Megyeri Bridge

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This article or section contains information about a bridge currently under construction.
It may contain information of a speculative nature, and the content may change dramatically as construction progresses and new information becomes available.

Schematic path of the M0 ringroad

The Megyeri Bridge, previously known as the Northern M0 Danube bridge, is a new cable-stayed road bridge currently under construction that will span the River Danube between Buda and Pest, respectively the west and east sides of Budapest, the capital of Hungary. As a continuation of the M0 motorway, it will be the last section to complete the M0 ringroad around Budapest. The bridge will be 4 km long and will cost 61.9 billion forints (approx. US$300M).^{[citation needed]} It is due to open in 2008. It has received much media attention due to the naming poll started to name the bridge.

1 Naming poll
- 1.1 Results
2 Megyeri Bridge
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Naming poll

The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Transport of Hungary organized a public vote on the website http://m0hid.gov.hu to solicit possible names for the new bridge. The three names with the most votes, as well as suggestions from local governments, cartographers, linguists and other experts, were to be reviewed by a government committee before a final name for the bridge was chosen. New nominations were accepted until August 21, 2006, and the voting ended on September 8, 2006, with Stephen Colbert winning with 93,163 votes, and Jon Stewart and Zrínyi close behind with 85,171 and 83,966 votes, respectively.

Colbert calls "16^th century Hungarian leader Nicholas Zrínyi" an "asshole," using a graphic of his great-grandson on The Colbert Report.

On August 1, 2006, Reuters reported that the top candidate according to the online poll was the "Chuck Norris híd", named for American action star Chuck Norris.^[1] On August 11, 2006, American satirist Stephen Colbert discussed the story on his comedy program The Colbert Report, instructing his viewers to visit the polling website and vote for him instead of Norris. The next day the number of votes for him had grown 230 times, and he now asked his viewers to follow a link from his own "Colbert Nation" website, to avoid "all that illegible Hungarian". Colbert's site also indirectly offered techniques for "stuffing the ballot box", as users of their forums created several automated scripts to cast multiple votes for Colbert. On August 15, 2006, he repeated his call to be voted top of the Hungarian poll, and by August 22, 2006, the "Stephen Colbert híd" was in first with 17 million votes, about 14 million votes ahead of the second-placed Zrínyi híd, named after the Croatian-Hungarian national hero, Miklós Zrínyi, and about 7 million more than the entire population of Hungary. The same day, the site announced a new round of voting, which would require registration to participate, and Colbert asked his viewers to "call off the dogs", requesting on his website that fans stop using scripts to vote. Despite this, the "Stephen Colbert híd" remained in the top position on the website in the second round.

On September 14, 2006, András Simonyi - the ambassador of Hungary to the United States - announced on The Colbert Report that Stephen Colbert had won the vote. Unfortunately for Colbert, Ambassador Simonyi declared that under Hungarian law, Colbert would have to be fluent in Hungarian, and would have to be deceased in order to have the bridge named for him. However, after saying the rules could most likely be bent, he invited Colbert to visit Hungary and view the construction in person and gave him a Hungarian passport and a 10,000 HUF Bill, with an approximate value of, as the ambassador put it, 'fifty dollars, fifty good US dollars'. Colbert promptly tried to bribe him with said money.

[edit] Results

Round 1 Top Five^[2]
Name	Votes	Percentage
Stephen Colbert híd	17231725	53%
Zrínyi híd	2062649	6%
Pató Pál híd	1805118	6%
Bethlen Gábor híd	1735587	5%
Hunyadi Mátyás híd	1478020	5%

Round 2 Top Five^[3]
Name	Votes	Percentage
Stephen Colbert híd	93163	25%
Jon Stewart híd	85171	23%
Zrínyi híd	83966	23%
Eötvös híd	37042	10%
Perl-Script híd	17354	5%

[edit] Megyeri Bridge

On September 28, 2006, it was announced that the bridge will be named "Megyeri Bridge", even though that name did not make it to the second round. The Hungarian Geographical Name Committee justified the final name by explaining that the bridge connects Káposztásmegyer and Békásmegyer^[4].