World's longest undersea road tunnel opens

The world's longest undersea road tunnel has opened in Japan.

The ten-kilometre tunnel, which links the Tokyo suburb of Kawasaki with the city of Kisarazu, took more than eight years to build and cost more than eleven billion dollars.

It will cut journey times across Tokyo Bay from about two hours to just fifteen minutes, but critics say the thirty-one dollar toll for each one-way trip is too expensive for most Japanese motorists.

The tunnel's operators expect twenty-five thousand cars a day to use it.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service