Roads to nowhere...

For starters, a disclaimer – it’s April Fool’s Day, but please don’t try to seek out any joke in this posting (with hindsight, there’s one, linguistic). The topic broached today is, in the light of the imminent European Football Championship, no laughing matter… I travelled recently around Poland, had the opportunity to see the progress of road construction works, found out about the advancement of developments I couldn’t look over in Skyscrapercity relevant threads and the summary of what I’ve learnt appears pretty dire.

Let’s bring this chaos into numerical order… A helping hand is lent by continually updated stats coming from the ever-excellent Skyscrapercity forum – map and table. For the sake of brevity and my limited time frame, only the most important undertakings are listed below.

A1 motorway – three sections between Toruń and Łódź are to be opened on 30 April 2012. I drove over the A1 near Stryków last week and the road is almost ready, with sound barriers installed and lamp posts turned on, but the last layer of tarmac didn’t seem laid (was in the evening, so I’m not sure), but on Friday I cut through it near Kutno, where National Road 92 and A1 are to cross and I’m sure they won’t make it…

A2 motorway – great to have a toll road (with some short free of charge sections) all the way from the German border east to Stryków, where on a big junction A1 and A2 one day will meet. But then in Stryków masses of football fans travelling from the western Europe will end their journey via up-to-the standard roads and will continue the drive to Warsaw through old, congested National Road 2. There’s no chance that two out of five sections of A2 between Łódź and Warsaw forsaken in June 2011 by bankrupt Chinese companies will be finished, or at least passable. Funnily enough, two sections near Warsaw are almost finished, so there’s a contingency plan that they are opened, as scheduled (the one closest to Warsaw even one month before deadline), but does it make any practicable solution. The motorway would end in the middle of nowhere somewhere near Grodzisk Mazowiecki. For the locals – a great link to the capital, for transit traffic – a useless facility.

S2/S79 expressway – what a botch-up. The section from Junction Puławska, through Lotnisko to Marynarska was, according to preliminary plans, supposed to be opened in December 2011 and then in April 2012. If it is ready in April 2013 it will be a success, given the current progress of works, chiefly the fact that digging the tunnel under Warsaw-Radom rail line, is just about to kick off… Shame! The section from junction Lotnisko to junction Konotopa, where S2 will turn A2 and meet existing S8 section has a bit of better progress, but if any part of the Southern bypass of Warsaw is opened by the end of this year, I’m a Dutchman. And the rescheduled opening day is 31 August 2012. I don’t believe it!

A4 motorway – running from the Polish-German border in Zgorzelec, through Wrocław, Opole, Silesia to Kraków was supposed to be finished up to the Polish-Ukrainian border. No such luck, road builders are in the forest…

S7 expressway running from Gdańsk to Zakopane is a big blend of single- and dual-carriageway sections. Some, including southern Gdańsk bypass and some section in Warmia, which could come in useful for me in August, when I’m heading to Olsztyn… I’m finding it hard to judge whether the Nidzica – Olsztynek section (crucial for me) will be opened for traffic… On the other side of Warsaw I have to admit the already opened sections of expressway between Grójec and Kielce superbly facilitate the drive to the former destination.

S8 expressway – oh, how to cut the long story short. Wrocław has a beautiful bypass, which incidentally has a status of motorway (and prime minister Tusk pledged it would not be a toll road). Heading towards Warsaw we come across a few kilometres long expressway being a bypass of Oleśnica, two expressway sections are being built between Wrocław and Oleśnica and between Oleśnica and Syców. There were scheduled to be completed in late May 2012, now they might be passable then, but finished in the second half of the year. Further sections of S8 between Syców and Łódź are to by built by 2015. Additionally there is a huge 100-kilometres long section of National Road 8 dual carriageway being modernised to fit the parameters of an expressway. Driving there between Piotrków Trybunalski and Mszczonów is a big nuisance and guess what – this undertaking won’t be finished before football championship as well (deadline of 5 June 2012 is out of reach)… Further north S8 looks like S7, i.e. you have a few kilometres of new expressway and then take a break to drive a section of old National Road 8 which takes you to another section of S8, on and on. New expressway sections of S8 north-east of Warsaw to be opened this year are the bypass of Zambrów and Białystok-Jeżewo section. But the most urgent ones, not started yet, are the bypass of Marki and a road out of Warsaw south, passing by the ever-clogged-up Raszyn and Janki…

The saddest thing about the whole Road Construction Programme is not that it was designed to serve the next generations, but only to modernise road infrastructure before the oncoming football fete. I also hold the opinion we shouldn’t be ashamed of how Poland looks (we’ll be, just look at how W-wa Zachodnia station), but it’s not a primary goal to make the roads passable for Euro 2012. Football fans will see a big construction site, or rather mess, so I don’t see any point in excessive hurrying to finish some works before the championship, if the haste would impinge on quality of the ventures. These roads should serve for years to come Poland and its economy, not to foreign footballs fans, who’ll come here for three weeks, spend some money here and return to their homelands.

I’m not a football fan, so in June I’ll surely watch a few games, but I’ve scheduled my summer holidays from 11 to 21 June and I’ll be glad to stay away from Warsaw. I’ll going by car, so I would appreciate anyway, if some of the roads I mentioned (sections of S8 from Warsaw to Wrocław under construction) had temporarily the status of “passable”… On 29 March the parliament discussed the so-called “passability law”, which is set to allow to temporarily use of unfinished, but passable roads (with some limitations), legal implications are unclear…