During the last winter season, Národná diaľničná spoločnosť, a.s. (National Motorway Company, hereinafter referred to as “NDS”), used 26 thousand tons of chemical gritting material. From November 2024 to mid-April 2025, the gritters, machinery, and maintenance equipment covered 380 thousand kilometres. Almost 1200 km of motorways, expressways and other roads maintained by NDS were kept passable by 715 staff employees using 299 pieces of winter maintenance equipment.
In terms of the number of interventions, the most intensively maintained sections were those below the High Tatra Mountains, in Mengusovce and Liptov, followed by Kysuce, Zvolen and Košice.
“Every well-maintained and safe kilometre of roads is the result of precise work provided by our dispatchers, drivers of maintenance machinery, technicians, and many other colleagues. Ensuring safe and passable motorways is our top priority,” said Rastislav Droppa, Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors and Operations Section Director of NDS.
Every year, NDS invests in the renewal of road maintenance equipment and improves the quality of infrastructure monitoring, thus enabling efficient and coordinated road maintenance.
“Using advanced technologies allows us to provide effective assistance to motorists even in harsh winter conditions on the D1 motorway section below the High Tatras. The new traffic solution we have introduced consists of adding variable message signs that warn drivers of the so-called “white darkness”. White darkness, or whiteout, occurs when the area around the motorway is covered with snow, and combined with fog or snow swirling it leads to almost zero visibility. During this phenomenon, the passing vehicles lose orientation, often resulting in paralysis or complete shutdown of road traffic. By introducing this new measure, we ensure that the traffic is diverted away from this dangerous climatic situation”, noted Rastislav Droppa.