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Episode 01

Why Has Slovakia Spent 54 Years Building One Motorway?

Slovakia began the D1 in 1972 and it still doesn't join Bratislava and Košice. The route runs through mountains, and the last 13.5 km cost €141 million per km.

23 October 20266 min readVideo 8:25

Slovakia has spent 54 years on the D1 because the motorway was routed through the mountains of the north, where landslides, tunnels, failed contracts, water rules and cost kept stopping it. Its last 13.5 km need two tunnels at about €141 million per km. Until about 2034, the only motorway between Bratislava and Košice, the country's two largest cities, runs through Hungary.

Watch the episode: Why Slovakia Has Spent 54 Years Building One Motorway 8:25

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A motorway that keeps missing its deadlines

The D1 is planned at about 512 km, from Bratislava to the Ukrainian border, and construction began in 1972. From 1972 to 2026 is 54 years. It still doesn't join Bratislava and Košice, Slovakia's two largest cities.

It was meant to be finished by 1990. Then new deadlines were set and missed: 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2013, then 2020 and 2026. The latest promise is 2030. New deadlines came faster than new road.

What does that mean for a driver? In December 2024 a reporter drove from Bratislava to Košice by the southern route. Under 400 km, about 150 km of it through villages, took almost 4 hours 10 minutes, mostly because of heavy traffic and bad weather.

There is a motorway between the two cities, though. Since 26 October 2021 they have been linked by motorway through Hungary, on the M1, M3 and M30, then the R4 to Košice. Hungary's last M30 section, 57 km from Miskolc to the Slovak border, opened after more than 3.5 years of work.

Why does the D1 go through the mountains?

Start with the map. From Bratislava the D1 runs through Trnava, Piešťany, Trenčín, Žilina, Martin and Ružomberok: north first, then east into the mountains. That northern stretch, above all between Hričovské Podhradie and Ivachnová, is the hardest part of the whole road to build.

In mountains you can't just lay asphalt. The D1 is planned with 12 tunnels totalling almost 36 km (one of them, Dargov, may never be built). Nine of the 12 are open.

I expected the engineers to blame the rock. Instead, in 2023, a state secretary at the transport ministry said the mistake was the route chosen over half a century ago. A southern route, with easier terrain, might long be finished. Useful advice, half a century late.

What a mountain does to a motorway

Čebrať: the hillside that moved

North of Ružomberok, the plan included a tunnel called Čebrať, about 2 km long. Digging began in 2014. Then, in early 2015, a landslide stopped the work and forced a new route. The fix was a longer tunnel: 3.6 km, almost twice the length.

The paperwork had to catch up. A detailed water survey was only ordered at the end of 2016, the environmental report came in November 2017, and final approval in summer 2018. After a long pause, the tunnel broke through on 15 November 2022, 8 years after digging began.

The Hubová-Ivachnová section was due to open in December 2025. Then another landslide shifted the foot of a bridge pier by a few centimetres. The section opened on 5 October 2026. It had first been due in June 2017, so it was more than 9 years late.

Višňové: the tunnel that needed fixing first

Near Žilina, the D1 needed something longer still. Višňové is about 7.5 km, the longest tunnel in Slovakia. Its timeline reads like a list of things that can go wrong:

2012: a builder wins the tender. The tender is later thrown out.
2014: a new winner is chosen.
June 2015: digging begins.
Early 2019: the state says the builder can't finish.
2021: a new builder signs and finds serious defects in the tunnel lining.
22 December 2025: the section opens, 13 years after the 2012 tender.

Step one of finishing the tunnel was fixing the tunnel.

Why haven't the last 13.5 km been started?

Today one gap remains between the two cities. Turany-Hubová, 13.5 km, is the last D1 section between Bratislava and Košice that is neither tendered nor under construction. Until it's built, traffic uses the old road I/18, squeezed between the river Váh, the railway and family houses in Stankovany, Ľubochňa and Hubová. It already carries 17,000 vehicles a day, about one every 5 seconds, at the edge of its capacity. Traffic is forecast to rise to 20,000, and 22 to 26% of it is trucks and buses.

There were two ways through: along the valley, or under the mountains. In 2002 the environment ministry judged a tunnel route best, but the motorway company pushed a surface route through protected nature sites. Over unresolved environmental questions, the European Investment Bank loan was never cleared, and the section's financing collapsed.

The valley route would have cut directly through Šútovo, Rojkov and part of Kraľovany. In 2017 the environment ministry approved the tunnel route: the least landslide risk, a shorter drive, and brown bears migrate through the area. The Korbeľka tunnel comes no closer than about 500 m to Krpeľany. Valley-route supporters said the tunnel could destroy the Teplička spring; a botanist said a hydrogeological survey finished in 2015 ruled that out.

The valley variant had been finally abandoned in 2016, 14 years after the 2002 recommendation. The 2018 environmental decision was then challenged in court, and the case was still running in May 2024. Both tunnels were redesigned in 2018, and where water flows hard, they must be fully sealed.

Builders were asked to bid in August 2024. At the end of 2025 that tender was ordered cancelled for breaking procurement rules, and a new one began in March 2026. In October 2026 objections to it were withdrawn, and the deadline for applications moved to 19 November.

What does €1.9 billion buy?

The finance ministry's review puts the total cost of Turany-Hubová at €1.9 billion with VAT. Construction alone is €1.6 billion; the rest is land, site supervision, design documents and a reserve. That's €141 million per km, or €141,000 per metre, among the most expensive motorway projects in Slovakia's history.

Most of it goes into the Korbeľka and Havran tunnels, about 8.6 km together. Per km they cost about twice as much as three recent Slovak tunnels near Prešov: €120 million against €64 million, without VAT. They would also cost more than some motorway tunnels in the Austrian or German Alps. Korbeľka alone means removing about 1.2 million cubic metres of rock, nearly 500 Olympic pools.

The reviewers warned the tunnel costs could include some work counted twice, or the most expensive solutions. A rough comparison suggested the two tunnels could cost 46% less on average.

For the money, the route gets about 5 km shorter and the drive 8 to 14 minutes faster. The benefit-to-cost ratio is 0.55: the costs are almost double the benefits. The same review still calls the motorway the only possible fix for road I/18, and the EU's core TEN-T network requires the D1 to be built by 2030.

Design and construction are planned at 2,555 days, seven years. So Bratislava and Košice likely won't be linked by the D1 before 2034.

Look for the mountain in the way

So why 54 years? The D1 was sent through the mountains, and there every mistake costs years: a hillside moves, a builder can't finish, a tender breaks the rules, and a route recommended in 2002 waited until 2016 for its rival to be dropped. Until the last gap is dug, the motorway between Slovakia's two biggest cities runs through Hungary.

Next time a road takes a strange detour, look for the mountain in the way. And is there a road near you that's been almost finished for years?

Sources

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