OREANDA-NEWS. A formal ceremony took place on 5 June 2014 to lay the foundation stone for the future road bypassing the settlements of Novaya Usman and Rogachevka at the 517th kilometre of the M-4 Don Highway.

The ceremony was attended by Igor Levitin, Aide to the President of the Russian Federation, Sergei Kelbakh, Chairman of the Board of Russian Highways (Avtodor), and Alexei Gordeyev, acting governor of Voronezh Region.

The segment of the M-4 Don Highway from km 517 to km 544 bypassing Novaya Usman and Rogachevka will be a continuation of the Voronezh bypass, which came into operation in November 2013. The M-4 Don Federal Highway currently passes through the settlements of Novaya Usman and Rogachevka in Voronezh Region. This segment is one of the most difficult and congested points on the M-4 Don Highway. The fact that the road goes through these settlements has a negative effect on the environmental situation, traffic safety and the speed of transit transport.

Construction of the M-4 Don Highway on the Novaya Usman and Rogachevka bypass will be completed under the long-term investment agreement between Avtodor and Mostotrest's subsidiary Transstroymekhanisatsiya. The contract covers construction of the new segment, and also maintenance and repairs for a period of 20 years after completion of the construction work.

Transstroymekhanisatsiya specialists will have to build a 29-kilometre segment of new four-lane Class 1A highway with a 6m-wide separation lane, two multilevel interchanges, 14 flyovers with an aggregate length of 1,159m, and also two pedestrian bridges with an aggregate length of 163m. The design speed on the new segment will be 150 kph.

In order to reduce the negative effect on the environment the project includes installing noise barriers in places that are subject to heightened acoustic impact, planting trees along the edges of the road site, and also building manmade structures to enable migrating animals to cross the highway.

The cost of the construction work amounts to 17.3 billion roubles. The project includes 1.9 billion roubles of investment by the builder, which will be returned in the operational phase in accordance with the terms of the agreement. The agreed construction period is 2014-2016. Once the construction work is completed, Transstroymekhanisatsiya will become responsible for the maintenance, repair and overhaul of the segment of the M-4 Don Highway from km 517 to km 544 up to 2036.

The M-4 Don Federal Highway, which follows the route Moscow - Voronezh - Rostov-on-Don - Krasnodar - Novorossiysk, links the central and northern regions of the European part of the country with the North Caucasus, the Black Sea coast and the port of Novorossiysk. The road is more than 1,500 km long. In May 2010 the M-4 Don Highway was transferred to the beneficial ownership of Avtodor. Large-scale reconstruction is currently underway on this route, as a result of which the whole of the M-4 Don Highway will comply with technical class 1 by 2019. Once the new high-speed segments bypassing settlements in Tula, Voronezh and Lipetsk Regions were brought into operation, 918,172 km of the M-4 Don Highway complied with class 1B, 101,135 km with class 1A, and 100,629 with class 1C.