The danger on Poland's roads
A report released in early April by the Supreme Board of Inspection (NIK) denounces the quality of the nation's roads and claims that large cities have the highest number of unsafe roads.
The main reasons for this include poor management and organization of traffic flow, poor documentation of the status of roads, a lack of funds to maintain them as well as scarce monitoring of road safety and city road departments, according to the report. NIK also states that 5,144 points on roads across the country were considered threatening to the movement of traffic.
Of those, 4,343 were reported by the police or drivers, and 381 by NIK supervisors. Only 420 danger points were registered by local road departments. One of the least safe roads outside major cities was along the Gdansk to Chyzne route via Warsaw and Krakow, which had about 90 danger points.
Wojciech Drzewiecki, head of automotive research company Samar, said that one of the main reasons for increasing gasoline excise taxes was to pay for road maintenance and improvements.
"The question is whether that money will be used to improve the quality or not. Because today you see no improvement," Drzewiecki said.
Excise taxes at gas pumps increased by about 30% in 1999. In 2000 excise taxes are expected to increase by 16%.
The burgeoning number of automobiles on the road each year also isn't helping matters.
"If you look at the roads connecting many cities, the traffic there is destroying the surface," Drzewiecki said.
He also said that local governments had few funds to make significant improvements, a problem that Malgorzata Gajewska, press secretary for the Warsaw Roads Department, agreed with.
"If they don't give it, we don't have it," she said.
Warsaw receives money for road maintenance from the state, the voivodship and city authorities, but the total amount still isn't enough, Gajewska said.
At the same time, however, she disputed the report's criticism that there is little proper monitoring of roads in Warsaw.
"In order to put any signs on our roads, there has to be a traffic movement projection," she said.
The city of Warsaw has also received claims from drivers who have alleged that bad roads were responsible for accidents.
"There are such complaints, of course," Gajewska said. However, there aren't very many, she added.
In 1998 there were approximately 110 claims from drivers in Warsaw. In 1999 that number grew to 150, out of which only 12 have been compensated by the government so far. Although Gajewska could not give an exact number, she did note that the number of claims in 2000 has already increased, but she didn't attribute these to road conditions.
"I think it is because people know that they can file such complaints," she said.
