Prague’s mayor posted a triumphant tweet at the end of July, announcing that the city had secured planning permission for a 13 km section of the outer ring road. But if he thought the battle had been won, he should have known better. The country’s planning system gives opponents of any project one month to file their objections to such permits, and 49 villages, groups and individuals did so by August 31. It’s a surprisingly large number of objections for a project that has such broad political support. City officials estimate it will take roughly a year to work through them all, meaning that construction will start in the middle of 2022 at the earliest. The new section of the ring road will run from Bechovice near the beginning of the D11 to the D1. No work on the ring road has been done in ten years.
