Awa Shirasagi Ohashi, Cable-stayed bridge in Tokushima, Japan.
Awa Shirasagi Ohashi is a 1,291-meter road bridge over the Yoshino River, linking Sumiyoshi 6-chome on the right bank with Tsurushima in Kawachi-cho, Tokushima. Its general section is a 716-meter rigid-frame plate girder, while the 575-meter section over the tidal flat is a cable-egret plate girder bridge with a single 29.5-meter main tower and one cable. The bridge carries four lanes of Tokushima Prefectural Route 29, with sidewalks on both sides.
Construction began on 6 December 2003 and the bridge opened on 25 April 2012, after its official name was chosen by public competition on 13 February 2012; until then it had long been planned as the Higashi Kanjō Ōhashi. The project won the 2011 Zenken Award and the 2012 JSCE Tanaka Prize. Its 1,291 m span made it, at the time, the longest road bridge over a river in Shikoku.
The name was chosen by public competition shortly before opening and made official on 13 February 2012. It refers to the shirasagi, the white heron that flies over the Yoshino River estuary. The bridge's own construction method is named after it: the cable-eagret (iguretto) method, with a single low pylon.
The bridge carries four lanes of the Tokushima Loop Route 29 with sidewalks on both sides. Its northern and southern approaches narrow from two lanes to one, so traffic still backs up; two extra ramps toward Jōtō-chō and Atake opened on 20 March 2015. The descent to the Okinozu wharf road (Route 189) was still unopened as of September 2015.
The section over the tidal flat uses the "Cable Egret method", named after the white egrets that visit the mudflats: the pylons are kept to 29.5 m and carry a single cable each, reducing the number of piers and limiting impact on endangered fiddler crabs and visiting shorebirds.
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