The Via Carpathia road corridor is a project that will link southern and northern Europe and also crosses eastern Slovakia. As RTVS senior regional correspondent Ivana Ratkovska informed from the meeting of the Visegrad Four transport ministries in the High Tatras, Slovak partners stated that the construction is to be accelerated. Despite this, we are years behind our colleagues and it will not be easy to remedy the situation.
"We will have to begin with the preparation of the project in order to fulfill our vows that we have presented here to our Polish colleagues." This is how former Transport Minister Andrej Doležal explained to his Polish counterpart last September why we are not working on the north-south road corridor link as agreed.
By changing the law on the construction of expressways and motorways, the construction of the Via Carpathia will probably be speeded up by two years. The Deputy Transport Minister, Jaroslav Kmeta stated that should they not make this change, the project would be 4 to 6 years behind.
The Via Carpathia corridor includes the R4 expressway in the east of Slovakia. The project will also be financed from European sources - the war in Ukraine has made this corridor a European priority.
According to Jaroslav Kmenta, in the next two years, they will issue a call for tenders for the construction of the road and the project should be finished by 2032.
While Hungary has the connection to the Slovak border ready, Poland is finishing up and wants to complete the corridor to the border in a short time. This was confirmed by Andrej Bettel, a representative of the Polish transport ministry: "I hope we will have finished with our entire section of the Via Carpathia project by the 2026 or 2027."
The northern bypass of Prešov in the east of Slovakia is also part of the corridor. The good news is that the first part will open in September. They are now signing a contract for the second one. The Minister in charge of transport, Pavol Lančarič: "We cannot really absolve ourselves from the responsibility for this project, but it is not easy to amend the mistakes made in the past."
The Via Carpathia is a corridor that connects the north with the south of Europe and is over 3,000 kilometres long. The unfinished section in Slovakia is 70 kilometres long and the estimated investment for its completion is over a billion euros.
Source: Ivana Ratkovská, senior RTVS regional coresspondent
