For all of these tests I just made a beeline for that zone line into the lower city and all of them ended with the usual 33% > 67% > 100% (sounds start up) > crash to desktop.
Based on this description I'm reasonably confident that you do NOT have the same issue as others in this thread! If you did I wouldn't expect the loading progress to get past 33%.
Instead it sounds more like a graphics crash - or at least some issue with your specific system hardware / OS / game installation. Probably related to the optimisations in Patch 3 that were intended to improve game performance in the Lower City.
