Good day,
yesterday the highway officials opened the first part of the northern bypass of Prešov, they started building the second, and they claim that this freeway will continue all the way to the state border with Poland.
However, this promise should be taken with a lot of caution. The state has no money for the remaining 60 kilometers of the R4 expressway, and even if it had, it would not make sense to invest it here and not in education or healthcare.
Most sections of R4 have a very low rate of return, and highway operators should think carefully about which of them it is important to project now. In the long term, they spend unnecessarily a lot of money on project documentation, which then becomes old anyway, because there is no money for such extensive construction. For example, the Kysucka D3 highway is being planned for an infinite time. So that it doesn’t turn out the same with R4.
Today’s Economic newsfilter has 1400 words, you can read it in less than 6 minutes. Prepared by Ján Kováč, Ján Filip and Radoslav Tomek.
1. Cars are already driving along the northern bypass of Prešov
The construction companies Váhostav and TuCon completed the four-kilometer section of the northern bypass of Prešov for approximately 150 million euros without VAT. The contract also included the kilometer-long Bikoš tunnel.
Both companies will remain in the region. Together with Eurovia, they are to build a connecting part of the bypass, which will be 10 kilometers long and include another nearly two-kilometer tunnel.
NDS added to this the optimistic promise that the R4 expressway does not end in the north of Prešov, and that it wants to have other sections designed towards the Polish border. However, there is no need to have unnecessarily high expectations here.
Why it matters:
The construction of all missing sections on the D3 highway in Kysuck and on the northern D1 is planned for the next few years. Various municipal politicians and activists are now lobbying for the construction to be moved to them. They often argue that there is a lot of construction going on in neighboring states and we will embarrass ourselves if we are behind. The R4 northern expressway is said to be part of an important European corridor that connects the Baltic and Black seas. Other lobbyists exaggerate the importance of the D1 sections east of Košice.
How it really is: Next to the construction of the second part of the northern bypass
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