Megyeri Bridge

The Megyeri Bridge previously known as Northern M0 Danube Bridge is a cable stayed bridge that spans River Danube between Buda and Pest respectively west and east sides of Budapest, capital of Hungary. It is an important section of M0 ringroad around Budapest. The details of Megyeri Bridge are explained in world tour guides below.

The bridge cost 63 billion forints approximately US$ 300M to build and was officially opened on September 30, 2008 however National Transport Authority of Hungary has only issued temporary permits because of disagreement among suburban cities surrounding the bridge. A naming poll to determine new name of recently-built bridge caused controversy and received media attention when American comedians Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart won. The total length of bridge is 1862m. Structurally it is composed of five parts. They are Left quayside inundation area bridge 148m, Main Danube-branch bridge cable stayed 590m with a span of 300m, Szentendre island inundation area bridge 559m, Szentendre Danube-branch bridge 332m and Right quayside inundation area bridge 218m.

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

On August 1, 2006 Reuters reported that top candidate according to the online poll was the Chuck Norris hid named for American action star Chuck Norris. On August 11, 2006 American satirist Stephen Colbert discussed story on his comedy program The Colbert Report instructing his viewers to visit 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. Colberts 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 Hungarian poll and by August 22, 2006 Stephen Colbert hid was in first with 17 million votes about 14 million votes ahead of second-placed Zrinyi hid named after Croatian Hungarian national hero Miklos Zrinyi and about 7 million more than entire population of Hungary. The same day site announced a new round of voting which would require registration to participate and Colbert asked his viewers to call off dogs requesting on his website that fans stop using scripts to vote. Despite this Stephen Colbert hid remained in the top position on the website in the second round.

On September 14, 2006 Andras 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.