One of Europe’s most recognisable transport icons, the Öresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden, is marking 25 years since it opened. But its influence comes with problems despite having an immense impact on regional business.
Oskar Damkjaer, 28, is looking out from a platform in the red-brick 19th-century railway station in Malmö. He resides in the Danish capital of Copenhagen and travels to Sweden’s third city twice a week, incorporating some of his work time into the 40-minute high-speed train ride across the Öresund bridge.
“It’s perceived as a very large thing to commute to a foreign country,” says the software developer who works for Neo4j, a Swedish-born database firm. “It’s very handy, I think.”
Over the bridge in Copenhagen, Laurine Deschamps sits at her desk at Danish game firm IO Interactive’s shiny, modern office.
She had previously worked at a Swedish-owned game studio in Malmö, and opted to continue living there when she got a job at IO Interactive’s main office in Copenhagen, which she travels to four days a week.
“Others would choose to live in Copenhagen, to be located in an active, capital city with plenty of things to do,” says the global brand manager. I much prefer Malmö – it’s a city for people, you can walk anywhere.”
Their experiences are the ultimate achievement of what Sweden and Denmark’s governments had in mind when they signed a deal in 1991 to construct a permanent connection over the Oresund Strait.
The aim was to make travel quicker and simpler (commuters had used ferries or short-range flights before), better integrate the region and increase economic development.
It took 30 billion Danish krone ($4.3bn; £3bn) and five years to construct. Twenty-five years after it was built, the connection is still the EU’s longest road and rail bridge at 16km long, including a tunnel section.
The crossing provides travellers with film-quality vistas over the water, and its enormous metal pillars are dramatic. The structure was the inspiration for one of Scandinavia’s best-performing TV shows, cross-border crime drama The Bridge, which was an international hit in the 2010s.
