Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma in the village of Zhashkiv in Cherkasy region at the 159th kilometer of the highway, cutting a symbolic ribbon, opened the "Kyiv-Odesa" motorway.
Leonid Kuchma also presented state awards of Ukraine to the builders, inspected part of the constructed motorway and a photo exhibition dedicated to its construction, reports "UNIAN".
Earlier, ForUm reported that the reconstruction of the "Kyiv-Odesa" road began in June 2003. In a year and a half, 11 bridges and 29 overpasses were built on the highway, 29 transport interchanges were constructed, 133 culverts were laid, and 22 million cubic meters of earthworks were performed. Almost 4 million cubic meters of crushed stone and slag were used for the road base, and more than 1.2 million tons of asphalt-concrete mixture for the road surface.
The design speed of travel on the "Kyiv-Odesa" motorway is 140 km/hour. The length of the road section being reconstructed reaches 235 km, the width of the roadway is 7.5 m by 2 m, the width of the median strip is 6 meters, the width of the roadbed is 28.5 meters. Design loads are at the level of world standards: for bridges AK-15, NK-80, for the road surface – 11.5 tons per axle.
The "Kyiv-Odesa" road is part of the ninth international transport corridor, which connects Finland, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece.
In 2005, it is planned to lay the upper layer of asphalt-concrete surface on various sections 4-5 cm thick along the entire road, to carry out major repairs of road sections from Kyiv to Zhashkiv and from Krasnoznamenka to Odesa, and to carry out work on arranging an alternative route.