The Eastern City Ring Loses Its Congestion Charge Condition and Gains a Tunnel One

The condition that has hung over the eastern City Ring Road since 2012 is gone. Under the environmental decision updated in August, completing the ring no longer requires Prague to introduce a congestion charge inside it, and no longer has to wait for the outer Prague Ring Road to be finished to the west and north. Designers set out the new position to the city council's transport committee on Tuesday, Zdopravy.cz reported on 10 September.

Both of those conditions came from the original 2012 environmental assessment, and both bound the scheme to things outside its own control. A road that cannot open until a charging scheme is legislated, and until sections 518 to 520 of a separate motorway project are built, is a road with two other projects' timetables inside its own. The updated decision removes them and, in exchange, allows the eastern arc to be opened in stages and sets the order those stages come in.

What was traded away

One condition was added rather than dropped, and it is a substantial one. Three pieces of the scheme — Českobrodská to Balabenka, Pelc/Tyrolka to U Kříže, and the Libeň link between Vychovatelna and Balabenka — may not be brought into service until the Hloubětín tunnel is finished. That tunnel belongs to a different scheme, the Průmyslový polookruh, which Prague is preparing separately. Construction is to start in three years and finish in 2033.

So the trade is legible: the ring is released from a charging scheme and a motorway it does not control, and tied instead to a tunnel it does. Whether that is a better bargain depends on the Hloubětín tunnel keeping its date, and the whole point of the original conditions was that projects do not.

The section, and the arithmetic of tunnelling it

The eastern part is the last missing piece of the inner ring, a completion that has been in preparation for decades. The first stage of the 10.5 km build is now dated to 2029. After the redesign of recent years, 8.5 kilometres of it — four fifths — would run in tunnel, at a design speed of 70 km/h, and the scheme adds six further tunnels to the network. The new Metropolitan Plan, which came into force last week, counts on the scheme in full.

That ratio is the reason the schedule reads the way it does. Prague expects to launch a tender for the detailed geological survey of the route within a month; a contractor for geotechnical monitoring has already been chosen and awaits councillors' approval, with contracts due to be signed in November. Next year the survey adits start: Bílá skála is to be driven over four years, Jarov over roughly 42 months, Malešice over 30. Those are exploratory works, not construction, and the first of them will still be under way when the fourth anniversary of their start passes.

Construction proper begins in 2029 with the Rybníčky – Českobrodská section, allowed five years. It opens in 2036 and is the first stretch of the completion to carry traffic. The ring is to be complete in 2042.

Balabenka is a railway problem before it is a road one

Work at Balabenka does not start until 2033, after the Hloubětín tunnel opens — but something else starts there in 2028. A separate pre-investment is needed at the junction because Správa železnic is rebuilding the rail lines through it under the Železniční uzel Praha programme. Those preparatory works run three years, and the railway works that follow continue until 2037. The railway at Balabenka will end up on several levels, and the connection for the high-speed line towards Roudnice nad Labem is planned into the same node.

Read against the road schedule, that is fifteen years of construction converging on one junction in Libeň, with the road's own section there arriving last and conditional on a tunnel three kilometres away. This month's milestone — documentation for the permit finished, consultation beginning, the application to DESÚ due in December and a non-final permit expected next year — is real, and it is the fourteenth year of a process that now has 2042 at the end of it.