The 41.58-km, eight-lane Qingdao Jiaozhou Bay Bridge, connecting the urban district of the city to its Huangdao district, cost 14.8 billion yuan ($2.3 billion). Construction started in May 2007.
The bridge will shorten the route between the two centers by 30 km, cutting travel time from more than 40 minutes to about 20 minutes, said Han Shouxin, deputy director of the city's traffic management committee.
Previously, the longest cross-sea bridge in the world was the 36-km-long Hangzhou Bay Cross-sea Bridge that connects the cities of Jiaxing and Ningbo in East China's Zhejiang province.
"The bridge has been a long-time dream for Qingdao residents," said Qingdao Party Chief Li Qun at the inauguration ceremony.
He said the bridge will greatly improve travel from the eastern tip of Shandong's Qingdao, Yantai and Weihai, through central Shandong's Rizhao, Linyi and even to the northern areas of neighboring Jiangsu province.
It makes the one-hour economy ring for downtown Qingdao and its surrounding districts a reality and strengthens the prospect of a four-hour economy ring among cities on the Shandong Peninsula, Li said.
Guan Hua, a 30-year-old woman at a local shipping company, was excited about the bridge.
"I have to travel back and forth between Huangdao and downtown and other places in Qingdao for work and sometimes for fun with friends," she said. "It was annoying to have to fight the downtown traffic for the expressway entry to reach the destinations.
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