Opening of Largest Infrastructure Project in Scotland a Decade in Making

DALLAS, Texas – Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. and Arup celebrated the official opening of the Queensferry Crossing by Her Majesty The Queen. The Jacobs Arup joint venture has worked with Transport Scotland since 2007 to develop and manage the Forth Replacement Crossing project in the east of Scotland. The Scottish Government investment of over $1.6 billion comprises the new Queensferry Crossing, the longest three-tower, cable-stayed bridge in the world and 13.7-miles of major motorway upgrades to the cross-Forth transport corridor.

The Jacobs Arup JV co-located with Transport Scotland as an integrated Employer Delivery Team, initially in Transport Scotland’s office in Glasgow in 2008, and onsite since 2011, to develop and manage the entire project. As Transport Scotland’s lead consultant and delivery partner for construction, the Jacobs Arup JV’s 1,400 global staff provided more than 1.6 million work hours.

“The Queensferry Crossing has been designed to complement its unique setting on the Firth of Forth,” explained Dr. Mike Glover OBE, Arup technical director on the project. “There is an effortless elegance to the bridge’s distinctive overlapping cabling system, which disguises the amazing feat of engineering it represents. The crossed cables create a structure of such strength that the towers and deck are able to be as slim as feasible, producing a slender silhouette.”

The integrated “managed crossing scheme,” pivotal to the project’s viability and ultimate user experience, enables the Forth Road Bridge to continue to be used as a public transport corridor. This, combined with the innovative cable design and the implementation of Intelligent Transport Systems, reduced the need for significant expansion of the existing road network, allowing the overall scheme budget to be reduced by over $2.5 billion. The Jacobs Arup JV also provided guidance into the design of the bridge’s cable-stayed solution, which allows individual strands within each cable to be replaced if required without the need to close the Queensferry Crossing. Wind shields and a structural health monitoring system have been implemented to help enhance reliability.

The Jacobs Arup JV scope included scheme definition, sustainable bridge strategy, highway and environmental design, statutory process, procurement, project management and construction support. Staff skill sets spanned traditional engineering, structural health monitoring, environmental consulting, wind engineering, ship impact studies, stakeholder engagement and Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method building portfolio management, together with road infrastructure design and ITS.

Photo courtesy of Business Wire / ©Transport Scotland.