Four and a Half Years Later, Ke Štvanici Reopens: the Florenc Slab Is Done

From the start of service on 1 September, Ke Štvanici is open again to all traffic and to pedestrians between the Sokolovská and Křižíkova junctions. Dopravní podnik hl. m. Prahy announced on 31 August that it had finished the last phase of the ceiling slab over the Florenc metro vestibule and the underpass beside it — the work that has kept that stretch of street fenced off and rerouted since March 2022.

Six bus routes go back to where they were. Lines 133, 175, 207, 908 and 909 return to their original stops on Ke Štvanici, line 135 to its stop on Křižíkova by exit E6, and line 194 to its own stop.

What was actually replaced

The final phase started in mid-November 2024 and ran for almost 22 months. In that time the contractors took out the second half of the original monolithic concrete slab under the Ke Štvanici–Křižíkova junction and built a new steel-and-concrete one in its place, replacing 37 twenty-metre and 11 seven-metre prestressed beams — close to a third of the original beams in the structure. Kilometres of utilities were relaid, and new waterproofing laid across the full extent of the slab, including the ventilation outlet that sits in the park beside the Prague City Museum.

Only then came the visible part: asphalt on the roadway and the walking surfaces, the classic Prague mosaic paving on the footways, and the road markings and signs. A new standard shelter has gone up over exit E5, and the lift kiosk at street level is new, as is the lift machinery inside it.

DPP describes the whole scheme as the largest and longest-running investment in the existing metro network. Jaromír Beránek, first deputy mayor for transport, put a number and a comparison on it:

In its scale, its technical difficulty and its financial volume of around two billion crowns, this investment can be compared to the recent complete reconstruction of the Barrandov Bridge or to repairs of key sections of the D1 motorway. It was an extremely complicated job under full operation, directly above passengers' heads.

— Jaromír Beránek, first deputy mayor of Prague for transport

What is still shut

The street is back but the station is not. Exits E2, E3 and E6 on Křižíkova and by the central bus station remain the only ways in and out. E4, on the corner of Křižíkova and Ke Štvanici, and E5 on Ke Štvanici by the transport museum building are inside the closed part of the underpass, and they open together with the rest of it in December, along with the lift.

Inside, the contractors are finishing ventilation ductwork and cabling under the new slab, modernising the retail units and rebuilding the toilets, while the main ventilation fans are being swapped in the non-public part of the station. LED lighting, suspended ceilings and the passenger information system go in last.

Vojtěch Lacina of Metrostav CZ, the project manager, explained why the underpass could not be done in parallel: the temporary props that held the concrete slab up during the works ran through the underpass and partly onto the platform, and nothing could start until they came out. He also noted that DPP was running a second investment inside the station at the same time, which meant coordinating with another contractor working in the same underpass.

The consortium delivering it is Metrostav CZ — Metrostav DIZ when the contract began — and Geosan Group.

The prediction that did not come true

Jaroslav Kristen, DPP's technical director for the metro, dated the start to March 2022 and put the replaced area at three-quarters of a football pitch, at one of the busiest stations in the network, with the number of weekend metro closures cut well below the original plan.

Before the work started, some tongues predicted it would cause a traffic collapse at Florenc. The slab reconstruction is finished, without collapses and in line with the schedule.

— Jaroslav Kristen, technical director for the metro, DPP

Both the DPP release and Zdopravy.cz carry the same figures and the same quotations, with no discrepancy between them. What neither settles is the interchange's next phase: the underpass reopening in December is the end of this contract, not the end of building at Florenc, where the bus station and the surrounding blocks are a separate programme entirely.