Skip to main content

Prague wins legal battle over Blanka Tunnel costs

The Czech capital Prague will not have to pay €63 million to construction firm CKD Praha DIZ for cost overruns on the Blanka Tunnel complex. CKD Praha DIZ sought the amount over an alleged rise in costs when completion of the tunnel was delayed, according to a report by Radio Praha.
September 6, 2016 Read time: 2 mins

The Czech capital Prague will not have to pay €63 million to construction firm CKD Praha DIZ for cost overruns on the Blanka Tunnel complex.

CKD Praha DIZ sought the amount over an alleged rise in costs when completion of the tunnel was delayed, according to a report by Radio Praha.

A court of arbitration also ruled that the company must pay the city’s legal costs of around €630,000. The court’s decisions are binding and final.

The 6.4km Blanka Tunnel complex is a part of Prague’s unfinished ring road system and is the longest road tunnel in the Czech Republic and the longest city tunnel in Europe. Just under 40km of the 83km Ring Road are complete.

The tunnel, which connects the area west of Prague Castle with Trója district in the northeast, consists of three tunnels - Bubenečský, Dejvický and Brusnický. Construction started in 2006 and completion was supposed to be 2011.

However, delays put the opening date back to September last year and doubled the overall cost to around €1.6 billion.

A survey by Prague’s Technical Administration of Roadways recently found that on averages 75,000 vehicles use the Blanka tunnel daily.

Related Content

  • Korean bridge construction poses challenges
    April 5, 2012
    On South Korea's southern coast, an innovative highway sea crossing is providing many engineering challenges The new Busan-Geoje crosses from South Korea's second city to its biggest island and is slightly shorter than the 12km of the country's famous Incheon project. In addition the main cable stay bridge for the Busan-Geoje project has a 475m span rather than the 800m of the Incheon central span. However the 8.2km Busan-Geoje project faces perhaps greater technical challenges and also includes a second b
  • State-of-the art road tunnels in construction and use of ITS
    April 25, 2013
    A wealth of major road tunnel construction projects and significant cant ITS installations within existing key road tunnels have been recently completed or will soon be underway. Guy Woodford examines some of them. A state-of-the art Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) - the 10th largest ever to be built worldwide will be put to work later this year on New Zealand Transport Agency’s landmark Waterview Connection project in Auckland. The giant Herrenknecht-manufactured machine will be used to construct the twin 2.5
  • Bids in for Estonia’s Pärnu to Uulu road
    May 31, 2022
    Six companies are bidding for a key road project in Estonia: Verston, Nordecon, GRK, TREV-2, KMG and TREF Nord.
  • The March of the Urban Low-emission Zone
    April 17, 2018
    Europe’s political patchwork is getting a low-emission zone overlap, according to Malcolm Kent* By now, pretty much everybody in the industry will be aware of the Low Emission Zone in London, UK. But awareness of similar European zones about to start or expand might be more patchy. The background to all of these schemes is the problem of air quality, particularly European Union rules setting limits on acceptable pollution levels. It was found some years ago that several member states’ cities, including