The Copenhagen Post

The Copenhagen Post: "A call to build a 44 km bridge connecting the Danish mainland with the island of Zealand is being labelled as 'visionary' by politicians. But the proposal, according to the traffic minister, Flemming Hansen, is way ahead of its time and will have to wait until a bridge between Denmark and Germany is completed."

Traffic engineers called on politicians Monday to scrap proposed plans for a 19 km link over the Femharn Belt and instead focus on a link that would drastically reduce travel time between the country's two largest cities, Copenhagen and Århus.

Denmark and Germany are in the midst of negotiations over a Fehmarn link and Hansen said that while he couldn't rule out the new proposal, the bridge to Germany took priority.

'The Fehmarn Bridge will connect Scandinavia with the rest of Europe,' he said, noting that a bridge would cut 155 km off a trip to Hamburg.

Hansen added that this was not the first time a bridge across the Kattegat waterway had been proposed, but that he would nevertheless ask the Infrastructure Commission, which is to look at Denmark's traffic infrastructure needs for the next three decades, to consider the plan.

Other MPs agreed that the time to build a Kattegat bridge was not now.

'It's very visionary,' said Kristian Pihl Lorentzen, traffic spokesperson for the PM's Liberal Party. 'But it is also a gigantic proposal that we're not ready to take up just yet.'

The opposition Social Democrats felt the proposal was worth looking into, but agreed that a Fehmarn bridge was still most important.

Traffic engineer Uffe Jacobsen said on Monday that up to five times as many cars would pass over a Kattegat link between Jutland and Zealand than a southern link. The distance between the two regions would also be reduced by about 150 km.

Currently, both stretches are directly linked by ferry service.