Life UNDER the fast lane

Life UNDER the fast lane: The Chinese city where homes tremble from motorway built just feet above residents' living rooms

People in cities around the world have learned to live all kinds of noise, but in one Chinese metropolis families have been forced to sleep with cotton wool in their ears. Some residents in Guiyang found themselves living directly under a motorway which sits just a few metres above their living rooms. Called the Shuikousi bridge, it was completed in May 1997, and about 10 residential buildings were built under it two years later as low-rent housing and resettlement housing projects. But instead of pedestrians strolling across overhead, for years their living room floors trembled as cars and heavy duty trucks roared past. One resident Lao Yang said he was so used to the trembling that he didn't feel the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, despite it shaking the city. He said he had lived there since 1999 and it had taken a long time to adapt to the constant noise. The noise dulled somewhat when, in September 2009, the Guiyang city highway opened and the authorities stopped lorries from travelling on the bridge and light trucks travelling across it in the evening.  But now residents say the biggest problem is dust from the road.  Describing the din, he said the ceiling would quiver and the windows and glass would shake and he'd have to put cotton wool balls in his ears to cope with the noise. It wasn't unusual in the nineties to have residents living under bridges, although it's now less common due to improvements in living conditions in China.  At 300m long it's a major thoroughfare and central access route to Longdongbao Airport. The city, in south west China, has a population of four million, and is located at the junction of four major segments of the national highway grid.  It's not the first time the Chinese have produced strange bridges.  The country even boasts it's every own Tower Bridge in Suzhou in eastern China - 9,000 miles away from the real thing in London.

الحياة تحت الخط السريع  : فقط في الصين الناس يسكنون تحت الخط السريع

لقد تعلم الناس في المدن في جميع أنحاء العالم للعيش جميع أنواع الضوضاء، ولكن في أحد الأحياء الصينية المعاصرة أجبروا على النوم والقطن والصوف في آذانهم. وجد بعض السكان في قوييانغ أنفسهم يعيشون مباشرة تحت الطريق السريع الذي يجلس على بعد بضعة أمتار فوق غرف معيشتهم.يسمى الجسر Shuikousi، تم الانتهاء منه في مايو 1997، وبنيت حوالي 10 عمارات سكنية تحته