Estonian roads agency to plow more money into maintenance

Photo: maanteeamet

So far half of the funds set apart for roads in Estonia has been used for building large-scale road infrastructure objects and the other half for maintenance, but according to a new road preservation program the volume of maintenance should grow, deputy director general of the Road Administration Kaupo Sirk said in an interview with the weekly Maaleht.

«The target is 2,300 kilometers of repairs per year,» Sirk said. In his words, the agency wants to pay more attention to the existing road network in the next two years as the condition of roads would deteriorate very badly if all the efforts were spent on large-scale projects.

Next year the agency will concentrate on reconstructing dangerous sections of roads. «We've increased the sums for this from five million to eight million euros,» Sirk said. Five million euros is to be used to increase the load-carrying capacity of bridges.

According to Sirk, a current problem is that roads tend to get out of repair already during the warranty period. «Builders use cheap materials, we need to reinforce ourselves not to let such tricks pass,» he said. A second problem is the quality of bitumen.

In Sirk's judgment, Estonian roads have been developed well in the long term and surface dressing has been the key to maintenance. «Latvians have not used this process and their roads are in a very bad condition,» he said.

While Estonia and Lithuania have invested roughly the same amount of money in roads per kilometer, in Latvia investments have been substantially smaller, Sirk said. «But Lithuania is building expensive objects and the rest of roads suffer,» he said.

The 2014-2020 road maintenance plan puts emphasis on preserving the existing road network for which 180 million euros is to be spent annually.