Singapore's Bridges: Crawford Bridge

For the last week we've been looking at arch bridges in Toronto. We're going to continue exploring arch bridges, but we're changing our location to the city-state of Singapore.

Actually, Toronto and Singapore are similar. They both were ruled by Great Britain, they both have a very diverse population, and they are both comfortable and attractive cities with many handsome bridges.

The Crawford Bridge crosses the Rochor River just upstream from its mouth in the Kallang Basin. The Kallang Basin and the Singapore River flow into Marina Channel. More information on Singapore's rivers is at Thinkquest.

Like the other bridges we've recently studied, the Crawford Bridge is a reinforced concrete through arch, in which the deck is a tie that pulls on the ends of the arch like the string of a bow. Also, like those other bridges, there is no cross-bracing and instead of having cables to support the deck it has concrete hangers.  There is a 15 page report about the reconstruction of this bridge by Thomas Christie Hood in a 1929 journal article of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

As shown on the photo above, the Crawford Bridge is wider than it is long. It has three arch ribs and includes pedestrian walkways and eight traffic lanes in two directions.  It is in the Little India and Arab Quarter, about a mile northeast of downtown Singapore.

Singapore's Bridges: Crawford Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.