The Prague Post
October 12th, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Real Estate Prague Prague Rentals Prague Apartments Prague Art & Antiques

Home » Archives » News

Highway link eases Vienna commute

High-speed motorway connects Austrian capital with Bratislava

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
November 21st, 2007 issue

Czech travelers are now able to get to Vienna faster thanks to a new high-speed motorway connecting the Austrian capital with Bratislava.
The new 22-kilometer (13.7-mile) stretch of the A6 motorway opened Nov. 19.
It now takes 50 minutes to travel by road from Bratislava to Vienna and 40 minutes from the Slovak capital to Vienna International Airport. But Czech travelers who use the new route will have to pay to use the Slovak stretch, the daily Hospodářské noviny writes.
Meanwhile, the construction of a new motorway from Vienna to Brno, south Moravia, is under way.
The route would be a welcome relief to local travelers who fly in and out of Vienna. A reported 589,000 Czechs used Vienna’s airport — Central Europe’s largest — last year.
Planning of the motorway, called the R52, was prompted by the construction of the new highway in Austria, according to Jan Hoření, spokesman for the Czech Road and Motorway Directorate. Austria is now building the A5 motorway from Vienna to the Czech border.
Within the next six or seven years, a trip that now plods along slow, poor-quality roads from Brno to Pohořelice on to Hodonín and Poysdorf will be significantly shortened by the new motorway.
“Right now we are finishing all the documents necessary to apply for a planning permit,” Hoření says of the layout dictating where the road will be located and details of the route.
“[Getting the permit] is a question of months, so we should have it in 2008. Then we have to get the land and seek permission to build, and put out a public tender for constructing the road in 2009 and 2010,” he says. Hoření says he does not know what the cost to build the new route will be.
Construction could start in 2010 and the highway could open as early as 2014, he says.
The Austrian daily Der Standard writes that political tensions between the Czech Republic and Austria, especially regarding the nuclear power plant in Temelín, have hampered cooperation on the motorway project.
— Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


Other articles in News (21/11/2007):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.