Europastrasse

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

European roads are a class of trunk roads that are located in Europe , Central and Asia Minor . They form a network of around 50,000 kilometers in length, serve international traffic and are marked with a white E with the street number on a green background.

In most states, roads are marked with the European road name next to the national road number, while in other states such as B. Sweden or Norway the national highways carry only the European road number. Belgium and Denmark also use this system on the motorways, but not on the other roads. In Germany , the European road numbers are almost always missing when signposting the motorway, they are only shown on the distance boards. There are currently around 250 European roads.

The international European road network
Motorway intersection E 42 and E 451 at Frankfurt Airport

Definition of the European roads

The route of the European roads is determined under the umbrella of the UN / ECE . The basis is the Declaration on the Construction of Main International Traffic Arteries of September 16, 1950, later replaced by the European Agreement on Main International Traffic Arteries (AGR; European Agreement on the Main Roads of International Traffic) of November 15, 1975 Contracting parties (2008) undertake to take into account the network of European roads described in the contract as part of their national transport development programs. The Federal Republic of Germany acceded to the agreement in 1976 and ratified it on August 3, 1978. The original text is only available in the three official languages English, French and Russian.

The change in 1975 led to a complete reorganization of the European roads, which is why meaningful comparisons between the network before and after 1975 are not possible.

The European roads run not only through the European Union , but through all European countries and beyond the European continent to Asia Minor and Central Asia. The list of European roads is updated at irregular intervals.

numbering

From the 1950s to around 1985 there was an older numbering system in which the most important European roads had single-digit numbers, e.g. B. the old E 5 from London to Istanbul or the old E 6 from Kirkenes via Narvik to Rome , the other two-digit numbers. These then single-digit European roads were the classic long-haul routes. Some Scandinavian sections, which were exceptionally not renumbered when the new numbering system was introduced, are mostly signposted with one digit to this day, such as B. the E 04 in Sweden and Finland and the E 06 in Sweden and Norway, so z. B. Tabliczka E4.svg.

Today the numbering follows the following principles: European roads are numbered with two or three digits. The most important routes (category A) are two-digit and end with “5” or “0”, with the roads that end with “5” running in north-south direction and those that end with “0” , in an east-west direction. They are numbered from west to east or from north to south.

Examples: Today's E 05 runs from Scotland to southern Spain and the E 85 runs along the western edge of the Black Sea. The E 20 goes from Shannon Airport near Limerick to Saint Petersburg . The E 40 , which stretches from Calais to the Chinese border in Kazakhstan , is more than 8000 kilometers in length and is the longest European road and is signposted for several thousand kilometers, overlapping with the Asian highways .

The European roads in between have corresponding even or odd numbers. On the east-west oriented roads between the E 10 and the E 20, the other European roads 12, 14, 16 and 18 are in the same basic direction.

All of these main routes are category A European roads . Branching, connecting and connecting European roads (category B) have three-digit numbers, with those east of the E 101 beginning with a zero, i.e. 001 to 099. The first digit of the three-digit number indicates the first digit of the next north-facing European road with 0 ending two-digit number again, the second digit corresponds to the first digit of the next western European road with a two-digit number ending in 5, the third digit is a serial number. In Germany, however, the numbering of the European route 451 violated this rule.

history

In 1931 the Bureau International des Autoroutes (B. I. A. R.) was founded in Geneva with the aim of building a pan-European expressway network; the ideas were discussed at the so-called “International Motorway Congresses”.

At the second Motorway Congress in Milan from April 18 to 20, 1932, the Organization Internationale des Autoroutes (O. I. A. R.) was founded with the aim of “promoting moral and financial cooperation between the state and private initiatives in all matters relating to motorways, […] creating the Technical, economic, legal and social documents for the construction of motorways [...] and a uniform and harmonious international approach is sought, without prejudice to the need to largely take national peculiarities into account. "

From this emerged the first Europe-wide uniformly numbered highways, but - due to political developments - not until many years later. If you follow today's European roads, you are often traveling on less frequented routes. As a result, they no longer have the reputation of the exotic, such as the earlier Balkan or North Cape routes.

Since the numbering introduced in 1985 was not changed after the end of the Cold War , the European road network only has connections over the former inner-German border at or near which border crossings were located in 1985. The division of Europe can also be seen in the network from the fact that some European roads suddenly bend onto secondary roads (such as European route 49 near Schleiz) or take detours (such as the European route 65 , which bypasses Austria ), only to close the "Iron Curtain" as rarely as possible cross.

See also

supporting documents

  1. ^ European Agrement on Main International Traffic Arteries (AGR). (PDF, 269 kB) UN Economic and Social Council. Economic Commission for Europe. Working Party on Road transport, March 14, 2008, p. 57 , accessed April 30, 2015 .
  2. ↑ UNECE
  3. ^ European Agreement on the Main Roads of International Traffic (AGR), Federal Law Gazette 1983 II p. 246.
  4. ↑ Original text on UNECE
  5. ↑ Example: Map excerpt from www.landkartenarchiv.de, ADAC map from 1972, Berlin area ( Memento of the original from September 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.landkartenarchiv.de
  6. ↑ see AGR, Annex I, number 2

Web links

Commons : International E-road network  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : European road number plates  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Europastraße  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations