When the Nădlac-Constanţa motorway will be ready: only ten years from now

Paneuropean corridor IV, the priority objective of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure over the next few years, could be fully completed as late as ten years from now, considering that the Sibiu-Piteşti section is still hanging in the air.

The Nădlac-Constanţa motorway, which crosses Romania from west to east has seen only around 280 kilometres completed of the over 850 it will ultimately have.

So, works are ongoing only for the Piteşti-Bucharest sections (111 km), Bucharest-Cernavodă (151 km) and Sibiu's ring road (20.8 km).

Whilst in the past few months the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure took action to ensure at least the auctions for the other sections would kick off in the coming period, the Sibiu-Piteşti section remains an unknown, considering the extremely high costs, estimated at around 3.2 billion euros, for which no source of funding has been found yet.

In other words, this section alone accounts for over 35% of the total costs of 8.5 billion euros, as estimated by CNADNR (The Motorways and National Roads Company in Romania) for building Corridor IV."

The most plausible option for the construction of the Sibiu-Piteşti section remains the public-private partnership, but so far no-one has announced their intention to get involved in a PPP, although, in theory, the law has been recently changed.

"Sustained efforts will be made until 2015 to finalise corridor IV. But, looking at Romanian reality, without promoting public-private partnerships on this corridor, our chances to travelling from Bucharest to Nădlac along the Olt Valley are minimal before 2020," believes Ionel Giuglea, general manager of Alpine Romania, the local subsidiary of Austrian construction group Alpine.