In the program “Revision” on NOVA NEWS, Eng. Georgi Zlatev, member of the Control Council of BCC “Roads” admitted that there are discrepancies between the wishes of Bulgarians to travel on more highways and the pace at which they are being built. “Road construction is a process different from the general concept of construction - start today and tomorrow the excavators and trucks are on site. Road construction begins with numerous processes of planning, design, expropriation, archeology and only then can work begin”. According to him, it is this long list of activities that precede the actual construction that slows down the entire process.
A few days ago, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Transport Grozdan Karadjov estimated that 6 years pass from the idea to the first sod and announced that legal changes will be made to shorten these deadlines.
Eng. Zlatev pointed out that in Romania there has been a boom in motorways lately. He himself has asked the administration in our northern neighbor how they manage to deal with all the difficulties such as expropriation procedures, for example. “What my colleagues shared is that in the past it was a problem for them too, but with legislative initiative, with perseverance, with a clear strategy they have dealt with the long deadlines. Currently, the deadlines from the decision to build to the actual start of construction in Romania are much shorter than in Bulgaria”, he explained. In his words, this is the direction in which our country should also go.
The possibility of giving the construction of highways in our country to a concession, and then having road users pay fees, Eng. Zlatev defined as an old idea since 2008. However, he poses the question “do we want to have socially acceptable prices for the use of the roads or do we want good roads”?
Zlatev defined the question “Which will be the next fully finished highway in our country and when will it be completed” as a question – a dream. In his words, the “Struma” highway has the greatest chance of being completed, if no obstacles arise again. Leaving aside all the environmental and "any other problems", the highway can certainly be built by 2030.
Out of 9 planned highways in our country, only 2 have been fully completed
The construction of highways is of utmost importance for the development of the economy, because all goods move along them to reach us. Every kilometer of highway helps the economic growth of our country. Investment in roads returns and leads to new investments. That is why all the countries we want to be like are proud of their developed road systems. That is why we in Bulgaria allocate so much resource every year to continue the construction of the main routes. In our country - unlike the countries we want to be like - things happen slowly, difficultly, quite often of poor quality and at the cost of a huge resource.
Few Bulgarians are aware that Bulgaria is planned to have as many as 9 highways - with a length of over 1600 km. In our country, we have only 2 fully completed highways, the "Trakia" and "Maritsa" highways. The rest, which are being worked on - first of all, is the eternal "Hemus", started about 50 years ago, followed by "Struma", "Black Sea", Ruse - Veliko Tarnovo, Vidin - Montana, Europe. We also have one highway that has never been developed, the "Rila" highway, which should connect the "Gueshevo" border checkpoint with the "Trakia" motorway. The conclusions - we are building, but we are building really slowly. That is why every few kilometers of section that is put into operation or every first sod is turned into a holiday. One of the options for accelerating the construction of motorways is to give it to private hands - on a concession. The state will not invest money in building the road, but then the private sector will put up barriers and fees that we will pay to travel on motorways.