Cixi, China
China this week completed construction of the worlds longest sea-crossing bridge. The 22.5-mile-long bridge stretches across the mouth of Hangzhou Bay in the East China Sea; it is six lanes wide and will shorten by 75 miles the drive between Chinas industrial capital, Shanghai, and the major industrial port of Ningbo. In a first for China, private firms provided almost a third of the $1.4 billion investment needed for the project. While claiming the title as the longest sea bridge, the Hangzhou Bay Bridge is about a mile shorter than the bridge that spans Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana.