TalentBest Projects2013Awards

Global Best Projects Winner, Roads/Highways: Kosovo Motorway Project (Sect. 1, 2, 3 & 4A)

Photos Courtesy of BEGP

With a team of engineers and other professionals from 11 countries, the highway is a "truly international project," a Best Projects judge says. That team ran on a fast track, finishing the 38-km road from Morinë to Pristina in 19 months.

The motorway traverses mountainous terrain and has 11 bridges, four interchanges and 22 overpasses or underpasses. Bechtel-Enka proposed a design with no tunnels. It says the plan saved time and "hundreds of millions of euros" for the government. Moreover, during the June-October 2011 construction peak, the job had more than 4 million worker-hours and no lost-workday incidents.

Location Prizren, Kosovo

Owner Government of Kosovo, Pristina

Lead Design Firms Institut IGH, Zagreb, Croatia; Egis, Guyancourt Cedex, France

General Contractor/CM Bechtel-Enka General Partnership, Pristina

Supervising Engineer Hill International Inc., Athens, Greece

As ENR's former Washington Bureau Chief, Tom Ichniowski wrote about the federal government since the George H.W. Bush administration, and covered at least five major highway bills. A recognized expert on government policy on infrastructure and regulation, Tom is also a Baltimore native and Orioles fan who grew up rooting for Brooks and Frank Robinson. He is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, where he once used “unrelentless” in a headline.

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