A bridge spanning the five kilometre stretch between Malta and Gozo would come with a yearly price tag of €4 million to maintain and operate.

This amount is over and above the €800 million (excluding taxes) needed to finance the project.

Annual operation and maintenance costs were estimated at 0.5 per cent of the construction cost.

The calculation is found in a feasibility study carried out by China Communications Construction Company, details of which emerged yesterday in The Sunday Times of Malta.

The report is the first in-depth study of its kind to analyse the various engineering, financing and environmental challenges such a massive project would entail.

The study, seen by this newspaper, evaluated four options and recommended a bridge that would skirt Comino’s east coast, linking Marfa in Malta to Qala in Gozo.

This option covers a 5.2 kilometre section of the bridge over water and another 3.6km of access roads on both islands to connect the landing points to existing road infrastructure.

On the Malta side the landing point would be between Torri l-Abjad and Armier, connecting via a new road to the main road along the l-Aħrax peninsula. Traffic coming up from Għadira would have to turn right towards l-Aħrax to take the bridge road, rather than go down to Ċirkewwa.

In Gozo the bridge would land in the area known as Tal-Melħ, just below Qala. A new road would run along the coast, veering north to connect with the main road between Għajnsielem and Qala.

The bridge skirting Comino’s east coast as seen from the Malta side.

This means that motorists in Gozo would no longer take the main road down to Mġarr harbour to cross over to Malta but instead take a left turn before reaching Għajnsielem, into the main road that passes below Nadur onto Qala. This road would connect to the new infrastructure.

The study shunned the option of the lowest construction cost – two bridges linking Malta and Gozo to Comino and a road running along Comino, causing serious environmental damage

The road running along the bridge would have a single lane in either direction with two shoulder lanes for motorcycles. The overall width would be 14.5 metres, with the motorcycle lanes acting as emergency lanes in the event of a car collision. The wider the road, the higher the construction costs, according to the report.

The path of the bridge passes along the shallowest waters in the Comino channel, and there would be no impact on air operations at the Xewkija heliport if an airstrip was built there for small aircraft.

The study shunned the option of the lowest construction cost, which would have seen two bridges linking Malta and Gozo to Comino.

This would have seen a road running along Comino’s length, causing serious environmental damage to the ecologically sensitive island.

This had been the preferred option in a 1972 study by Japanese government experts tasked to carry out a preliminary survey on the most suitable link road between Malta and Gozo.

The study at the time had found that a bridge was more economical to build than a submerged tunnel or a causeway across the channel.

A more recent pre-feasibility study commissioned by the previous administration had looked at the construction of a tunnel below the seabed. It found that a tunnel would be technically possible but the study was not as in-depth as the more recent one by the Chinese company.

kurt.sansone@timesofmalta.com