The Suchdol Ring Road Section Loses Another Year to a Question About What Can Stand on Top of a Tunnel

The Road and Motorway Directorate will not finish this year the clean copy of the project documentation for D0 section 518, Ruzyně–Suchdol, which its own schedule had it delivering in 2026. ŘSD's director general Radek Mátl told Zdopravy.cz the date has moved.

We expect the clean copy to be completed in the first quarter of 2027.

— Radek Mátl, director general of ŘSD

That document is not an internal milestone. The clean copy is the official annex to the application for the project permit at the building authority, so everything downstream of it moves with it: ŘSD plans to have the joint permit issued next year, then tender the contractor, then start building in 2028. Mátl attributes the slip to several factors at once, among them the negotiations with the city districts and municipalities the road passes through, and the work of writing their comments into the design.

The bridge took a year to confirm

Part of the delay sits with the Vltava crossing at Suchdol. Confirming that the variant which won the architectural competition would actually be built took ŘSD and the Ministry of Transport close to a year, and objections against the selection were then filed with the competition authority, ÚOHS.

Mátl says that second part is not what is holding the documentation up.

The bridge over the Vltava is being designed within the permit documentation in the winning variant as normal. The ÚOHS decision has no effect on that.

— Radek Mátl

What can be built over the Suchdol tunnel

The harder problem, on ŘSD's own account, is the ground above the tunnel. Michal Hrdlička, who heads construction of this part of the ring road, says negotiations with the Suchdol district are the ones becoming complicated — Suchdol, with Dolní Chabry, has been the most persistent opponent of the chosen alignment for years.

In Suchdol we are still working out the details of the whole arrangement of the space above the Suchdol tunnel and its immediate connections.

— Michal Hrdlička, ŘSD

What Suchdol is settling is whether anything can be built on top of the tunnel, and what. The answer is mostly constrained by something that has nothing to do with the road: an overhead 110 kV transmission line runs along the tunnel corridor, and its protection zone rules out both permanent and temporary structures. Realistically, Zdopravy reports, the surface can carry footpaths and planting up to three metres high and little else.

The rest of the objections come from the road cutting local streets. Hrdlička frames the obligation plainly: what the scheme interrupts it has to replace and restore, taking the Metropolitan Plan into account as it does so. A community garden and a waste collection point are among the things being found new positions. ŘSD is working on the urban study with the architect Jan Kasl, a former mayor of Prague.

The part that is not stalled

Land acquisition is going faster than the paperwork. The section already holds a positive EIA opinion, and ŘSD says roughly 80 percent of the purchase contracts it has sent out are coming back signed. Mátl has said separately that he hopes to have 80 percent of the land along the route bought by the end of this year. Those are two different figures about two different things — the share of issued contracts returned, and the share of the route secured — and it is worth keeping them apart.

Read together, the two halves of this story point the same way. The compulsory-purchase machinery and the environmental consent, the stages that usually break Czech road projects, are moving. What is holding section 518 is an argument about a strip of ground the road will run underneath, in a district that has fought the alignment through the courts and lost, and which is now negotiating over what it gets back on the surface. That is a smaller thing than an alignment dispute, and it has still cost a year.