Kingsway Tunnel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Kingsway Tunnel is a road tunnel under the River Mersey in Merseyside, northwest England, between Liverpool and Wallasey. It is one and half miles (2.4 km) long. It is often called the Wallasey Tunnel to specify it serves Wallasey as opposed to the Queensway Tunnel, an alternative tunnel crossing the Mersey, which serves Birkenhead.
The tunnel was built between 1966 and 1971 when the Queensway Tunnel between Liverpool and Birkenhead was no longer able to cope with the volume of traffic and was opened in June 1971 by Queen Elizabeth II. It consists of twin tubes, each tube having two lanes each 12 ft wide. The present fee for a single car journey through the tunnel is £1.40[1], payable only at the Wallasey end of the tunnel.
In a study following the fire in the Mont Blanc Tunnel in 1999, inspectors from the European Union rated the Kingsway Tunnel as "good", one of only eight to receive that rating in Europe.
[edit] Appearances in popular culture
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The entrance to the Kingsway Tunnel is used as the basis of a tunnel entrance in the video game Grand Theft Auto 3 — during the 1990s, several members of the game's development team had worked for the Merseyside-based development company Psygnosis.
