The Tivat-Jaz boulevard will not solve the problem of traffic jams on this part of the coast, agree experts, responsible in the Traffic Administration, as well as politicians who are at the head of the state.
The boulevard, which starts from the Tivat side at the existing roundabout in Kukuljina, goes through the heart of Grblje along the route of the existing highway, 16 kilometers long and 22 meters wide, and ends with a new roundabout that will be built at the current turn for Jaz and Trsteno beaches. , before the ascent of the highway to the "Mogren" tunnel. This means that all the doubled traffic from the future two lanes of the boulevard from the direction of Tivat will again "flow" into only two lanes that go over Mogren and enter Budva, and the traffic chaos on the approach to the metropolis of tourism will be even worse. The same is the case in the opposite direction towards Tivat, where the future two lanes instead of the current one will bring traffic again to only two lanes of Jadanska magistrala in Tivat, which here has been reduced to an ordinary city street and is constantly congested in the summer.
The construction of this road will cost at least between 70 and 80 million euros, and the exact calculation depends on the cost of expropriation of numerous private properties (properties, individual houses and business premises) that the state should take from the people of Grblje in order, in parallel with the current route of the Adriatic highway, which here has two lanes, built two more carriageways and added an additional pipeline for the Regional Water Supply System for the supply of Tivat, Kotor and Herceg Novi.
"No one said that one road will solve all the problems in Montenegro, of course it won't, we have to build other roads as well, it's true, we have to be faster, but for that we need to change the Law on Expropriation", he said the day before yesterday in Tivat the prime minister Dritan Abazovic, asked why the works that were opened on August 11 are delayed.
He admitted that the Ministry of Ecology, Spatial Planning and Urbanism did not issue a construction permit to the investor of the boulevard construction, the Traffic Administration, because the expropriation of private property was not completed.
Even at the ceremony on August 11, Abazović did not talk about the boulevard as a final solution to the problem of traffic jams between Tivat and Budva, which is the busiest road in Montenegro with 30.000 vehicles passing through it in an average of 24 hours in summer.
"I hope that in two years we will witness the opening of a 16-kilometer boulevard, which will significantly help the flow of traffic between Budva and Tivat," said the Prime Minister in August.
The Traffic Directorate (now the Traffic Administration) confirmed during a public hearing four years ago that the boulevard envisioned in this way, which ends at the turn for Jaz, is not intended to connect there to the route of the future Budva bypass.
"The bypass project is in an advanced stage and the second location of the contact point has been defined, i.e. the location between the bridge to Kotor and the road leading to Terna in Lastva Grbaljska," said the Directorate at the time.
In 2019, the directorate indirectly admitted that the Tivat-Jaz boulevard is only a partial solution to the problem of congestion on this part of the coast.
"The four-lane road was designed for a better flow of traffic along the entire section", was the official response of this authority to numerous remarks that the residents of Tivat, Grblje, Kotor and Budva repeat to this day - that the boulevard will not solve the problem of summer traffic collapses in those cities. because it is not caused by locals and tourists staying in Tivat, Kotor and Budva, but primarily by transit traffic that passes through this part of the coast south towards Bar, Ulcinj and Albania, i.e. towards Podgorica and further towards Kosovo, i.e. it passes north towards Croatia and BiH.
"The road in question is being reconstructed into a boulevard-type road, which is supported by the Spatial Plan of Montenegro by the fact that a "high-speed highway" corridor has been defined for transit traffic that runs through the hinterland of coastal cities", the Directorate for Transport officially responded to dissatisfied citizens in 2019.
The citizens of Grbljana, who held a new protest against the construction of the boulevard on Sunday, reiterated that in the meantime they "contacted experts, from whom they received information that there are many alternative solutions that would be to the satisfaction of the citizens and the state."
"The problem is not the flow of traffic on the existing highway Tivat-Jaz, but the approach to Tivat, Kotor and Budva," he emphasized. Milan Djuric from the organizing committee of the protest against the boulevard.
Traffic experts have previously warned that the four lanes from Tivat to Jaz mean nothing because all the traffic from them then again flows into the narrow two lanes of the existing highway on Mogren, i.e. in Tivat, and that it would be much more effective if the money will be spent on the boulevard, directed to the construction of bypasses above Tivat and Budva, because the main problem here is transit traffic.
When asked by "Vijesti" why almost 70 million euros are being invested in a way that will not solve the key problem, and why this money was not directed to the bypasses around Tivat and Budva, the director of the Traffic Administration Radomir Vuksanovic On August 11, he said that "the question of the order in which certain projects will be carried out has too many things that we have to satisfy".
"For the Tivat-Jaz boulevard, we had completed projects, which allowed us to react more quickly. In any case, this investment in the boulevard will not slow down other investments that we intend to implement in the coming period," said Vuksanović.
The reconstruction of this section of the Adriatic highway Tivat-Jaz into a boulevard implies the creation of a road that will have two carriageways in the direction of movement, sidewalks on both sides, a dividing strip and as many as 14 roundabouts in the section through Grbalj. This will significantly reduce the speed of vehicle movement on this section, as its greater part is in populated areas where the speed limit will be 50 kilometers per hour.
In accordance with the requirements of the EBRD bank, from whose loan funds this project is financed, the Chinese consortium Shandong Foreign Economic & Technical Cooperation Co., Ltd & Shandong Luqiao Group Co Ltd was chosen to perform the works, whose offer was 53.915.262 euros without VAT -a.
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