Wanli Skyway - 万里高架 v1

A 31.5 km dead straight six-lane bridge in the middle of an ocean. Out now for BeamNG.drive 0.39.x.

What it is

31 488 metres of six-lane road, 30 metres above open water, flat from one end to the other. No corners, no junctions, no side roads, nothing to slow down for.

Spawn in the middle and you have 15.7 km in each direction. That's about four minutes at a steady 250, and long enough that most cars run out of gearing before they run out of road.

万里 (wànlǐ, "ten thousand li") is the Chinese phrase for a distance you can't really picture. Same 万里 as in 万里长城, the Great Wall.

The bridge

It's built like a real sea crossing, not a strip of tarmac in the void.

• Three 3.75 m lanes each way, concrete median, hard shoulders both sides, steel handrail on the parapet. 31.3 m of deck.

• 321 twin-column piers at 96 m centres under a 4.2 m box girder, with a splash collar on every column at the waterline.

• Eight cable-stayed towers, 172 m above the deck, in four 576 m main spans. They're your only landmark out there, so you can actually tell how far along you are.

• 656 twin-arm lighting masts at 48 m centres. Each arm reaches the centre of its own carriageway, so the deck is lit evenly instead of in patches.

• A platform at each end, 384 x 216 m, with a toll canopy and room to turn around, so you don't have to finish a 31 km run in reverse.

Chinese decoration, on the bridge itself

Anything sitting on the horizon is something you never really look at, so all of it is within thirty metres of the car.

• 27 paifang gates (牌楼) over the road, one every 1.15 km. Red lacquered columns, three-tier green glazed roofs with upturned eaves and gold ridges, dougong bracket sets, and a gold-framed name board. Four names in rotation: 万里高架 (the ten-thousand-li skyway), 通达四海 (through to the four seas), 长风万里 (the long wind, ten thousand li), 海天一色 (sea and sky, one colour). Eleven red lanterns hanging under each gate.

• 109 backlit billboards, one every 288 m, alternating sides, six designs. Each one is angled twenty degrees into its own traffic, because a board mounted square to the road is edge-on to a driver and you never see it.

• Red lanterns on every other lighting mast.

• A pair of huabiao (华表), the carved cloud columns that stand at the gate of anything important in China, at both ends of the crossing.

• A gold cloud-scroll frieze along the outer parapet, the full 31 km of it.

Out on the water there are eight container ships under way in the shipping lane, and red and green channel buoys marking the passage under every main span.

Day and night

Time of day runs. A full cycle takes forty minutes and a session opens in the late afternoon, so if you stay out there it goes through dusk into a lantern-lit night and back around to dawn on its own. After dark the masts, the gates and the billboards are what you drive by.

AI traffic

Each carriageway is a proper one-way three-lane road in the navigation graph, right-hand traffic, and the two are joined by a U-turn at each end into one closed circuit. Traffic keeps circulating instead of stacking up against a dead end, so you have something to overtake for the whole 31 km.