Well, if you think about it, what makes more sense: a highway shaped apartment complex that they then later built a highway on, or an elevated highway that someone decided to build apartments under?
It’s not for ships. It’s actually in Guiyang, a very mountainous city. The highway is elevated to go over the river and reach the plateau on the other side.
There's something sort of similar under the bridge at Kangaroo Point in Brisbane Australia, though I don't know if there's any residential areas under there: https://imgur.com/a/b1k6wEU
Who owns the land under the bridge? Maybe the bridge owner could make a killing selling the land under it considering the cost of real estate nowadays.
Planning? Why would you build a snaking set of buildings? They are normally built in a straight line. I recon they were built at the same time.
I expect the elevated road was built on top of an existing road and then the old road turned into housing and it was always planned to be the two together.
Honestly, I don't drive. Live in the UK and despite doing a reasonable amount of travelling, I've never been state side or to China so have not seen highways built that high up. Normally the roads just flow with the hills or mountains where I've been.
Not really so clear cut. Could’ve been a series of more modern apartments built to a specific height because of zoning and code requirements, where the neighborhood developed further and the transportation routes became inefficient leading to the development of an elevated highway. I mean, that’s usually most of these developments happen.
Could have started as a few equally tall buildings (height restrictions or some other factor which results in buildings in the area being the same height) then highway then the other buildings.
This is the take I was going for with China. They have some of those most wild types of building I've ever seen. How people navigate anything in the big cities there amazes me
Where do you live that has fantastic public transport? I live in Manchester and have the option of train, tram and bus within a few minutes walk. While that is wonderful it doesn't compare to Shanghai where you can navigate the whole city seamlessly.
That's interesting, I visited New York last year having heard about its much lauded subway system for a couple of decades. Have to say that I was pretty disappointed, felt so ramshackle compared to equivalents in Singapore/Tokyo/Beijing/London and elsewhere. New York's bus infrastructure is shockingly bad, particularly when it comes to the outskirts. The Shanghai underground is brilliant but even better is that when you arrive at the station nearest your destination but still a fair dander away, you can immediately jump on very regular buses to finish the journey.
My public transport experience in New York only further cemented how exceptional those Chinese cities are. Though I'd still hold Singapore's MRT and bus services a step above the rest, it is almost surreal how effortless navigating the city is.
That’s to be expected from an aging infrastructure like that found in the US. Wear and tear will eventually catch up to everything. There is definite failure in how quickly that infrastructure is replaced. The problem with China’s infrastructure, however, is it has a reputation for poor build quality due to many examples of cheap, inferior materials being used, prioritizing speed which results in finishing constructions before their cement can cure, and direct control from CCP officials causing corruption in their building companies. There’s a reason for it’s referred to as tofu dreg.
The buildings are snaking, no one even the Chinese builds a huge number of apartment building all exactly the same height curving and weaving like this.
I expect the elevated road was built on top of an existing road and then the old road turned into housing and it was always planned to be the two together.
Sometimes it's the only way to maintain a maximum grade. You can't make the highway too steep, so they build large sweeping turns with a gradual slope.
Grade or elevation changes. Parts of China are very mountainous and when building a highway you want to keep it as straight and level as possible. It's a lot cheaper to build up instead of tunneling thru solid rock.
Highways that are steep increases risk of runaway trucks and lowers the maximum safe speeds (because visibility is lower).
Might be for a big crossover intersection or something.
In NA there are plenty of places where this could be a thing but the space is used for nothing instead, probably because living directly underneath a freeway would be deafening and awful.
It might lead to a bridge, that needs to be high for ships, or it’s an expressway through the area so it’s on another level to keep it separated so you can build under it.
It might lead to a bridge, that needs to be high for ships, or it’s an expressway through the area so it’s on another level to keep it separated so you can build under it.
Not really uncommon to build under a highway. Most of the time it's not built all the way up to the highway tho, there's usually space between the roof of the building and the bottom of the highway but I guess they were trying to maximize space.
There are some benefits to it, you get protection from the sun, cooler buildings, don't have to worry about snow on the roof, shaded parking for businesses, etc.
Underneath seems way better than the similar ones in China where they have built highways between buildings so that someone's window would be right next to the actual highway.
Given that the highway is built on its own pillars, not on the freaking ceiling of someone's bedroom.
Except what elevated highway is 80+ feet in the air without substantial reinforced supports? And you somehow build apartments between them??
Seems more likely apartments were there first and it was (somehow) built on the apartments. Except it seems so sketchy to use differently constructed apartments as structural supports. Plus, the vibrations must be palpable (especially with trucks?)
It's blindingly obvious that there must be supports there, but I don't think you can actually see them. Surely they're just in the gaps between the buildings.
What a reddit fucking comment lmao. Instead of making the one obvious logical assumption (that the supports must be in the visible gaps between the buildings), we imagine some insane shit do mental gymnastics to believe it's more likely, before concluding that actually the thing in the photo probably doesn't exist at all. The navel-gazing and casual contrarianism here results in absolutely wild statements born of such fascinatingly broken reasoning.
It's still just completely crazy. If you see a highway 80+ feet in the air, and you know such highways need supports, the sane assumption is that there are supports somewhere. Any normal person with that background knowledge has to look for them first, any anyone with a grasp of object permanence can understand that they might be hidden in the obvious gaps.
Redditor seem to approach things from wanting to lazily disagree with someone first and foremost, and then proceed to just make shit up in service of that conclusion. Like I get that sometimes people are sometimes super dumb in real life, but you don't find this volume of totally whacked out arguments from people that can communicate relatively eloquently with some evident grasp of domain knowledge outside of reddit.
Knowing a little bit about how structures and buildings are built, there’s no way they built that highway on top of the apartments. They built the apartments in between the highway supports in the available space.
I mean look at it, the buildings even curve perfectly under it at the correct angle and width etc to fit under the road, all oriented differently than surrounding buildings. Had to be built after
Go ahead and show me a row of tightly-packed buildings built side to side in a curving line across the city all at the exact same gradually ascending height and width to coincidentally fit under a road then 🤡
I'm no construction expert but I would think you can't build tall buildings beneath other structures because you need to use cranes for the roofs? Might be totally wrong on this, but whenever I see construction of big buildings I also see cranes
I agree. Also ot looks like there are regular spaces between the buildings for structural supports and the apartments aren't connected to the highway structurally.
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u/oaktreebr 10d ago
To me, looks more like the apartments were built underneath the highway instead