Eastern Europe's roads still a building site

With smashed up dirt tracks, expressways packed to the bursting point and struggling trains, the transport infrastructure of the European Union's eastern candidate countries is still a building site.

In Hungary, Budapest residents regularly protest against heavy goods traffic forced to drive through the capital because it does not have a bypass expressway.

Poland's roads, where heavy goods trucks leave deep tracks in the sun-melted asphalt, are some of the deadliest in central Europe, and in Slovakia transport is so poor that foreign investors refuse to go outside Bratislava.

Central and Eastern Europe's eight countries slated to join the EU in 2004 - Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia - have seen a transport explosion since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.

But with the exception of Slovenia, their infrastructures have not kept up. In Hungary, which is on the main transit routes between the Balkans and Western Europe, only half of the country's 30,000 kilometers of roads are asphalted.

In Budapest alone, 1,000 kilometers of roads are still made up of dirt tracks. The country's 448 kilometers of expressways - the newest was opened in 1998 - charge heavy tolls and are often too expensive for Hungarians, truck drivers and vacationers, who instead squeeze onto the old trunk roads.

"I prefer to use the old road when I drive my four children to Lake Balaton (Hungary's biggest tourist attraction) in the summer. It takes longer, but I cannot afford the motorway," said Budapest resident Erika Magyar.

There is no circular expressway around Budapest, where all Hungary's main roads converge, and a 1990s project to build a two-lane ring road around the capital was halted with only a quarter completed because it ran out of money.

That means heavy trucks have to drive through the town, creating endless traffic jams. In villages surrounding Budapest, where multinational firms have set up factories, residents regularly mount roadblocks to protest the terrible traffic.

Poland, which is three times as large as Hungary and has a population four times the size, has just 398 kilometers of expressways. Of its 360,000 km of roads, less than 1 percent meet European resilience standards.

"A lot of accidents are caused by the poor state of the roads," said national police spokesman Marcin Szyndler. Statistically, 12 percent of road accidents are fatal in Poland, compared with 2 percent in Germany, 6 percent in Spain, 5 percent in the Czech Republic and 7 percent in Hungary.

The Czech Republic, which expects a large increase in north-south and east-west transit once the EU enlarges, plans to double its 500 km of expressways, but has been blocked by financial difficulties and environmentalist protests.

It takes motorists five hours to drive the 360 kilometers between Prague and Bratislava, and the route is constantly jammed with traffic slowed further by maintenance works.

The traffic explosion has also taken its toll on Eastern Europe's railways, which are falling more and more into debt despite state grants to keep them running.

Poland had a network of 29,000 kilometers of railways in the 1980s. Just 23,500 remain in use, of which only 1,500 kilometers meet European standards.

"If there are hardly any rail accidents in Poland, it is because the trains are so slow," explained Krysztof Lancucki, spokesman for Poland's railway company PKP.