Austria has completed one of the last portions of its portion of the motorway that’s been promised for decades now to connect the Austrian capital with Prague over the weekend. The two-lane bypass of the village Drasenhofen was opened to motorists, even though Czechs haven’t progressed on their side of the border since 1996, when construction of an express road got stuck in Pohořelice. The fact that the country’s laws make such investments easy targets for pressure groups to block, greatly slowing down the pace of investment in areas with low job creation levels, hasn’t been enough for legislators to change over the past couple of decades. The Czech Highway Authority (RSD) claims that it has submitted project documentation for all the missing portions of the road but it’s powerless to predict when construction might actually begin. The Austrians, meanwhile, are ready to begin construction of the remaining nine kilometers to the Czech border but they’re waiting for their neighbors to begin work.
