A roundup of all the week’s most important stories – from Italy, Croatia & Belgium.
Plus new roads news, road toll roundup + Welcome Home.
.
Rome: the city council debates this week whether to ban cars from the Via dei Fori Imperiali from August.
Italy – BreBeMi, a new motorway between Milan and Brescia will be ready by April 2014. Dubbed A35, the new road cuts the journey from 97km to 60km. The existing A4 between the two cities, via Bergamo, is notoriously congested. The new road will have no major junctions along its length and will considerably boost transit times across northern Italy, from Trieste and Venice in the east to Turin in the west, to everybody’s benefit. It will also improve access to the Lombardy countryside.
Meanwhile, the new Pope has warned priests (and nuns) not to drive ‘expensive cars’. The Pope of course is carried around in a custom-built Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen. The hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox church recently issued a similar warning to its clergy, after one priest was jailed for three years after killing two Moscow road workers in his $120,000 Mercedes SUV, and another was accused of road rage.
.
Belgium: restrictions have been relaxed on Old Timers, cars over 25 years old registered with O pre-fixed number plates, above. Previously only allowed on the roads during daylight hours and to and from designated events. Now free to roam wherever and whenever. Prepare for an explosion of vintage car events in Belgium.
.
Croatia – long border queues, inbound and outbound, immediately after Croatia joined the EU on Monday (1 July) – when a stricter regime came into play – subsided as the week wore on but returned over the weekend. Multi-kilometer queues were reported at many crossing points yesterday; at the time of writing worst affected is the major Bajakovo crossing with Serbia with a 4km outbound freight queue. The Croatian Motoring Association (HAK) publishes a daily brief of all road and border conditions here. As the summer wears on, all eyes will be on the Klek border over the Bosnian Neum corridor which many tourists use to visit Dubrovnik. So far all seems well.
.
Road tolls roundup
Hungary’s new electronic road toll system for freight HU-GO is go.
Road tolls roundup – an embarrassing week for Austrian Kapsch TrafficCom who were forced to admit that ‘an array of diverse legal administrative procedures, some of which we had no idea of when launching the project’ caused the month’s delay for Belarus’ new national road tolls system. It now starts on 1 August for all foreign vehicles. See www.beltoll.by for more. Defying all predictions, Hungary’s new electronic charging system for trucks was up on running on 1 July with only a couple of glitches early on the first morning. No word yet on whether the system will be extended to cars in six months (voluntarily) as initially proposed. See www.hu-go.hu for more. Finally, a month after its opening, tolls are now being levied on the New Europe Bridge (previously Danube 2) between Bulgaria and Romania. Charges range from €6 for a car to €37 for a four axle truck, each way.
.
New roads roundup
Romania: the famous Transfagarasan DN7c road, from Sibiu to Curtea de Arges (near Pitesti) is officially open says the Romanian roads authority. It closes this year on 31 October, as well as from 21:00-07:00 each day.
New roads roundup – the big, big news is that Bulgaria’s Trakia Highway, from Sofia to the Black Sea Coast, will absolutely definitely open on 15 July*. Beware though a lack of petrol stations. Good news also for Moldova which has secured World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development financing to upgrade its major roadways, a big deal for Europe’s poorest country. Montenegro too has EBRD money for road upgrades but much more significant is the yet-to-be-ratified deal with Chinese constructors to build the challenging central link in its Bar-Boljave motorway. This road will eventually extend from Belgrade to the Adriatic. Meanwhile another Austrian company has come a cropper in its dealings with Eastern Europe. Having finally entered insolvency proceedings after months of speculation, Alpina leaves an important stretch of road between Serbia‘s second city Nis and the Bulgarian border incomplete. Serb authorities will shortly re-tender the contract.
* a new report this afternoon says that date will be confirmed on 8 or 9 July.
.
Welcome Home…
The Rolls-Royce Alpine Rally culminated in a reception at the Kursalon in central Vienna. Picture courtesy of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Ltd.
There are mixed feelings at the end of any trip. The difference ‘on tour’ is that having got yourself there and back almost entirely by your own efforts you can look forward to the future with extra confidence. So it’s welcome back to the Rolls-Royce Alpine Rally (not quite non-stop luxury) and the Windy500 teams (definitely not non-stop luxury). The former did 1,800 miles through the Alps in sixteen days in hundred year old cars; the latter did over 5,500 miles in 23 days through 23 countries in vehicles only marginally younger in some cases. Hearty cheers all round!
.
And finally: amusing? For the second time in as many weeks we’ve heard of Belarus traffic police firing on suspected drunk drivers. The first time was a couple of warning shots. This last Wednesday evening however police fired 22 times at a car being driven (at 140kph it has to be said) through the streets of the capital Minsk. Nineteen of the shots were on target. Blood tests later found a BC level of 120mg though it’s not yet clear if they were obtained post mortem.
.
DriveEuropeNews 