Highways in Slovakia
The majority of these dual carriageways are managed by the state-owned National Motorway Company of Slovakia (NDS), established in 2005.
The first informal plan for a motorway (first called in Czechoslovak autostráda or dálková cesta) in Czechoslovakia date back to 1935.
This was to link Prague through Slovakia with the easternmost Czechoslovak territory, Carpathian Ruthenia (now Zakarpattia Oblast in Ukraine).
The definitive route, including a Prague ring motorway, was approved shortly after the Munich Agreement on 4 November 1938, with a planned speed limit of 120 km/h.
On 1 December 1938 Nazi Germany had already initiated a construction of the so-called Sudetenautobahn (in Sudetenland, before the Munich agreement part of Czechoslovakia, then of Germany) in the route Streitau (Bavaria) – Eger – Karlovy vary – Lobositz – Böhmisch Leipa – Reichenberg (capital of Sudetenland) – Görlitz (in Prussia, now in Saxony).
The autobahn has never been finished, but some remnants in the landscape close to Pomezí nad Ohří, Cheb/Eger and Liberec/Reichenberg are still prominent and an unfinished part from Svárov via Machnín to Chrastava was used in the construction of the I/35 road.
Czechoslovakia was broken up with a declaration of independence by the Slovak Republic and by the short-lived Carpatho-Ukraine which was a prelude to the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia on 15 March 1939.
The motorway should have reached Brno in 1940, but building materials and labour shortages due to an absolute priority given to the Nazi armament industry delayed the work considerably.
77 km from Prague towards Brno advanced notably, but a prohibition of all civil constructions by the German authorities came into force in 1942.
After the Second World War, the completion of only the first and unfinished 77 km of the motorway Prague – Brno as far as Humpolec was approved by the Government in November 1945 and was reinaugurated in 1946.
During the government of Vladimír Mečiar, the opening of some (sometimes semi-profile) sections by foreign personalities (Claudia Schiffer or Gérard Depardieu) became known just before the parliamentary elections.
After the inauguration of the government of Róbert Fico, it was announced that the completion of the D1 highway between Bratislava and Košice, as well as the R1 expressway between Nitra and Banská Bystrica, would be accelerated.
The missing sections of the mentioned highways were to be built and operated for 30 years by a private individual, to whom the state would repay the costs during the entire period as part of "availability payments".
All public tenders for the concessionaire were accompanied by doubts about the purposeful setting of the conditions, or the dubious exclusion of the participating consortia.
In the years 2007–2010, the long-awaited D1 section across Považská Bystrica was gradually built, thus completing the highway connection between Bratislava and Žilina.
