World’s smallest motorway built to shame a nation

[Peter350]

From the BBC:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47582694

[WHBM]

Interesting chart there - who has the most miles of motorway in Europe.

Really didn't think it was Spain.

[c2R]

I just saw that, what a brilliant publicity stunt!

[Marzo]

'Razvan Cuc, Romania's minister of transport, has declared the Mandachi road illegal due to a lack of permits.'

Was he joking or actually serious?

[Euan]

I doubt any immediate motorway upgrades would benefit the man personally, Suceava is not a very large city and is currently hundreds of miles from any motorway in Romania. At the moment the priority has to be finishing the A1, and connecting Timisoara and Cluj to Bucharest fully by motorway. It would also help if Bucharest had a motorway bypass as well. On a positive note, Romania is doing better in terms of motorway connections than neighbouring Ukraine, or indeed Moldova which still has none.

[Owain]

Interesting chart there - who has the most miles of motorway in Europe.

Really didn't think it was Spain.
Motorway.JPG

Very interesting!

About 20 years ago, France would have been much closer to Italy than to Germany.

[c2R]

Interesting chart there - who has the most miles of motorway in Europe.

Really didn't think it was Spain.
Motorway.JPG

Did you know only China and the USA have more motorway than Spain, it's actually third in the world - although their 17,000km pales in comparison to the 108,000km in the US or 143,000km in China

[J N Winkler]

Interesting chart there - who has the most miles of motorway in Europe.

Really didn't think it was Spain.

It doesn't surprise me, but then I had warning. I have downloaded gigabytes upon gigabytes of Spanish proyectos de construcción for motorways, and I am capturing only a fraction of the total activity because the cities and autonomous communities lagged the central government in putting documentation online, the autopista companies require prequalification (and CIF and NIF) for access to documents, and online availability really only started around 2008, when Spain had already pulled level with France and was about to overtake Germany.

These days I am downloading gigabytes upon gigabytes from China. This take represents only two provinces out of 34 province-level divisions, and one of the two (Gansu) is fairly low in population rank. Yet I see kilometer after kilometer of bridge and tunnel through really rough mountainous terrain, which makes me wonder how maintenance costs will be met several decades down the road. I am already starting to see repair contracts for side slope failures. I-70 through Glenwood Canyon is unique in the US; in China it has many equivalents, to the point it is almost a humdrum method of working.

[Euan]

Interesting chart there - who has the most miles of motorway in Europe.

Really didn't think it was Spain.
Motorway.JPG

No doubt the highly extensive motorway network around Madrid will be a major contributor to Spain's overall motorway length, it beats just about any European city in that context.

[exiled]

Interesting chart there - who has the most miles of motorway in Europe.

Really didn't think it was Spain.
Motorway.JPG

No doubt the highly extensive motorway network around Madrid will be a major contributor to Spain's overall motorway length, it beats just about any European city in that context.

In the case of Spain I think both the autovias and autopistas are counted as motorways for the stats.

[jimboLL]

Interesting chart there - who has the most miles of motorway in Europe.

Really didn't think it was Spain.
Motorway.JPG

Did you know only China and the USA have more motorway than Spain, it's actually third in the world - although their 17,000km pales in comparison to the 108,000km in the US or 143,000km in China

But it depends what you call a motorway. There are long stretches with steep grades, tight bends, intermittent hard shoulders and 80km/h speed limits in the mountainous areas (of which there are many in Spain). Not to denigrate the engineering achievement that some of these roads represent, but are they really Motorways?

[exiled]

Interesting chart there - who has the most miles of motorway in Europe.

Really didn't think it was Spain.
Motorway.JPG

Did you know only China and the USA have more motorway than Spain, it's actually third in the world - although their 17,000km pales in comparison to the 108,000km in the US or 143,000km in China

But it depends what you call a motorway. There are long stretches with steep grades, tight bends, intermittent hard shoulders and 80km/h speed limits in the mountainous areas (of which there are many in Spain). Not to denigrate the engineering achievement that some of these roads represent, but are they really Motorways?

In the same way some of the odder bits of the UK network are motorways, that is how they are classified.

[Enceladus]

A little surprised that Spain leads Europe in total motorway length (I thought the Autobahnen in Germany would have been the leader) but IMO a lot of the Spanish network sems oddly planned and there are many sections that are parallel duplicates of each other which seems a real waste of resources.

Anyhow, total length as a measure of the degree of road infrastructure development is rather crude, it should be length of motorway to population per km or mile.

[FosseWay]

Did you know only China and the USA have more motorway than Spain, it's actually third in the world - although their 17,000km pales in comparison to the 108,000km in the US or 143,000km in China

But it depends what you call a motorway. There are long stretches with steep grades, tight bends, intermittent hard shoulders and 80km/h speed limits in the mountainous areas (of which there are many in Spain). Not to denigrate the engineering achievement that some of these roads represent, but are they really Motorways?

In the same way some of the odder bits of the UK network are motorways, that is how they are classified.

The UK suffers more in the other direction - it's not so much the A601(M)s of this world adding artificially to the total mileage but rather the fact that the A55, A14, A50 etc. are not coloured blue makes the UK look disproportionately poorly served in this context.

There are various features you could use to arrive at some form of standardised definition of what a motorway is for international comparison purposes, such as "must be a dual carriageway", "must have at least two lanes in each direction", "must have a hard shoulder", "must be entirely grade-separated" and so on. But speed limit is not a good criterion, because jurisdictions differ wildly in how they apply limits. In Sweden if you only take those motorway stretches with the official motorway speed limit (120) the network shrinks alarmingly because of the prevalence of other limits. The E6 between about Lindome and Kungälv is mostly 80 km/h with some 70, for example. Official classification is a similarly dubious criterion, IMO.

Edit - what Enceladus says about population density is also a good point. A better measure of road system developedness would be some form of congestion measure coupled with KSI stats. If a network scores well on both without motorways, it doesn't need motorways.

[exiled]

The UK suffers more in the other direction - it's not so much the A601(M)s of this world adding artificially to the total mileage but rather the fact that the A55, A14, A50 etc. are not coloured blue makes the UK look disproportionately poorly served in this context.

There are various features you could use to arrive at some form of standardised definition of what a motorway is for international comparison purposes, such as "must be a dual carriageway", "must have at least two lanes in each direction", "must have a hard shoulder", "must be entirely grade-separated" and so on. But speed limit is not a good criterion, because jurisdictions differ wildly in how they apply limits. In Sweden if you only take those motorway stretches with the official motorway speed limit (120) the network shrinks alarmingly because of the prevalence of other limits. The E6 between about Lindome and Kungälv is mostly 80 km/h with some 70, for example. Official classification is a similarly dubious criterion, IMO.

Edit - what Enceladus says about population density is also a good point. A better measure of road system developedness would be some form of congestion measure coupled with KSI stats. If a network scores well on both without motorways, it doesn't need motorways.

We also have things like the M90 and the South Wales M3. For some of the others like the A55 or the A90 it a bit of the UK preferring a corner cutting all purpose with at grade junctions rather than go the motorway route.

[FosseWay]

We also have things like the ... South Wales M3.

¿Qué?

[FosseWay]

My point was more that many other countries' definitions of "motorway" would easily encompass long stretches of what the UK classifies as A-road.

[exiled]

We also have things like the ... South Wales M3.

¿Qué?

Oops, I meant of course the M5, err, M4

[exiled]

My point was more that many other countries' definitions of "motorway" would easily encompass long stretches of what the UK classifies as A-road.

However we also have roads so classified that would elsewhere be A-road equivalents. Realistically this is in part because unlike most other countries we do not have a classification between ordinary roads and motorways. It is certainly the case Spain puts the same regs on users of both the autopista and autovia networks so they classify as motorways, but in the context of tight turns and low limits in the mountains, as does France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and so on, this is more telling that we don't often put high quality infrastructure in difficult terrain. We have the M62 and it is lauded, but some of the motorways in the Pyrenees and the Alpes put that to shame, even with 80 or 90 km limits due to circumstances.

[Chris5156]

But it depends what you call a motorway. There are long stretches with steep grades, tight bends, intermittent hard shoulders and 80km/h speed limits in the mountainous areas (of which there are many in Spain). Not to denigrate the engineering achievement that some of these roads represent, but are they really Motorways?

The trouble with this statistic is that it counts whatever each country decides to classify as motorways. If Spain says those roads are motorways, they count! There's no other universally accepted definition that can be used.