Rheinkniebrücke

Rheinkniebrücke

The Rheinkniebrücke is a Rhine crossing. It is 1.5 km long and belongs to the Düsseldorf family of bridges. The cable-stayed bridge was built between 1965 and 1969 and has been open to traffic ever since. It connects Oberkassel and Unterbilk or Friedrichstadt with the “Rhine knee” after its name. Serious accidents with many traffic jams occur again and again on the Rheinkniebrücke because the bridge is a bottleneck.

General information about the Rheinkniebrücke

The Rhine, the promenade, the Rheinturm and the Rheinkniebrücke – a panorama of Düsseldorf that has certainly been photographed millions of times. And the bridge, often referred to simply as the “knee bridge,” turns 50 this year. She was opened to traffic on October 16, 1969. According to the city, the building is 1,518.89 meters long and 30 meters wide. Like the Theodor Heuss Bridge (North Bridge) inaugurated in late 1957 and the new Oberkasseler Bridge (1976), it is a cable-stayed bridge. The three connections between the left and right banks of the Rhine, which are so close together, are also referred to as the narrowest point of the “Düsseldorf bridge family”. Their common “father” was the civil engineer Fritz Leonhardt. The Theodor Heuss Bridge was the world’s first cable-stayed bridge.

A special feature of the Rheinkniebrücke with a span of 320 meters are the two huge pylons with a height of 114.1 meters, which carry the cables of the bridge. After the bridge was built, the Rheinallee tunnel was built on the left bank of the Rhine. When the Rheinuferstrasse was lowered, the bridge on the right bank of the Rhine was connected to the Rheinufer Tunnel. The name of the bridge comes from the location of the structure at the knee of the Rhine with the steep river curve at this point. In 1997 the Apollo Varieté was opened under the bridge.