Mumbai, Nearly five decades after it was conceived, India’s first sea bridge opens its toll gates in the country’s commercial and entertainment capital later Tuesday, promising to cut travel time by 80 percent to just eight minutes, bypassing 23 traffic signals that commuters have to presently endure.
Called the Bandra-Worli Sea Link (BWSL), the 5.6-km bridge on the Arabian Sea has cost Rs.1634-crore ($325 million) and the authorities hope to see some 150,000 vehicles use it each day for a toll that ranges between Rs.50 and Rs.100 per trip depending on the size of the automobile.
United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi is slated to inaugurate the gleaming new sea link, which has been billed as an engineering marvel and the most prestigious project for the Maharashtra State Road Development Corp (MSRDC) in over a decade, after the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.
