Raca-Bijeljina Highway Paving Starts Before Serbia Crossing
Paving has begun on the access road to the new bridge over the Sava River on the Raca-Bijeljina highway's Serbian side, a key step before the border crossing to Serbia opens in mid-October.
Construction crews at the Raca-Bijeljina highway site laid the first asphalt on Friday, September 18, a step that will directly determine when Serbia gets a new border crossing with Republika Srpska. The 700 meter access road connecting the new bridge over the Sava River to the main highway must be finished by the end of September to handle traffic coming from Serbia, since the opening of the Serbian Kuzmin-Sremska Raca section and the joint integrated border crossing is planned for mid-October.
We will certainly finish that access road by the end of the month, so we can take on traffic from this new bridge and new border crossing, both leaving and arriving
said Radovan Viskovic, acting director of Highways of Republika Srpska, at the construction site. He added that the old border crossings will not disappear, but from now on will carry a purely local character and remain in use only for residents living in the area, without the international status they have held until now.
On the entire 20 kilometer stretch from Raca to Bijeljina, 60 percent of the work has been completed so far, with around 135 million convertible marks invested. The contractor, Integral inzenjering, has promised that the first 7.5 kilometers of the road, from Raca to the Brodac interchange, will be finished by the end of the year, weather permitting. That deadline is later than originally announced, though the reason is not a lack of money.
Money is not the problem at this point, it’s the conditions at the construction site over the past month or two. Temperatures were high, and workers were unable to do their job at full capacity
Viskovic explained, adding that Highways of Republika Srpska currently has no outstanding debts to its contractors.
Two bridges are being built in parallel along the route, and more than two million cubic meters of fill material have already been laid, said Tomislav Miljevic, the site’s works manager, who also confirmed that paving began on the same day. Two problems that had been slowing construction have also been resolved: power lines belonging to Elektroprenos BiH that run through the route, and the conversion of agricultural land into construction land, which required approval from the Bijeljina City Administration. The quality of the structures and the route itself is beyond question, according to supervising engineer Mladen Petrovic.
When does the border crossing to Serbia open?
On the other side of the Sava, on the Serbian Kuzmin-Sremska Raca section, work is in its final phase. Crews are installing telecommunications equipment, traffic signage and related gear, building toll collection facilities, and protecting the remaining stretch of power lines along the route. According to announcements from the Serbian side, that section and the shared border crossing should open in mid-October, though the deadline depends on whether Republika Srpska manages to finish the access road and the new bridge by the end of September.
For Serbia, the new crossing near Raca is more than just a road. It will ease pressure on the existing border crossings with Bosnia and Herzegovina and shorten the route to the northeastern part of Republika Srpska, while also speeding up the connection to the corridor being built on the Bosnian side. That is why the opening date, which depends on construction work on both sides of the river and on the weather that slowed the project over the summer, remains a number being watched from both sides of the border.
The final date for the new bridge and the integrated crossing to be fully operational, as announced by Viskovic, is expected from mid-October, when it should begin operating alongside the opening of the Serbian section up to Raca.
