Skip to main content

Ukraine, Poland ‘boast the most modernised infrastructure in eastern Europe’

Preparations for hosting the major sporting event, the Euro 2012 European football championship, enabled Ukraine and Poland to give their infrastructure the biggest facelift in the region and beyond. While three-quarters of Poland's expenditure was covered by EU funds, Ukraine financed the building of roads, hotels, and airports itself. Ukraine, however, did receive a EUR 2.2 billion loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). "The infrastructure sector will definitely remain one
November 13, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
Preparations for hosting the major sporting event, the Euro 2012 European football championship, enabled Ukraine and Poland to give their infrastructure the biggest facelift in the region and beyond. While three-quarters of Poland's expenditure was covered by EU funds, Ukraine financed the building of roads, hotels, and airports itself.

Ukraine, however, did receive a EUR 2.2 billion loan from the 2001 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). "The infrastructure sector will definitely remain one of our top priorities in the coming years. We should be ready to invest around 30 to 50 percent of our annual business volume in infrastructure projects," says Anton Usov, the EBRD's spokesman for Ukraine.

"We built five brand new airports in eighteen months," comments Borys Kolesnikov, Ukraine's deputy prime minister in charge of infrastructure. The country repaved 3,455 kilometres of roads, spending US$5 billion of government money. Moreover, Ukraine ordered high-speed modern trains from 1684 Hyundai, South Korea, which connected all host cities and cut the travelling time by approximately 25 percent.

Construction of the roads connecting Kyiv with Poland and other EU countries is in its final stages. "The focus is now on building new roads connecting to eastern cities and Russia," commented Ukraine's Kolesnikov. In Poland, the government is set to build about 3,000 kilometres of new highways, which would connect Warsaw with the German border, and the south of the country from Germany to Ukraine. The third artery will run all the way from Gdansk in Poland to the Czech border.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • ITS needs to talk the talk as well as walk the walk
    March 24, 2014
    The US automated enforcement market is in rude health as the number of systems and applications continues to grow and broaden. Jason Barnes reports. Blessed and cursed – arguably, in equal measure – with a constitution which stresses the right to self-expression and determination, the US has had a harder journey than most to the more widespread use of automated traffic enforcement systems. In some cases, opposition to the concept has been extreme – including the murder of a roadside civil enforcement offici
  • UK puts £3bn into new bus strategy
    March 16, 2021
    Daily fare caps, plus better coordination of multimodal services, are promised
  • Astaldi wins rail upgrade contract in Poland
    June 28, 2017
    The Italian Astaldi Group has been awarded the contract by Polskie Linie Kolejowe (PKP) to upgrade a section of the E-59 Warsaw-Poznań railway line (Lot IV).
  • Taiwan to go all-electronic free flow tolling
    November 28, 2013
    Taiwan’s 900 kilometres of toll roads will transition to all-electronic free flow operations early next year. The roads, which include three north-south routes with 22 toll points, carry out around 1.7 million transactions a day, generating some US$700 million of annual toll revenue. Private contractor Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Company (FETC), under contract to the National Freeway Bureau to collect the tolls, says that the IR-based toll system worked well and some 43 per cent of transactio