With highways in
Poland having their own teething problems, local roads don’t have
it much better either. After a long and frosty winter, the city of Kraków
has found itself to be severely lacking in resources to fix every road
in the southern city.
Report by John Beauchamp.
Poland is renowned
for its bad roads. With a lack of motorways, major trunk routes through
the country are constantly used by long distance trucks criss-crossing
the country from north to south and east to west. There has been a boom
in the usage of personal cars, so much so that the country’s transport
infrastructure is bursting at the seams.
On a more local scale, city
traffic in Poland is not getting a break either. Urban development has
been growing rapidly, and city streets and roads are simply crumbling.
In Kraków the problem has escalated to such an extent that the local
edition of the daily
Gazeta Wyborcza
organised a reader poll to name and shame the worst thoroughfares in
the city, entitled “Akcja Durszlak”: or simply, “Operation Colander”.
Another problem for
the city of Kraków is that it has missed out on 270 million zloty’s
worth of EU funding to help get its roads back into shape. With a hole
of around 60 million euro, a lot of roads are not going to be touched
this season. But with Kraków’s hopes of hosting some of the games
during the Euro 2012 football tournament, something has to move. One
positive note to finish on though: since the completion of the A4 motorway
through Upper Silesia and its near completion near the border with
Germany, at least Kraków is connected with the rest of Europe.
Click on the audio icon above to listen to the report.