How much does it cost to build a kilometer of road in Serbia? From the controversy between the President of the state, Aleksandar Vucic, and the acting Director of Roads of Serbia Zoran Drobnjak, we heard that it was five million euros. The Minister of Construction, Zorana Mihajlovic, says for N1 that it is different every time and that it is not possible to guess whether it is five or 10 million. And how many, according to the estimates of experts from her office, she did not state.
The auction on mileage, in which the first man of the state and Roads of Serbia participated, would have already been a show with these two actors if they had not come to the cost of building a kilometer of road.
Vucic: I ask you how much will the fast road to Pazar cost?
Drobnjak: 90 times, five… 500 million!
Vucic: 500 million? Well 90 times five is 450 million, not 500! How did you immediately add 500?
Drobnjak: Yes, but how many bridges and tunnels are there?
This question of Drobnjak is completely justified, construction experts agree. Bridges, tunnels, riverbeds, completely new traffic lanes or just “rehabilitation” of existing ones, will affect the final price of the road. All this is preceded by the preparation of feasibility studies and plans, says Minister Zorana Mihajlovic.
“No contract has ever been signed that there was no certain documentation before that, based on which it was estimated how much something costs per kilometer. So that every kind of attempt to explain how something is determined in a lump sum, I now tell you as a responsible person from the Government of Serbia – no! We are a serious state,” says Mihajlovic.
When asked by N1 whether the Ministry has an assessment made on the basis of documentation, and not a lump sum assessment, instead of an answer, we were ignored. In the construction business in Serbia, the estimates of the European Union are also ignored, says engineer Danijel Dasic.
“We have a situation where the price of a kilometer of an ordinary highway with two lanes reaches the average price of a highway in the same Europe. It would be very good if our government simply showed that calculation according to which they predict that the cost of making that road will be five million,” points out Dasic.
Up to one and a half million euros per kilometer is the price that would be operational for our working conditions, adds Dasic.
According to the assessment of the professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and the former line minister, Dragoslav Sumarac, that could be the price of a road in the plain.
“If two new lanes were made, on the terrain above this current highway in terms of altitude, then there would be a lot of constructions, a lot of tunnels, a lot of bridges, and that would certainly exceed the figure of over five million,” explains Sumarac.
One or five will still not guarantee the quality of the road if the previous step is bad, warns the former Minister of Construction.
“All these developed countries pay more attention and pay well for those projects, they take a little longer, but they are precise. Now we have those so-called BIM technologies which, according to that project, can accurately monitor the quality of works and the amount of works that have been done, and to follow the deadlines,” states Sumarac.
He adds that investing in field testing is important because of the many slopes and landslides. And the case of Corridor 10 near Grdelica showed that there are no jokes with the hills next to the road, N1 reports.
