SLOVAKIA: Bratislava Races Prague For Key Trans-Europe Highway

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peter Fridner

BRATISLAVA, Mar 19 1996 (IPS) - The Slovak government is stepping up work on a north-south express highway through its territory, whih it offers as part of a key trans-Europe traffic corridor linking the Baltic and Adriatic coasts.

But alternative proposals for a route through the neighbouring Czech Republic are still on the table, forcing Slovak prime minister Vladimir Meciar’s government into a construction race to see which nation’s highway will be ready first.

Meciar has given top priority to the completion of a 200 kilometre stretch of expressway between Bratislava and the traffic junction at Zilina in Slovakia’s north-west within five years. So far about 100 kilometers of new four-lane roads are open.

The race became public in March when Polish prime minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz startled Slovakia by announcing that Poland would build a highway to the Czech border. This opened up the possibility of an alternative link with a proposed Czech highway between Ostrava and Brno running parallel to the Slovak route.

This led to fears in Bratislava that Warsaw planned to drop its earlier agreement to build a link between the Polish A1 highway and the Zwardon-Skalite passage at the Slovak border — cutting Slovakia out of the Baltic-Adriatic trans-European route.

The Prague daily Pravo has also reported that the Czech government has sped up work on the rival Ostrava-Brno route in a bid to influence decisions on the route’s final direction.

Mikulas Dzurinda, the Transport Minister under the former government and now an opposition deputy, viewed Cimoszewicz’s statement as a “setback for Slovakia in its competition with the Czech Republic”.

“It is 95 percent sure that Slovakia is losing the Baltic- Adriatic corridor,” he told the Bratislava daily Narodna Obroda.

But since then Dezider Szabo, state secretary at the Slovak ministry of transport has been told at a meeting in Budapest with Polish and Hungarian colleagues that the so-called trans-European ‘No 6 multimodal traffic corridor’ will run through Slovakia.

The Slovaks argue that their Katowice-Zwardon-Zilina-Bratislava route is shorter by 60 kilometres and one border. However the terrain between the Polish town of Zywiec and the Slovak border is difficult, and building a expressway there would be very expensive.

Szabo’s news in Budapest indicates that these problems are thought solvable and the Baltic-Adriatic ‘multimodal traffic corridor’ will go through Slovakia instead of the Czech Republic after all.

But the competition between the two former united republics is still very much alive. The time factor may yet remain a clinching argument. The corridor may finally run through the country which will be able to most quickly complete the job, which comprises not only new roads, but also modernisation of railway facilities.

The Meciar cabinet has resolved to face the challenge. Building works could start close to the Polish border as early as next month and at the other end of the proposed route, near Bratislava, links with the existing Slovak highway network and Hungarian and Austrian highways will be in operation in 1997 and 1998 respectively.

But as Dzurinda and some media noted, all the finances have not yet been identified.

The cost of the entire redevelopment of the Slovak expressway network, to be finished by 2005, and including east-west routes as well as the north-south contribution to the trans-Europe highway, is estimated at 133.7 billion Slovak crowns (4.5 billion dollars).

Only 6.7 billion crowns for the first year’s work have been pledged so far, including three billion to be raised by a state bond issue. Sources still have to be found for most of the rest.

Some of it will come from tolls on the finished highways, some may come from abroad.

On Mar. 12, Hitoshi Tonomura, acting vice-president of the Nomura Securities company of Japan, met Meciar to pledge a possible one billion dollar investment in the Slovak economic base, including finance for infrastructure projects like highways.

There is also the hope of funding from the European Union, which is ploughing a massive 381 billion dollars over the next 15 years into a new cros Europe transport network in a bid to reduce transport congestion that the OECD says costs the EU the eqivalent of 152 billion dollars a year.

The European Union Trans-European Network (Ten) of road, rail, sea and air links is designed to link the countries on the edge of Europe, where transport networks are not highly developed, more closely with the centre.

There is special interest in Brussels in the kind of so-called ‘multimodal’ transport links possible under the Slovak plan, where goods can go part of their way by lorry but the main long-distance haul is by rail. The EU hopes to put forward new proposals to promote multimodal transport this year.