September the 26th, 2022 - Peljesac Bridge might have taken all of the limelight away from, well, just about everything else for a while, but there will soon be another Croatian bridge in town.
As Morski writes, by the end of this year, Croatian Roads (Hrvatske ceste) will announce a tender for the technical and design solution of the new bridge over Kastela Bay, which will connect Split and Kastela and at the same time represent the fastest connection of the second largest city in the country with a highway, this state-owned company confirmed for tportal.
This facility is part of a wider project called ''New entrance to Split/Novi ulaz u Split'', and it includes the construction of a new road from the Vucevica intersection on the highway, through the Kozjak tunnel and over the two-lane road to Kastela, then over the aforementioned bridge into Split and then finally to the ferry port. It is worth several billion kuna and four years ago it was included in the list of strategic projects of the Republic of Croatia.
It was announced that the part from Vucevica to Kastela will be financed by Croatian Roads from its own resources, including the tunneling through Kozjak, and for that part of the investment, the public procurement procedure for the execution of the works for this new Croatian bridge has already been initiated. The documentation for the bridge itself will be prepared for financing from European Union (EU) funds.
While it won't take anywhere near as long as Peljesac Bridge did to come to fruition, the completion of the entire project for this new Croatian bridge in Central Dalmatia is not expected before the year 2027.
In addition to the traffic connection of the congested Split agglomeration, the ''New entrance to Split'' project should result in a welcome a twenty-kilometre shorter journey between this city and the City of Zagreb, and finally enable Kastela to have a direct connection with the highway. In addition, it will bring a new road access to Split itself, a city located on a peninsula, which has been dependent on two roads on its eastern part for many decades now.
Apart from the confirmation of the tender for the new bridge, Croatian Roads did not want to provide any additional information on this topic.
Across the wider Split area, Croatian Roads currently implementing several projects worth several billion kuna, but despite the announcements, physical works haven't yet started in most of them. It is precisely in this area that the two busiest points in all of Croatia are located, the intersections of Solin and Stobrec, which are used by about 60,000 vehicles on a daily basis, while the ferry port with five million passengers a year is almost impossible to access during the hot summer months.
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