xi’an, China. It contains the remains of several well organized Neolithic settlements dating from 5600 — 6700 years ago according to radiocarbon dating. It is a large area of 5 to 6 hectares and surrounded by a ditch, probably a defensive moat, five or six metres wide. The houses were circular, built of mud and wood with overhanging thatched roofs. They sat on low foundations. There appear to be communal burial areas.

Banpo is the type site associated with Yangshao Culture. Archaeological sites with similarities to the first phase at Banpo are considered to be part of the “Banpo phase” (7th millennium BCE) of the Yangshao culture. Banpo was excavated from 1954 to 1957 and covers an area of around 50,000 square metres.

The settlement was surrounded by a moat, with the graves and pottery kilns located outside of the moat perimeter. Many of the houses were semisubterranean with the floor typically a metre below the ground surface. The houses were supported by timber poles and had steeply pitched thatched roofs.

According to the Marxist paradigm of archaeology that was prevalent in the People’s Republic of China during the time of the excavation of the site, Banpo was considered to be a matriarchal society; however, new research contradicts this claim, and the Marxist paradigm is gradually being phased out in modern Chinese archaeological research. Currently, little can be said of the religious or political structure from these ruins from the archeological evidence.

The site is now home to the Xi’an Banpo Museum, built in 1957 to preserve the archaeological collection.

More Roads

⇑ Autumn Colours

⇒ One side is natural, the other genetically modified?

⇒ Now if the surface was red, they could be getting ready for The Oscars

⇐ I just wish I could read the road signs; “Warning! Makers of Scary Movies ahead”

⇐ What I’d like to know is how they built it

⇒ Well, stone me! They must be expecting marauding Picts

⇐ Don’t you just love it when you’re stuck behind three caravans on a road like this? Or a lorry belching diesel fumes?

Surprise, surprise! A coach route; it’ll soon meet one coming the other way, right on a bend (actually, how could it not be on a bend?) In fact this is the Tianmen Mountain Road, Zhangjiajie, China and is shown on the video Five Most Challenging and Scary Roads on Earth For Driving. It includes loads of coaches and a mad driver. Parts of the other four roads on this video are quite good, especially the Norwegian Atlantic Ocean Road.

Here you just don’t need those concrete crash barriers — nature has provided! [It reminds me of a holiday driving on Tenerife around Mount Teide; later that day we were sunbathing on the beach]

Paths

This must be ‘Hyacinth Lane’

Where you feel envious of blind people

A lovely view when there are no clouds

But it’s a long way back when you need to go

What happens if you take a wrong turning, or your sat-nav is on the blink

⇐ Home at last, if there are no woodworms around
⇒ How come there are so many people around?

⇐ What would they have done if that tree hadn’t been there?

⇒ Forest path

More Bridges

Golden Gate Bridge, north of San Francisco

The Keddie Wye is an interesting trestle bridge, also in California.

The Forth Railway bridge and the Glenfinnan Viaduct are magnificent Scottish structures; another photo that includes the Forth railway bridge also appears here. The Ribblehead viaduct on the Settle & Carlisle line is a majestic railway bridge.

The Viaduc de Cize–Bolozon is a road and rail bridge across the Ain gorge in eastern France between Mâcon and Geneva.

Spectacular Chinese Roads and Bridges

Guoliang tunnel road

China’s Guoliang tunnel road is in the Taihang Mountains; the small village of Guoliang is on a mountaintop and was isolated from the rest of the world, the only way to reach it being to walk through a valley surrounded by steep cliffs, and then climb a series of cut out stone steps. Cut off from the rest of the world, the village was doomed to become a ghost town, unless a road could be constructed trough the cliffs.

This all changed in 1972. When the Chinese government decided it wasn’t worth to invest several millions into a road that would only be used by 300 people, the villagers decided to dig the tunnel road themselves. It was their only hope to get connected to the rest of the world. It took thirteen villagers five years to finish the 1,200-metre long tunnel road. The tunnel is about 5 metres high and 4 metres wide, enough for two vehicles to pass. Without any training, the construction of the tunnel was very dangerous. Farmers were working with explosives on the steep cliffs. Some of them died in fatal accidents, but the others kept on digging. Finally, on 1^st May 1977, the tunnel was opened to traffic.

Guoliang Tunnel Road

Overwater Highway

Overwater Highway

A stunning new route opened in Hubei province, central China, on 9^th August 2015. Drivers drive over water as the 6.8-mile motorway is built in the middle of a river valley. The spectacular road connects Xingshan County in Hubei to G42, a high-speed route that connects Shanghai to Chengdu in south west China.

It will cut down travel time from Xingshan to G42 to just 20 minutes – this was previously around an hour along a steep and convoluted road.

The road is built on top of a bridge that follows the curve of the river valley, treating drivers along the route to breathtaking views of the valley as well as the river and nearby villages.

Sinuous Structure for Chinese bridge

Dutch studio NEXT Architects designed a pedestrian bridge for Changsha, China, with plans for a wavy structure based on a sequence of undulating steel ribbons that combine to create a never-ending surface like a Möbius strip.

NEXT Architects designed the 150-metre bridge to span the Dragon King Harbour River in Changsha’s Meixi Lake district – a 6.5 million square-metre development masterplanned by Kohn Pedersen Fox and being built from scratch in the south west of the city. Architect John van de Water says the form is also intended to reference traditional Chinese crafts. “It refers to a Chinese knot that comes from an ancient decorative Chinese folk art,” he explained.

WHAT IS THAT?

Is this genuine?

Is it another failure from Google Earth?

Is it someone high on something-or-other hallucinating with the help of Photoshop?

It could be the Golden Gate bridge, so I suspect that the last one is closest to the mark.

This [below] can be nowhere else in the world than San Francisco

Balham – Then and Now

The wreckage of a bus which fell into a huge crater during the blitz in October 1940. A bomb fractured a water main which resulted in the flooding of Balham underground station, where people were sheltering from the German air raid.

68 people died.

Daily life on Balham High Road, south London in October 2012. A memorial plaque commemorating the event was unveiled in the station’s ticket hall on the sixtieth anniversary.

Traffic Jam

The longest traffic jam in the world was recorded in China. Its total length was 260 kilometres.

Thousands of motorists were caught up in a 60-mile, 11-day tailback on the National Expressway 110 between the capital Beijing and Inner Mongolia — setting the new world record for the longest traffic jam. It was caused by a flood of cargo-bearing heavy trucks and compounded by road work. On 26^th August 2010 traffic officials had estimated the longest traffic jam in the World would last until mid-September.

Where the Great Wall of China ends

While many motorists took detours, some ended up trapped for up to five days, sleeping in their cars and taking shifts behind the wheel. Others played cards to pass the time and chatted by the roadside as 400 police were drafted in to ensure the communal road rage was kept in check. And local traders made the most of the situation by setting up stalls and roaming from lorry to lorry selling their wares at exorbitant prices. A publicity officer with the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau blamed insufficient capacity as a result of the roadworks for the delays.

Construction was ordered on the National Expressway, which travels from Beijing to Huai’an in Heibei Province, and on to Jining in Inner Mongolia, because of damage done by lorries. An eight-tonne limit was imposed but that month there were even more lorries carrying heavy loads of coal or fruit because the Beijing section of the other major route out of the capital — the Beijing-Tibet Expressway — has had stricter weight limits brought in.

Gulf of Jiaozhou Bridge

Hand it to the Chinese — they not only have the second biggest economy in the world but also two of the longest cross-sea bridges on the planet with the opening of the country’s 41-kilometre Qingdao Jiaozhou Bay Bridge. The bridge is designed for eight car lanes, and is the longest sea bridge in the world.

According to the China Daily, construction of the £1.5 billion bridge began in May 2007 and the bridge’s opening to traffic connects Qingdao to Huangdao, allowing travellers access to both districts in a mere 20 minutes. The Chinese publication said that building the record-breaking bridge was part of China’s efforts to push the area as a hub for international shipping in the Northeast Asia region.

The new China landmark effectively eclipsed the 36-kilometre stretch of Hangzhou Bay Cross-sea Bridge as the longest in the world and fulfilled “a long-time dream for Qingdao residents,” city officials said.

Here’s a bridge that’s probably more familiar to westerners.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge

Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse

Slender, elegant and graceful, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge stretched like a steel ribbon across Puget Sound in 1940. The third longest suspension span in the world opened on 1^st July. Only four months later, the great span’s short life ended in disaster. “Galloping Gertie”, collapsed in a windstorm on 7^th November 1940.

Watch the amazing Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse “Gallopin’ Gertie” 1940 film clip.

The bridge became famous as “the most dramatic failure in bridge engineering history.” Now, it’s also “one of the world’s largest man-made reefs.” The sunken remains of “Gallopin’ Gertie” were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992 to protect her from salvagers.

A dramatic tale of failure and success

The story of the failure of the 1940 Narrows Bridge and the success of the Current Narrows Bridge is a great American saga. When “Gallopin’ Gertie” splashed into Puget Sound, it created ripple effects across the nation and around the world. The event changed forever how engineers design suspension bridges. “Gertie’s” failure led to the safer suspension spans we use today.

Read the Lessons From the Failure of a Great Machine.

Street and City Scenes

Geneva, Switzerland

Los Angeles, USA

Regent Street, London

Riga and the River Daugava, Latvia

Vejer de la Frontera, Spain

⇐ Vejer de la Frontera is a picturesque hill-top Andalusian village in the province of Cádiz; it has a restaurant “El Jardín del Califa” (The Caliph’s Garden) in its main square

Google Earth’s Problems with Bridges

When I first prepared the section on transport problems I hadn’t thought of the sort of mess Google could make of the world in presenting its maps in a “realistic” manner. Here are some examples.

⇐ Bixby Creek Bridge, Big Sur, southern California, according to Google

⇒ Bixby Creek Bridge as it was in 2013

Here are four more Google highway problems. The first is of the Hoover dam bridge and the picture alongside is as it really is; I don’t know where the other three are, but I have no plans to go to any of them! The last one looks like an ultra-super-duper-jumbo-jet has mistaken the highway for a runway.

Roads, Bridges & Paths