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)
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