Improving border crossing capacities

On average, the border crossing points are located 22 kilometres apart on the seven border sections of Hungary. Therefore, the urban network of the border area is somewhat distorted; the “neighbouring” towns separated by the country border can only be reached by making a lengthy detour. The opening of new border crossings and the improvement of the existing ones can help to strengthen the development, social and economic cooperation of towns, communities in the border region.

At the request of the Ministry of National Development, with the support of the Prime Minister’s Office co-financed by the EU, the Transport Development Coordination Centre launched a project with the purpose to assess the development potentials of border crossing points. TRENECON and its partners have carried out the relevant assessment efforts for the the Slovakian, Serbian, Croatian and Ukrainian border sections.

In the first phase of the assignment we surveyed the social and economic characteristics of the relevant border areas, took stock of the existing transport needs and transport infrastructure and finally gave an account of border-crossing features and potentials. We examined the possibility of building new road crossing points particularly in the alignment of cut-off roads used in the early 20th century.

On the basis of the projections, we estimated the potential traffic at the new crossing points and the concurrent realignment of current traffic flows. We have identified the costs of development, the effects and the risks of the interventions, the time requirement of the implementation. We prepared detailed feasibility studies on the best development proposals selected on the basis of the studies. We also delivered corresponding study designs and, as required, the transport safety impact assessments, the documentation for environmental permit procedure and the preliminary NATURA 2000 impact assessment.

Throughout the activity we were consulting with both the client and the national authorities, the county and town municipalities and were sharing information with the residents at public forums on both sides of the border. Multilingual publications were produced to share the main information fundamental particularities of the individual project proposals envisaged on the relevant border sections.