The S19 is being extended. Road workers from GDDKiA showed bridges and viaducts
On Wednesday, the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways presented the engineering structures under construction on the S19 route, including viaducts, overpasses and bridges. This is part of the Via Carpatia, which will settle in Klaipėda in Lithuania and end in Thessaloniki in Greece.
S19 will be part of the Via Carpatia route, which will connect the north and south of Europe. In Poland, the route will be over 700 km long and will run through the following provinces: Podlaskie, Mazowieckie, Lubelskie and Podkarpackie. This route will include sections of expressways S61, S16 and S19.
What’s on the S19 construction site?
On Wednesday, the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways presented the engineering structures under construction there, including viaducts, flyovers and bridges. There are several dozen of them in total.
As many as 20 engineering structures are being built between Dukla and Miejsce Piastowe. Each is at around 30 percent progress. Much of the work is being done at night, which involves transporting huge elements, as in the case of this viaduct. In turn, on the new section of S-19 between Krosno and Miejsce Piastowe, reinforced concrete works are being continued on bridges, of which there will be as many as 19, and 29 culverts.
A total of eight new sections of the S-19 road are being built in the region. Some of them will be ready next year.
Motorways and expressways will be tolled
On Monday, the list of legislative and programmatic works on the website of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister included information on a planned amendment to the regulation on national roads or their sections on which electronic tolls are collected, as well as the rates of electronic tolls. “The proposed regulation provides for the expansion of the network of national roads covered by the electronic toll collection system,” it was written on the website of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister.
The Ministry of Infrastructure is working on the project. It recommends “expanding the network of roads covered by the electronic toll collection system for vehicles over 3.5 to sections of newly built motorways and expressways” – it was reported. “The network of toll roads has not been expanded since 2017. Since then, a significant number of new sections of class A national roads and class S national roads have been put into use in Poland”.
Road construction in 2024
As we wrote earlier, since the beginning of 2024, road workers have signed 25 contracts for the construction of new sections, significantly more than in the whole of 2023. Now, GDDKiA has boasted about the expenses.
Contracts signed this year for the implementation of nearly 333 km of new roads worth over PLN 12.4 billion. In 2023, road builders spent about PLN 17 billion on investments, and the forecast for this year is about PLN 20 billion. The Directorate has over 1.6 thousand km of new roads under implementation.
As the road workers write, the agreements already signed and those planned to be signed will ensure that in the coming years, investment expenditure will amount to approximately PLN 20 billion per year. The Directorate plans to maintain this level at least until… 2030.
