The Ring Road's Haul Route Has Become a Public Street Between Lochkov and Slivenec

Prague has opened a 2.3-kilometre link road between Lochkov and Slivenec in the south-west of the city. It is not a new alignment. It is the construction access road ŘSD built more than ten years ago to get plant and material to the Pražský okruh, and which has had no use since the ring road was finished. The city took it over from ŘSD earlier and has now turned it into a collector road. Zdopravy.cz reported the opening on 15 September.

The road starts on the western side where it joins K Cikánce and ends on the eastern side at a newly built connection to K Lahovské. Before it existed as a public route, drivers between these places had to go the long way round through loaded local streets.

The route ŘSD built more than ten years ago for the construction of the Pražský okruh, and which has had no use since it was completed, we have turned into a collector road that shortens the connection to the motorway network for residents of Lochkov, Velká Chuchle, part of Slivenec and Radotín. That relieves the centres of the municipal districts and the residential areas they currently have to drive through.

— Jaromír Beránek, deputy mayor of Prague for transport

What the 30 million actually bought

The works were a conversion rather than a construction: adjusting the carriageway width, laying asphalt, drainage, adding traffic signs, and building one genuinely new section — the connection to K Lahovské. The job took 300 days and the contract came to just under 30 million crowns including VAT. SWIETELSKY carried it out.

The estimated contract value was 52 million, and six bids arrived. The work was therefore let at roughly 58 per cent of what the city had budgeted for it, in a competition with a real field.

The reason the price fell that far is in the ground rather than in the bidding. A road built for the construction of a motorway is engineered for heavy plant, and what was underneath was sound enough to keep.

We made use of the load-bearing sub-base, adjusted the carriageway's width proportions, carried out remediation and laid new wearing courses.

— Petr Myslivec, SWIETELSKY

A category of asset the city rarely does anything with

The interesting part of this is not the 2.3 kilometres. It is that a temporary road survived its project, sat unused for years, and was then converted into permanent infrastructure for a fraction of what a new road between the same two points would have cost.

Large road schemes leave these behind routinely — haul routes, site accesses, bypasses built to keep traffic moving during construction. Most are stripped out or left to grass over. This one was already graded, already drained to a degree, and already built to carry weight, and the difference between that and a greenfield road is most of the cost.

The named beneficiaries are the districts on either side: Lochkov, Velká Chuchle, part of Slivenec and Radotín, whose connection to the motorway network no longer runs through their own centres. The city's case is that removing that through-traffic from residential streets is the point, and the shorter journey times are a consequence rather than the aim.