Not only countries where there were land operations suffered heavy loss of life and equipment. Indeed, because of the air bombardments, countries like England or Japan for instance were also hit. Millions of people were affected by territorial modifications, transfers of population and military occupation.

10.1 - In France

10.1.1 - Rebuilding and developing of roads

Harbours, transport and supply sources were mostly unusable following the war. Navigation was impossible on the eight thousand kilometres of waterways that once had been navigable. Clearing and reconstruction demanded every effort. At the end of the year 1945, nearly one thousand bridges had been rebuilt and more than four thousand temporary bridges had been erected. In the same year, the President of the Board of Trade in Jean Monnet 's (1888 - 1979) provisional government worked out a plan for the reconstruction: French economy had to be modernised and the building of communication networks was seen as a priority. In 1946, the northern branch of the Western motorway was completed. The same year, Freyssinet finished a bridge with pre-cast concrete segments over the Marne in Luzancy. At the end of the year 1950, one thousand five hundred permanent road bridges had been rebuilt. The Campenon Bernard Company erected the Balduinstein cantilever bridge with pre-cast segments. The southern branch of the Western motorway, going to Trappes, was completed.

Automation required a lot less work on the part of men to build cars, and so the prices decreased. As roads were getting better, car traffic increased and people could now settle in the suburbs. In 1951, a tax was imposed on fuel, in order to create Special Funds for Road Investment. The proportion of the income yielded which was actually invested in that purpose varied from one tenth to one quarter over the years. It financed the pavement strengthening of main roads and the improvement of dilapidated bridges and motorway sections, such as the southern exits in Lille, the northern ones in Marseilles... As early as 1945, clinker from coal-fired boilers, slag from blast furnace and hydraulic binders were added to pavement foundation materials. From 1950, hot asphalt concrete was used. In 1952, road materials with controlled continuous grading were defined. The tunnel under the Croix-Rousse was opened in Lyon. Big industrial companies started being decentralised, which was regulated by a decree in 1955. In the same year, a law on the status of motorways was promulgated: roads without junctions at gradients or direct access and only available to vehicles with a specified minimum engine rating. They had moderate gradients: generally no more than four per cent. The first concessionary motorway company was created in 1956. It was the Company of the Estérel/Côte d'Azur Motorway. City by-passes that could be integrated into future motorways were built using new techniques: powerful mechanical engines, compaction and lime treatment of embankments, use of "reinforced earth", bituminous mixing plants, finishers, sliding form-works… Constructions were carried out quite quickly: Paris/Lille from 1964 until 1967, Lyon/Marseilles from 1963 to 1969 and Paris/Lyon from 1962 to 1970 (going through a tunnel under Fourvières in 1971 and through Lyon in 1974). The road tunnel through the Mont Blanc was opened in 1965. It was given a grant and was therefore subjected to toll. The winter from 1962 to 1963 was particularly inclement and as the load and traffic of vehicles increased, the road network was badly damaged during the subsequent thaw. Therefore, the main northern and western trunk roads were surfaced with an appropriate surface which was impervious to frost.

There were also "comprehensive strengthenings" for each route: simultaneous road improvement works were undertaken to suppress "black spots" and, in 1969, toll-free express roads were built as part of the "Brittany Road Plan". In 1970, the same approach as for railways in the 19th century was used: concessions for motorways were granted to a private company. The Financial and Industrial Company of Motorways ran the Paris/Poitiers and Paris/Le Mans motorways. The City of Paris completed the ring road in 1972. In 1973, the State handed over the responsibility for many roads to the departments (except for Corsica). In 1976, there remained only twenty-nine thousand kilometres of national roads.

During that period many bridges were built, five hundred a year compared to only ten before the war. They were essentially made of pre-stressed concrete. Pre-cast pre-tensioned beams were used from1946 (in Bourg d'Oisans). The Spie Batignolles Company erected a bridge in Choisy-le-Roi, over the Seine above Paris, using timed shifting. Length-profiled plates were used to build bridges from 1983 (in Joigny-sur-Meuse). There were also exceptional engineering structures, such as the Tancarville suspension bridge (1959) or the Aquitaine suspension bridge in Bordeaux (1967). The cable-stayed bridge in Saint-Nazaire (1975) had a central span of four thousand metres. The one in Brotonne over the Lower Seine (1977) had a three hundred and twenty metre long central span. Islands were connected with the mainland through bridges like the Oleron (1966), Noirmoutier (1971) or Ré (1988) islands. A second tunnel was opened under the Saint-Cloud Park in 1976.


10.1.2 - Some consequences of the development

This development of road infrastructures was connected with an important transfer of population from the countryside to towns. Town centres were congested, car traffic got slower and slower. In Paris for instance, the average speed of buses was twenty-three per cent lower in 1968 than in 1952 and the number of travel journeys in a working day went from one million four hundred thousand down to six hundred thousand a day. Suburbs extended. Railways had enabled a radial extension; roads filled the area in between, to create firms in "industrial zones". Built-up areas, the radius of which could reach one hundred kilometres, were surrounded by a mostly depopulated countryside. This kind of urbanisation generated a lot of daily commuting, by train or by road. The number of suburban trains increased and their performances were getting better. Despite the construction of bypass motorways, express roads and flyovers, car jams grew bigger. Built-up areas extended very fast and the financing of infrastructures couldn't keep up. Thus, some roads were saturated as soon as they were opened. That's why the Ministry in charge of roads, which had been the Board of Trade during the State government de facto, was the Ministry of Public Works again in 1944, and later on, it became also in charge of town planning, housing, and transport. Then, it had single departmental divisions and its specialised central services were reinforced.

The Special Motorway Division [Service spécial des Autoroutes] was created in 1959 and became the Roads and Highways Engineering Department [Service d'Etudes techniques des Routes et Autoroutes] in 1967. The Traffic Study and Research Department [Service des Etudes et Recherches la Circulation] was created in 1955 and transformed into the Research Institute on Transport [Institut de Recherche sur les Transports] in 1970. The Tunnel Study Centre [Centre d'Etudes des Tunnels] was created in that year too. A decree from 1949 transformed the laboratory of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées into an independent organisation: the Laboratoire central des Ponts et Chaussées. It employed one hundred and fifty people in 1952, two hundred and sixty in 1959 and four hundred in 1966.

In 1968, it got additional buildings, bigger than the ones before. Sixteen regional Public Works Laboratories and two Centres for Prototype Studies and Constructions [Centres d'Etude et de Construction de Prototypes] were progressively added to the first laboratory. In 1975, it obtained a very wide area in the region of Nantes where there are now very large facilities to conduct road tests and more than two hundred people working. Since 1989, part of this laboratory works with the National Centre for Scientific Research [CNRS - Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique]. In 1998, it has become a public scientific and technical institution. There were also seven Regional Public Works Engineering Centres [CETE - Centre d'Etudes techniques de l'Equipement] in 1973. In 1975, a decree made clear that the Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chaussées contributed to the research. In 1994, two corps of research workers for Public Works were created.


10.1.3 - Other technical innovations of that time

Since 1960, these research bodies have largely been using computers. The first of these electronic machines was built in 1944 by a team of the University of Harvard (in the USA). They used off-load / vacuum diodes, which had been invented in 1903 by Sir John Ambrose Fleming (1849 - 1945) and triodes in 1906 by Lee De Forest (1873 - 1961). In 1958, computers were built with transistors, which were electronic devices with semi-conductors thought up in 1947 by John Bardeen (1908 - 1991), Walter Houser Brattain (1902 - 1987) and William Bradford Schrockley (1910 - 1989). Today, a single component, costing two Euros, can contain ten million transistors. Computers made possible calculations that were almost impossible before, such as the ones with the finite element method needed for the study of the mechanical behaviour of structures like pavement layers or engineering structures. They also enabled the supervision of processes in real time making the road traffic management and the communication of information to motorists easier. Many vehicles are equipped with computers now to control the performance of the engine, to establish radio contact or to help navigation on the road network.

The public and private research bodies in the building and public works fields cost two per mil of the added value of that field of activity. The national cost for research and development amounts to twenty-four per mil of the gross domestic product. Thanks to these, fifteen per cent of the world patents in this field originated in France. These expenses also benefited road transport in which innovations were introduced to solve very different problems. Such was the case of radio transmission for instance.

It appeared with the telephone at the end of the 19th century (cf. supra). In Brussels, concerts were broadcast in public places in 1914. During World War I, this kind of contact was used to transmit military data. The first broadcasting stations for users of radio sets appeared in the United States of America in 1920. In 1925, there was a first international convention for the sharing of radio frequencies in Washington. Radio sets with vacuum tubes were available to the public in 1930. In 1940, there were fifty million of them in the United States, fifteen million in the United Kingdom and five million in France. In the 1950's, transistors enabled the building of light, cheap and portable radio sets and their use became widespread, even in non industrialised countries. Later on, this technique was also applied to low-power radio transmitters. Those were used in vehicles: citizen band radios, and cellular phones. The use of these machines was so widespread that many road tunnels were equipped with radio links so as to avoid interruption in reception.

The invention of the electronic iconoscope by Vladimir Kosma Zworykin (1889 - 1982) in 1931, made possible the capture of pictures and their transmission by radio: television was born. The first public broadcast was received in the same year in the Superior School for Electricity in Malakoff. In 1939, there were twenty thousand television receivers in Great Britain. Artificial satellites and optical fibres enabled the establishment of contacts with a high capacity of traffic over long distances. The first satellite launched was Sputnik I in 1957, and the first used for radio-transmissions was Score in 1958. In 1962, a first transatlantic connection was established through an artificial satellite between Pleumeur-Bodou in France and Andover in the United States. Artificial satellites also made possible the pinpointing of positions precisely (Global Positioning System) and the obtaining of meteorological and photographic data about the entire world. In 1855, Urbain Le Verrier (1811 - 1877) had organised the sharing of meteorological data. The forecasting methods that had been worked out since the beginning of the 20th century were used for aviation after World War I. From 1950, powerful computers have been used, and so have artificial satellites since the launching of Turos I in 1960. These forecasts allowed the transmission of information to road users and also help to keep roads fit for traffic during the winter. Photographs of the earth's surface taken by satellites were of invaluable help to cartography. Even if their resolution was lower than the width of roads, the latter could easily be recognised in agricultural areas: they appeared as a discontinuity line demarcating two different fields.

In 1982, a law allowed the free choice of the means of transportation and, in 1989, the fixing of quotas for carrier's licences was discontinued. The power and reliability of engines and tyres enabled the conveyance of heavy loads rapidly and it was necessary to restore the axle load restrictions. Road haulage was developed. Those vehicles became very specialised: there were tankers, refrigerator vans, skip lorries, mixer-trucks, car transporters, lorries with cranes or those that carried containers. Thus, in 1971, half of goods transported were by road. As a consequence, many railway lines of local or minor interest disappeared. Seventeen thousand kilometres of lines were closed in 1970. Conversely, there were improvements to main lines. On the line between Les Aubrais and Vierzon for instance, trains could run at a speed of two thousand kilometres an hour in 1967. Despite the rise in fuel prices, as the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries had planned an increase in the prices of crude oil in 1970, the existence of express roads made houses in the country accessible to a greater part of the population. This led to road congestion at weekends.

The technique of pavement wearing courses made great progress during that period. If there had been five hundred and fifty town gas works in 1946, there was only one left in 1968 (in Belfort). Towns were indeed progressively supplied through interconnected gas pipelines, by coking plants, and then with natural gas that was essentially imported. The tar from coking plants was principally used to produce carbon electrodes and so there was no more tar for roads. It was replaced by bitumen. In 1926, Hermann Staundinger (1881 - 1965) understood the macromolecular structure of some natural substances (like cellulose) and he synthesised new polymers. Nylon® was the first being publicly industrialised in 1939. There are many of them now and their use is widespread. Since the 1980's, some have been used as road binders. In 1950, so as to prevent the lack of grip on wet aerodrome runways, the British Transport and Road Research Laboratory developed a porous asphalt concrete with a satisfactory grading spectrum of aggregates. In 1967, it was applied to roads. This same technique has been used in France for about ten years now. In addition a method was worked out to put reinforcement steel rods into concrete roads, continuously laid before the fresh concrete was set.

High-performance concrete was used to build the bridge to the Ré Island in 1988. The flocculation of cement particles was prevented by the absorption of organic bodies and the grading spectrum was enlarged by adding very fine powders. Such concretes were used for other engineering structures, especially for the towers of the Normandy Bridge in 1995, the central span of which is eight hundred and fifty-six metres long. As a consequence of their different lengths of life, the two hundred and thirty thousand road bridges today are very various kinds. Recent bridges are mostly made of pre-stressed concrete (forty per cent of which with bridge deck surfaces). Other kinds of concrete bridges amount to nearly one third of the total number and masonry bridges that have withstood all tests still amount to over one tenth. Since the beginning of the 1980's, geo-technic works have benefited from the reinforced earth building process through the embedding of steel reinforcement bars connected with reinforced concrete "scales", of geotextiles, of polymer wires (Textsol®) or cement grout (jet grouting), etc. More and more tunnels, cut-and-covers and underground car parks are built. The transverse sections of road tunnels are wider. They are dug with tunnel-boring machines when it is possible. When they go through hard rocks, the cracking of the latter is prevented by holding them together with bolts (metal rods anchored or sealed with cement mortar or resin). These tunnels require a specific equipment: lighting, entry and exit louvres, specific signalling, roadside telephones, and, if they are long, ventilation to evacuate the exhaust gases and smoke from cars.


 

10.1.4 - Topical questions

The development of roads generated complaints. Those grew all the stronger as society demanded the removal of risks and the uncovering of the guilty any time there had been fraud. Protests were raised against town traffic congestion, noise, air and water pollution through nitric oxide, lead compounds, carbon monoxide and other products containing carbon. Land use, landscape alteration by bridges, roads and their facilities or quarries were denounced. So was the nuisance generated by building sites, the high oil consumption and accidents. Road accidents are less concentrated than with other forms of transport except for big vehicle pile-ups or when you consider the number of victims within a few days. In France, that number was the highest in 1972, when there were sixteen thousand dead. Measures were taken progressively that lowered the number despite a traffic increase. It was twice as low in 1997.

The authorities have reacted in many different ways. The criminal law was changed in 1980 for people having endangered the life of others. In 1985, the National Organisation for Road Safety, created in 1960, and the Transport Research Institute were unified into the National Research Institute for Transport and Safety. Since 1970, obligatory MOT tests have been more and more complete. Speed limits have been established according to the kind of road and to weather conditions. The alcohol level of motorists came under control. Cars were prohibited in some particular areas such as "pedestrian streets" and some areas were closed to traffic on days "without cars". Specialised police units were created to enforce the regulations. Technical measures were applied on vehicles: they were equipped with safety belts and air bags, the behaviour of their interior structure in case of accidents was studied… But they also affected roads: metal or concrete safety fences, lighting, road marking, traffic signs and variable message signs were erected, roundabouts were established, information was transmitted through the radio, roadside telephones were installed, there was television control and rest areas were built… In order to prevent other nuisances, decisions had to be taken in various fields. A Ministry of the Environment was created in 1971, and in 1976, a law on the protection of nature imposed an "environmental impact appraisal" of infrastructure plan. The regulation of the running of quarries was deeply modified.

The emission of harmful products by engines was checked not only as cars were put into service but also periodically. Efforts to diminish noise nuisance were made on vehicles and infrastructures. Protection shields - walls or berms - were built. Some roads were covered. The use of porous concrete for surfacing made roads less noisy, and it also improved the safety, since it reduced the water spray and thus increased visibility and road grip when it rained.

Regulation and standardisation were greatly developed, though they increased the costs. The standardisation of roads dates back to very ancient times. In Roman cities already, pedestrians were protected from cars by means of quite high sidewalks. Stones were put across the streets so that pedestrians could cross those without going down on them. Therefore, the width between the wheels was standardised. Today, regulation and standardisation affect many different areas: material, calculation or testing methods, equipment, signs and symbols, tariffing, practice conditions. They were first imposed by the Ministry but later on, they were passed to the French Standards Association (created in 1926 and state-approved in 1943), by the International Standards Organization (created in 1947) and by the European Committee for Standardisation (created in 1957).

During that period, there were also changes to French railways. The maximum load per axle was increased, the costs decreased, cars and passengers had been transported simultaneously since 1957 and an express train network was built. The most important innovation in Shinkansen on the Tokaido line linking Tokyo and Osaka from 1969 was no longer the two hundred and twenty kilometres an hour speed of good trains anymore, but the construction of a line that could only be used by high speed trains. As they had a great kinetic energy, they could ascend slopes that were almost equal to those of the motorways without losing much time. Consequently, railways were not only built in valleys any more and so they were straighter. In 1981, goods trains reached two hundred and seventy kilometres an hour on part of the new line from Paris to Lyon. The railway was completed in 1983 and enabled travel from one place to the other in two hours. In 1989, 1990 and 1993, the lines Paris/Le Mans, Paris/Tours and Paris/Lille respectively were opened. Trains ran at three hundred kilometres an hour on them. A line going from Lyon to Marseilles is being built. Thus, parallel to a second road network - the motorway network that is almost completed now - it is planned to build a second railway network within fifty years. This new means of transport, suitable for journeys over two hundred kilometres, can be exported out of France. This was the case of the Madrid/Seville line, built in 1992. A tunnel, avoiding the obstacles to navigation, was built to link Great Britain with continental Europe. It was achieved without any State subsidies. Thanks to the loading of vehicles onto special trains, the traffic could be as important as on a motorway. Moreover, ventilation wasn't necessary. The tunnel was built between 1988 and 1994 and enabled British standard high speed trains to reach London.

The French road network totals nearly one million kilometres today; seven thousand and five hundred of them are motorways. Maintenance costs amount to half of the expenses for new structures. This network carries more than twenty five million cars and five million lorries, buses and coaches, covering an average of thirteen thousand kilometres a year. Roads are used for nine tenths of public travelling and two thirds of goods haulage. Thus, ninety eight per cent of the twenty million tons of concrete produced in France leave the plants by road, eighteen per mil by means of waterways and the rest of it by rail. Rivers and canals aren't much used, though they have been for leisure since 1970. Though the distances are rather short, domestic flights account for more than one per cent of transport. In France, there are sixty-one airports served by regular flights. More than ten per cent of goods traffic goes through gas pipelines and oil pipelines. Lastly, one fifth of goods haulage and a little more than one tenth of public travel is undertaken by rail.

This predominance of roads has many consequences. The existence and the cost of road links affect the setting up of companies and their size. Companies can now be located far away from their place of use of their output. The quality and availability of communications reduces the need to hold large stocks ("tight flow"). The predominance of road transport dictates the price to other means. A lorry driver's strike or roadblocks can have considerable repercussions. The proximity of a heavy traffic road has an impact on the price of land: it is usually lower for the building of dwellings and increases for the setting up of trades. As the use of roads became widespread, new kinds of stores appeared: "supermarkets" on the outskirts of towns, filling stations where many items are sold that are not especially needed for vehicles. Even thieves operate on roads. The building and maintenance of the road network is mechanised and partly automated. Therefore, Public Works can't be used as a way to reduce the number of unemployed any more. Today, specialised companies employ around two hundred and fifty thousand people, yet even that number is decreasing. Meanwhile, there are three million unemployed, one third of whom are young people who left school with no diploma five years ago. Some French road building companies have now become multinational. One third of the activities are carried out abroad and amount to nearly four per cent of national exports. France is the first exporting country in this field.


10.2 In the United States of America

The economy of the United States was considerably developed during World War II. It is now the greatest power and its population keeps increasing at a higher rate than the world's average. Despite the expenses due to helping foreign countries - such as the Marshall Plan (George Catlett Marshall 1880 - 1959) in 1947, the cost of the "Cold War" (1946 - 1989), the armaments programme, (including the building up of a huge nuclear arsenal), the wars in Korea (1950 - 1953), Vietnam (1964 - 1975) and Iraq (1990 - 1991), the Federal Government and the states had a six million kilometre road network and a seventy thousand kilometre rail network built. One hundred and thirty-four million cars (a third of the world's total number) use these roads, as well as seventy-six million buses and lorries, some of which are convoys with three trailers and a total of fifty-six carrying wheels.

The network includes several remarkable bridges, such as the successive bridges on the one hundred and fifty kilometre long motorway to Key West. There is also the suspension bridge in Mackinac with an eleven hundred and sixty metre wide span (1957) or the one in Verrazano at the entry of the New York harbour, with a thirteen thousand metre wide span (1964). Some cities have been planned according to road traffic. That's why sixty per cent of the surface in Los Angeles is used for transport. Despite the widespread use of containers since 1954, the road network caused the disappearance of half the rail network. Today, there are only two hundred and twenty thousand kilometres of track left. Yet, the roads had powerful competitors.

In this vast country, air transport had already been considerably developed before World War II and it played a significant part during the latter. Jet propulsion, invented in 1939 by Ernst Heinkel (1888 - 1958), was developed in the United States. So was the building of landing gear which enabled heavy aircraft to be rid of constraints imposed upon seaplanes. Since 1970, there have been aircraft weighing three hundred and sixty tons at take-off, such as the Boeing 747. Such aircraft could convey four hundred passengers or sixty-seven tons of freight on a twelve thousand kilometere long journey at nearly one thousand kilometres an hour. Today, there are eight hundred and fifty airports served by regular flights. This means of transportation, the production of electric power and heat consume more than seven hundred billion cubic metres of natural gas a year. It is mostly conveyed through one million kilometres of pipeline, some of which are over one metre fifty in diameter.

As the foreign trade deficit is important and steady and the interest on the debt is quite high (fifteen per cent of the Federal budget), roads and bridges are insufficiently maintained.


10.3 - In Japan

After having annexed Korea in1905, occupied Manchuria in1933, Tongkin and a part of China in 1940, Cochin China and Hong Kong in 1941, the Philippines and Java in 1942, Japan capitulated in 1945. The Army had no longer the political power as between 1912 and 1945. Since then, military expenses have been little. They amounted to one per cent of the gross national product. The financial and industrial growth has been considerable. Seven million cars have been produced each year, and despite important exports, the number of cars today totals forty-three million and the number of lorries twenty million. Nearly two and a half per cent of the gross national product (eighteen per cent of the State budget) has been spent on public works. As a result, a rail network of twenty-four thousand kilometres (three thousand of which are for high-speed trains) and eight hundred thousand kilometres of good roads were built, as well as some outstanding bridges, such as the ones over straits. A suspension bridge with a span of nearly two thousand metres, linking Akashi and Kaikydo, was built in 1998 for instance. The Japanese of public works companies are also working abroad and this country ranks second for exports in this field.

10.4 - In Germany

After the Nazis had been defeated in 1945, the territory was reduced to three hundred and fifty thousand square metres and occupied by the Allies. Millions of people had died, become disabled, or been moved. The reparations owed to the winners hindered the recovery. The "Cold War" and the Marshall Plan brought about the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948. The American, British and French air forces supplied the city, including with coal. Nearly three hundred thousand flights enabled the conveyance of two million tons of goods. It was thus proved (but at what expense?) that it was possible to supply two million people through a "common airlift". A federation of Länder was created in 1949 in the western occupation zones: the Federal Republic of Germany was born. With assistance from the United States, the reconstruction was completed in 1950 and then the economical growth was quick. In 1962, the motorway between Lübeck and Basle was opened. In 1964, a second motorway from Frankfurt-am-Main to Munich was built. In 1969, there were almost four thousand kilometres of motorway.

The German Democratic Republic (1949 - 1989) was created in the Soviet occupation zone. Thus, there were two German States and most roads and motorways connecting both states were cut off. Transport was reorganised within the new boundaries. The reparations, paid until 1954, were higher than in the West and the reconstruction took more time. The road network consisted of seventy-two thousand kilometres of local roads, twenty-seven thousand kilometres of main roads and one thousand and eight hundred kilometres of motorway. Yet, the fourteen thousand-kilometre rail network accounted for fifty-five per cent of the traffic and pipelines conveyed six per cent of goods. After the perestroïka (restructuring) had been set up in the Soviet Union, the latter stopped supporting the GDR in 1989. Germany was reunited as the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. Roads and motorways of both former States were connected again.

In Germany, water, air and rail transport, as well as transport by pipeline are rather important. Today, there are four thousand and five hundred kilometres of navigable waterways and the Europa-Kanal linking the Rhine and the Danube dates from 1992. There are also forty airports served by regular flights and nearly ninety thousand kilometres of railway lines, on which there have been high-speed trains since 1991. Yet, the road network consists of nearly seven hundred thousand kilometres of roads and eleven thousand kilometres of toll-free motorways. Forty million cars and two and a half million lorries and buses use this network. Two hundred kilometres of new motorways are built each year. The goal is that every parish should be able to reach the network with lorries in less than thirty minutes. But the works are slowed down by the expense of the reunification and unemployment (amounting to ten per cent of the working population) and by ecological concerns, which are very strong in this country. Nevertheless, it ranks third in the export of Public Works.

10.5 - In Russia

Russia had experienced a great industrial rise before World War I. It withdrew from the latter at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917 but had to undergo devastating foreign interventions until 1922. After the recovery of agriculture, an intensive industrial development was centrally - and bureaucratically - planned from 1929 on. It enabled to drive back the Nazi attack (1941) up to Berlin (1945). Thereby, Russia suffered heavy losses of life - there were twenty million dead - and the European part was quite ravaged. The reconstruction and the Cold War led to the setting up of a powerful military and industrial complex. The perestroïka (1985 - 1991) brought about the breaking up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922 - 1991).

The Russian Federation, which is completely disorganised at present, is the widest State in the world. Its climatic conditions make the building and maintenance of roads difficult though. This explains why great importance has been attached to air transport amongst others forms. The Antonov 22, weighing six hundred tons at take-off, is able to convey one hundred and sixty tons. River transport has been used too to convey goods and passengers, but only when rivers aren't frozen. The rail network has also been developed. The network totals one hundred and fifty thousand kilometres, including the four thousand kilometre long "Baikal-Amur Magistral", built from 1974 to 1985, which includes the Trans-Siberian line in the north. There are also oil and gas pipelines. Besides that, there are only seven hundred thousand kilometres of maintained roads on this vast territory, used by ten million cars and four hundred thousand lorries. Even in the European part, the most densely populated one, the road network is very thinly spread.


10.6 - In China

After the war against Japan, the proclamation of the Popular Republic of China in 1949 put an end to the civil war. It is the most populated State in the world: one man in four is Chinese. There were one hundred and ten thousand kilometres of navigable waterways and twenty thousand kilometres of railway. But transport was mostly carried on by traditional techniques - junks, sampans, cartage and porterage. Until 1960, railway and strategic roads to Tibet and Xin-Jiang were developed as a priority. There are now seventy thousand kilometres of railway, five thousand of which are electrified. The more than one hundred airports are served by regular flights. The five thousand lorries and buses and the three and a half million cars can use the one million kilometres of roads, built with binders. Outstanding bridges have been built over very strong rivers. The cable stayed bridge in Shanghai over the Yangtze Kiang (1994), with a central span of more than six hundred metres, is one of them. Another example would be the fourteen hundred metre long suspension bridge in Jiangyn (1998).

10.7 - In other countries

It would take too much time to be exhaustive. Therefore, there will be only a few examples to show how diverse motivations and situations can be, despite growing international technical exchanges and efforts made by organisations such as the European Union or the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, thought up at the Bretton Woods conference (1944) and founded in 1945.

The United Kingdom was impoverished by both World Wars and the loss of its colonial empire (the British Commonwealth of Nations, created in 1931, lost the "British" in its name in 1949). In 1945, the Labour government nationalised the railways and road transport. The country benefited from the Marshall Aid programme and it raised a nuclear arms stockpile. In 1951, the Tory government handed over road transport to a private concern. While Margaret Thatcher (born in 1925) was Prime Minister, that is from 1979 to 1990, the railways were put into private hands and road funds were much reduced, though oil exploitation in the North Sea increased the resources. Today, the total number of cars is important: there are more than twenty million cars and nearly three million lorries. The road network is dense. It totals almost four hundred thousand kilometres of roads (which, for historical reasons, are often narrow and don't have any shoulders) as well as three thousand kilometres of motorway. There are some remarkable bridges too, such as the fourteen hundred metre long bridge with oblique suspenders, built over the Humber by the Freeman, Fox & Partners Office. The British public works companies rank fourth in exports.

Road networks progressively spanned straits as in the Turkish Republic and in the Danish Kingdom for instance. In 1973, a first suspension bridge was built over the Bosphorus in Istanbul. It was over one thousand metres long. Since 1997, a sixteen hundred metre long suspension bridge over the Great Belt links up the large Sjaelland Island and the Fyn Island. The latter had already been connected to the mainland through the rail and road bridges over the Little Belt.

Twenty-six per cent of the world's energy needs are provided by oil and seventeen per cent by natural gas. Roads are often necessary to reach the deposits. We will now look at some examples of it.

During the Algerian independence war (1954 - 1962), the prospecting in Sahara, started in 1952, led to the production of gas (1954) and oil (1957) in deposits lying far away from the coasts. The products were conveyed through gas and oil pipelines, but asphalt concrete roads were built in the desert to reach the wells. Oil products account for ninety-six per cent of today's Algerian exports.

Three quarters of the income of the Oman Sultanate comes from hydrocarbons. There is no railway in this country, but five thousand kilometres of asphalt concrete roads have been built since 1973 besides an oil and a gas pipeline. Today, those roads are used by two hundred thousand cars and one hundred thousand lorries and buses.

Other mining resources were exploited thanks to railways built for that purpose, as in Australia, in Mauritania or in Brazil for instance.

Australia is the second coal exporting country in the world. In that country, coal is exploited with bucket wheel excavators in open cast mines and so is iron ore.

Indeed, despite the growing salvage of scrap iron - which accounts for one third of the steel production in France - the need for iron ore increased. Since 1963, in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the ore of F'Derick has been transported to the port of Nouakchott by means of the one and only railway line in the country, built by the Iron Mine Society of Mauritania (nationalised in 1974).

Iron ore was also actively exploited in the State of Minas Gerais in the Federal Republic of Brazil where it was conveyed by rail. In this country, roads had a significant political purpose, as well as their usual ones. From 1956 to 1960, a new federal capital, Brasilia, was created ex nihilo in order to stimulate the development and exploitation of the interior. This city had good road connections in the south, the east and the north, and many people settled down along these roads. Since 1960, roads have been built in Amazonia to enable the de-forestation as well as the mining and farming exploitation of these grounds. The Trans-Amazonian road, started in 1973, is one of them.

The State of Kuwait is also a good example for the construction of roads out of political interest. As Iran and Iraq threatened to seize the Bubiyan Island, the State wanted to secure it by a permanent military presence. So as to connect the island with the mainland, a bridge more than two kilometres long was built quickly in 1982 and 1983 with hearts of voussoirs out of concrete lattice, dry expansion joints and a pre-stressing totally exterior to the concrete.

Yugoslavia provides another example of the political motivation for the building of roads. After 1948, the Popular Republic greeted young volunteers to show the advantages of self-management. Before the wars generated by the breaking up of the federation and the ethnic groupings, the road network (with binder pavement) was seventy thousand kilometres wide, whereas it was only nine thousand kilometres wide in 1962.

The State of Israel, original in many ways, built some roads to set up Jewish colonies in the territories it had been occupying since 1967 and which were considered as Palestinian in 1947. In this area, there are seven airports served by regular flights, six hundred kilometres of railway and fifteen thousand kilometres of road in good repair used by more than one million cars and two hundred and fifty thousand lorries and buses.

Roads were built for political reasons in the Kingdom of Nepal too. In 1960, the Popular Republic of China had a road built which went from Khatmandu to Tibet. In this area, the building of infrastructures is quite expensive because of the mountains and the climatic conditions. Besides, there are only fifty thousand cars and three thousand four hundred lorries. Nevertheless, three thousand five hundred kilometres of roads in good repair were built to favour the development of tourism.

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