Prague's ODS Again Promises to Finish the City Ring Road — But We've Heard This Before

Prague's ODS party has once again declared that completing the City Ring Road (Městský okruh) will be the top priority of the next election term. Politician Ondřej Portlík wrote this on X on Saturday, July 18, calling the project the "biggest challenge" for the city's future leadership.

But Prague has heard this promise before. Back in 2022, as a candidate for the Spolu coalition, current Prague Mayor Bohuslav Svoboda said the ring road was even more important than building metro line D, and vowed to get it built "at any cost."

Four years later — with ODS having spent that time in Prague's city leadership alongside the Pirates and STAN — the actual results are modest at best: construction of the missing northeastern section of the ring road still hasn't begun.

The delay isn't just down to bureaucratic red tape. The current leadership has had to carry on with a project reworked back in 2019 by Zdeněk Hřib and Adam Scheinherr. It was their insistence that key sections of the ring road run underground, minimizing disruption to the surrounding built-up areas.

At the time, ODS — then in opposition — sharply criticized these changes, calling them a pointless way of dragging out the timeline. Yet after joining city leadership in 2023, the party has, somewhat ironically, continued pushing forward with that very same project — otherwise it would have run into resistance from district authorities.

In January of last year, the city had to launch yet another tender — this time to rework the project documentation in line with the new construction law. Prague has already held a tender for geotechnical surveys, but the main tender for a construction contractor for the ring road still hasn't been announced.

The question of financing the entire construction also remains unresolved. Even before the 2022 municipal elections, Portlík was warning that Prague wouldn't be able to fund both metro line D and the ring road at the same time on its own.

"Prague needs the ring road because traffic conditions inside the city keep getting worse. But if metro D is being built in parallel, it's clear the city budget won't be able to handle two such enormous investments at once," Portlík said.

Completing the City Ring Road is once again becoming a campaign theme ahead of the municipal elections. ODS's election promises sound appealing, but the question of how to fund the project remains unanswered. Under the current circumstances, it's hard to imagine pulling this off without an agreement with the national government and multi-billion-crown financial support from the state.

Read also: Prague transport: a complete guide for newcomers — metro, trams, tickets and the PID Lítačka app

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz

Photo: Petr Jedelský / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)