History of Construction and Plans For The Future
Large stretches of this motorway were initially built as a Reichsautobahn by Nazi Germany in the 1930s. After the war, when the new borders placed them in Poland, they received minimal maintenance and upgrades, becoming notorious for the bad quality of their road surfaces, a phenomenon similar to that observed in East Germany. Extensive reconstruction, especially of the section between Legnica and Wrocław, has removed all traces of the old concrete road surface, but some aspects of 1930s standards of construction remain; for example, the aforementioned stretch does not have an emergency lane, a feature that is to be added in the future.
The section between Kraków and Katowice was built from the 1980s to 1996 and the section from Wrocław to Katowice between 2000 and 2005. In August 2009 construction of the last western part of the motorway from the border with Germany to the junction with A18 motorway was completed. Also, in 2009 the first part of the motorway east of Kraków (ending on national road 75 junction, near Szarów) was finished.
The original plan was to finish the rest of the motorway by about 2013, but because of the UEFA decision to host the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship in Poland and Ukraine and the resulting need for better road infrastructure connecting the two countries, the date for opening the motorway to traffic was moved up to June 2012. This ambitious target was not attained due to multiple delays encountered during construction, some caused by the floods of 2010. The various subsections currently under construction will open in stages during second half of 2012 and early 2014. Only the short section serving as the bypass of Rzeszów opened in September 2012.
When finished in 2014, the A4 will be the first of the three major Polish motorways to be fully completed along its entire planned length (A1 should be next around 2015, followed by A2 by about 2020).
Read more about this topic: A4 Autostrada (Poland)
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, construction, plans and/or future:
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Striving toward a goal puts a more pleasing construction on our advance toward death.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“A father ... knows exactly what those boys at the mall have in their depraved little minds because he once owned such a depraved little mind himself. In fact, if he thinks enough about the plans that he used to have for young girls, the father not only will support his wife in keeping their daughter home but he might even run over to the mall and have a few of those boys arrested.”
—Bill Cosby (20th century)
“To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)