Pont Henri-Konan-Bédié

Opened in December 2014 after more than two decades of planning and delayed financing, the Pont Henri-Konan-Bédié was the first new lagoon crossing built in Abidjan since the Général-de-Gaulle bridge of 1967, and it was constructed as Côte d'Ivoire's first toll road under a public-private partnership with a French-led consortium, a financing model chosen because the state itself could not fund the project outright after decades of interrupted development during the crisis years of the 1990s and 2000s. The bridge was built to relieve the two older lagoon crossings, the Houphouët-Boigny bridge of 1957 and the Général-de-Gaulle bridge of 1967, both designed for a city of a few hundred thousand people but by the 2010s carrying traffic for a metropolitan area of six million or more. Named for Henri Konan Bédié, Côte d'Ivoire's second president, the bridge links Marcory Zone 4 on the southern shore directly to Cocody Riviera in the east, a journey that previously required a long detour through the Plateau and could take well over an hour in traffic, reduced by the new bridge to a few minutes. Tolls are collected at barriers or via a subscription badge system, and the project's completion under President Alassane Ouattara, after being first proposed under Bédié's own presidency in the 1990s, made it one of the clearest physical symbols of the post-2011 reconstruction period that followed Côte d'Ivoire's second civil conflict. The bridge's cable-stayed main span and approach viaducts represent the most modern piece of lagoon-crossing infrastructure in the city, built to standards well beyond those of its two 20th-century predecessors.