Highways in Poland

The main promoter of this concept was Professor Melchior Wladyslaw Nestorowicz of the Warsaw University of Technology, who organized three Road Congresses, during which a group of specialists discussed the creation of the network. On March 5, 1939, in the trade magazine Drogowiec, Professor Nestorowicz proposed a very ambitious plan for the construction of almost 5,000 kilometres of category I and II roads, based on similar programmes in Germany and Italy. Nestorowicz sketched a map of the future system with the following routes:
First class roads would, according to the plans, consist of the following motorways, as well as A6 Szczecin bypass and S22. About half of them were constructed as single-carriageway with the intention of adding a second carriageway in later years. However, after 1938, warfare expenses meant little money would be invested into any infrastructure and only one 9 km single-carriageway piece west of Gliwice was constructed.
In Poland, a 28 km stretch between Warlubie and Osiek was constructed in 1937 – 1939 in the time's motorway standard with a concrete surface, which was designed by Italian engineer Piero Puricelli. The motorway was planned to reach Gdynia, but the outbreak of the Second World War halted the plans.

1945 – 1972

The Potsdam conference defined the borders for communist Poland, which were very different from the pre-1939 ones. It received the so-called Regained Territories from the former Third Reich with the aforementioned motorway sections. Most of the motorway bridges were destroyed by the warfare, but only a few were repaired or rebuilt in the first post-war years. The bridge over Ina river was reconstructed in 1972, and those on S22 only between 1996 and 2003.
Apart from the bridges, almost all the motorways were left in the same condition as they were in 1945 until the mid-1990s. The only road left from Nazi times that was completed by the People's Republic of Poland was a one-carriageway small section between Łęczyca and Lisowo, which was built on the previous works of Nazis.

Despite announcing such pompous plans, no motorway was opened in the meantime.

In the 1970s

Only in the 1970s did any works start. In 1972 it was planned to build:

In 1973 – 1976, "Gierkówka" dual carriageway from Warsaw to Katowice was built. Originally planned as a motorway, it was in the end constructed by adding another carriageway to the existing road, hence going through many villages and crossing with local roads. However, the part from Piotrków Trybunalski to Częstochowa was constructed on a new route in a semi-motorway standard: the road was constructed on a motorway alignment but majority of the intersections between the highway and the other roads were constructed as one-level with no viaducts or overpasses.

In the 1980s

Near the end of 1970s the first construction of motorways started and continued to the next decade. The roads opened in the 1980s were the first motorways and expressways which generally meet the contemporary standards, at least with respect to their more important attributes.
In 1985 the government already planned to build the expressways apart from the motorways. The major routes planned as motorways were A1, A2 and A4. The realization of these plans however came at a very slow pace: throughout the 1980s, only an average of of highways in the whole country were being opened per year.

In the 1990s

In the III Republic of Poland the plans started to change again. Planned S3 was promoted to a motorway standard as A3 and a plan was introduced of constructing the highway Łódź – Wrocław – Bolków in a motorway standard as A8. Szczecin bypass and Olszyna – Krzywa were promoted to motorways, even though at that time majority of their lengths was in bad shape, laid with the original concrete surface from the 1930s with no significant works having been performed on any of them throughout the communist period.

In the 2000s

As of the end of 1999, vast majority of national and international traffic routes were served by regular national roads, most of them leading through the cities, towns and villages, and most of them single carriageway. Only the following number of highways was present:

Before Poland received the EU membership

A few years before Poland entered the EU the tempo of motorway construction increased significantly. The main focus was on the east–west motorways A4 and A2. In 2002, a long-awaited renovation of the A4 from Krzywa to Wrocław has started, which included laying new high quality surface in place of the Nazi German concrete slabs, reconstruction of all the pre-WWII bridges on the motorway and renovation of the viaducts above the motorway.
This is also a period when Poland started introducing motorway tolls, first in 2000 for the A4 section between Mysłowice and Kraków.

Poland in European Union

1 May 2004 was a crucial day for the history of motorway construction, and that is when the highway boom started. One of major advantages of signing the European Union access document was that Poland could get access to large funds for co-financing the construction of new roads and upgrades of the existing road infrastructure.
These years, the existing pieces of the motorways started to converge into the basis of the future network: in 2005, A4 connected Wrocław with Katowice and Kraków, while in 2009 – with Germany; in 2006, A2 connected Poznań with Łódź. A large number of expressway bypasses of towns were also constructed at this time.

2010 – 2014

The sections opened in 2010 – 2014 belonged to the following highways:

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  2015 – 2019

After the peak of investments before Euro 2012, very few new sections have been contracted in 2012 and 2013, which resulted in a small number of sections opened in 2015 and 2016, large share of which were the last delayed fragments originally contracted for a Euro 2012 opening. In particular:

• In 2016, the last delayed fragment of from Kraków to Ukraine was opened, making A4 the first major Polish highway completed on its whole intended length, as well as the first complete border-to-border highway connection.
• Also in 2016, the delayed bypass of Łódź was finished, making completed on its whole route except for those sections where national road 1 had already been a dual carriageway, allowing for a significantly lower priority of constructing the remaining stretch compared to other highways.

Since 2014, the number of signed contracts has risen again, resulting in the number of road openings having risen again since 2017.
The sections opened in 2015 – 2019 belonged to the following highways:

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  2020 – present

The sections opened, or planned to be opened, in 2020 – 2024 belong to the following highways:

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• ,,,, : + ca. 70 - 80 km each
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  Total length of motorways and expressways in Poland (end of the year)