ŘSD Paid 190 Million Above the Cheapest Bid to Rebuild the Ring Road Bridge Five Months Faster

The Road and Motorway Directorate (ŘSD) has signed a contract with a consortium of Metrostav TBR and FIRESTA – Fišer, rekonstrukce to demolish and rebuild the bridge carrying the Prague Ring Road over Počernický rybník as a six-lane structure. ŘSD's director general Radek Mátl announced the signature on X, Zdopravy.cz reported on 14 September. The work will cost more than ŘSD had budgeted for.

What the contract covers

The existing deck comes off and a new one goes up. The bridge is 585 metres long, and the replacement gets six running lanes plus additional deceleration and acceleration lanes carried across the structure itself. Construction is to take 15 months.

The tender documents set the conditions so that traffic on what Zdopravy describes as one of the busiest sections of the Czech motorway network does not collapse while the work is under way. The bridge will be rebuilt in halves — left and right structures in turn — with traffic running on whichever half is free.

The price of time

ŘSD had expected to pay 1.307 billion crowns. Five bids came in. The cheapest was 1.293 billion; the winning consortium asked 1.483 billion, which is 190 million above the cheapest offer and 176 million above ŘSD's own estimate.

The reason it won anyway is in the scoring. ŘSD gave 20 percent of the weight to the length of the traffic restriction, not to price alone. Metrostav and Firesta offered 296 days; the cheapest bidder offered 459. Zdopravy sets the two against each other and arrives at roughly 1.17 million crowns per day of restriction avoided.

That is the whole argument for a duration criterion, stated as a number. Whether 1.17 million a day is a good price depends on what a day of constriction on this particular stretch costs the people driving it, which ŘSD has not published — but the alternative, a procurement rule that reads only the bottom line, would have bought 163 extra days of works on a motorway section ŘSD itself calls one of the country's busiest.

Start date: not yet

ŘSD's information leaflet gives construction as starting this year. Mátl was less committal.

We will specify the start date for construction according to the state of preparation.

— Radek Mátl, director general, ŘSD (translated from the Czech)

The bridge is a junction problem, not a bridge problem

Section 510 is so far the only part of the ring road in service on the eastern side of the city. The south-eastern section 511, which joins the D1 motorway at Modletice, is under construction now, and that is why the timing of this bridge matters beyond the bridge. The rebuild is tied to the completion of 511: the new deck is to be brought into service so that both D0 511 and the planned I/12 Běchovice–Úvaly relocation can already connect to it.

Those connections arrive through the new Dubeč interchange, a large grade-separated junction that will tie the four-lane I/12 and the Štěrboholská radiála into the ring. Six lanes over Počernický rybník is not a general upgrade of the eastern ring road; it is the capacity that the Dubeč interchange will require the moment it starts feeding traffic onto this section.

One constraint shaped the design. A nature monument lies beneath the existing bridge, and Zdopravy reports that it limits both the widening of the structure and the length of the connecting lanes — which is to say the merge geometry at the busiest point of the eastern ring was set by what could not be touched underneath it.