Magyar Közút has renovated nearly 140 kilometres of secondary roads across Hungary this year using its own equipment and workforce, Transport and Investment Minister Dávid Vitézy said on Monday.
In a post on Facebook, Vitézy said work had been completed on almost 132 kilometres of road across Hungary’s 19 counties, while final works were still under way at two locations covering nearly five kilometres. Preparations are also under way for projects covering a further 28 kilometres.
Separately, nearly 570 kilometres of main and secondary roads are undergoing or are due to undergo full-scale renovation this year, with the work being carried out by external contractors, according to the minister.
Taken together, full-scale road reconstruction projects and Magyar Közút’s own renovation work are expected to improve travel conditions on more than 700 kilometres of roads this year, most of them secondary routes, Vitézy said.
Magyar Közút operates ten complete road-construction equipment lines of its own for these projects. Unlike pothole repairs or other localized interventions, the technology allows the company to replace the entire wearing course of the road surface.
The projects typically cover stretches ranging from several hundred metres to a few kilometres, with most of the work taking place on roads outside built-up areas.
Vitézy said relying on Magyar Közút’s own technical capacity could allow the road operator to respond more quickly to resurfacing needs, in some cases within two to three weeks. The method also provides a more durable solution than conventional pothole repairs, with an average of eight centimetres of new asphalt laid during resurfacing.
The equipment lines generally operate from April through the end of October, depending on weather conditions. A paving-machine-based line can lay between 250 and 450 tonnes of asphalt per day, depending on the location and working conditions, meaning the ten lines have the capacity to process several hundred thousand tonnes of asphalt annually.
Vitézy said the government would present a long-term national road renovation programme in September aimed at ensuring that the condition of the state-managed road network improves in a predictable and sustained manner every year and across the country.
He said such a programme was necessary because Hungary has inherited a significant backlog of road maintenance. Of the more than 31,000-kilometre state-managed road network, almost half requires immediate full-scale renovation, according to the minister.
Vitézy argued that in recent years, substantial public funds had been allocated to new infrastructure projects while insufficient resources had been devoted to maintaining and renovating the existing road network.
He said the government intended to change this approach by focusing not only on building new infrastructure but also on properly maintaining the roads and other infrastructure already in place.
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