Bulgaria Built More Motorway Per Person Than Britain

My wife and I recently drove back from a brief holiday in Cornwall. The journey down had been largely uneventful – we drove our Hyundai EV down the M4 and M5, stopping for lunch at the excellent Emilia in Ashburton, Devon ¹. Charging was easy, visibility was good, and the whole thing felt almost suspiciously painless. We needed only one stop, and doing it over lunch made the trip feel seamless.

The return journey was different. On the way back, we stopped at the Eden Project, and Waze then routed us along the A303 to the M3 rather than back up to the M5. Forty-five minutes faster, it promised! What followed was several hours on a road that alternates between brief stretches of dual carriageway – almost all with roadworks – and long sections of single-carriageway trunk road with limited visibility, blind bends, and no hard shoulder. By the time we hit Wiltshire it was dark and raining hard. The locals were taking these roads at 75 mph (I was not comfortable going more than 50 mph given the total lack of visibility). There was nowhere to stop, few opportunities to charge – those that existed were slow – and the potholes were deep enough to feel through the suspension ². I had expected the journey home to be boring. Instead it was stressful and dangerous.

When I got home I looked up the A303’s history. Plans to dual it have been proposed, consulted on, and abandoned repeatedly since the 1970s. The most recent attempt – a £2.5 billion tunnel under Stonehenge – was given planning consent in 2023, then cancelled by the Labour government in July 2024, having already consumed £179 million in development costs. A few weeks before this post went up, the Transport Secretary formally revoked the planning consent entirely. The A303 will remain a single carriageway past Stonehenge for the foreseeable future – and probably for the rest of my life.

This is a road that the government first promised to upgrade when Edward Heath was Prime Minister.

The usual framing for Britain’s road-building failure involves comparisons with richer or more ambitious countries. Since 1990, Spain has built nearly 7,000 miles of motorway while the UK has managed 422. Germany has the Autobahn. France has autoroutes to places you’ve never heard of. These comparisons are valid, but they let Britain hide behind “well, those countries are different.” Spain had EU structural funds. Germany reunified. France has been planning autoroutes since de Gaulle.

Let me offer a comparison that allows for no hiding. I was born in Bulgaria – the poorest country in the European Union, a place that spent the 1990s lurching between economic crises, that experienced hyperinflation in 1996–97, and that didn’t join the EU until 2007. A country with a nominal GDP per capita of around $17,600 in 2024 – roughly a third of Britain’s $53,200.³ A country whose motorway construction programme is a genuine national embarrassment, plagued by corruption, political chaos, and projects that take decades to finish.

Bulgaria has more motorway per person than Britain.

The numbers

In 1990, Bulgaria had 170 miles of motorway. The UK had 1,907 miles. Britain’s head start was enormous: more than ten to one.

By 2025, Bulgaria had 566 miles. The UK had around 2,400 miles. Bulgaria added 396 miles in 35 years. The UK added 492 miles. ⁴

In absolute terms, the UK built slightly more. But Bulgaria has about 6.4 million people; the UK has about 68.3 million. Since 1990, Bulgaria has built almost as many miles of motorway as the UK, despite having roughly one-tenth the population.

Where the comparison really bites is once you adjust for the much larger population of the UK: the UK added about 7.2 miles per million residents. Bulgaria added about 62 miles per million. On a per-capita basis, Bulgaria outbuilt Britain by nearly nine to one.

Expressed as total stock rather than additions: Bulgaria now has about 8.1 miles of motorway per 100,000 people. The UK has 3.5. This puts the UK dead last among large Western European economies, and below every single EU member state except Romania, Poland, and the three Baltic/island states with no motorway at all.⁵

Bulgaria is not a model of efficiency

I want to stress this, because it’s the whole point. Bulgaria’s motorway programme is not something anyone holds up as an example to follow. The Trakia motorway – the country’s first major route, connecting Sofia to the Black Sea coast at Burgas – took 40 years from groundbreaking to completion, finally opening in full in 2013. The Hemus motorway (A2), which has been under construction since 1974, is still only half-finished after more than 50 years. The Struma motorway towards Greece has been stuck in a legal and environmental dispute over a gorge section for years.

Bulgarian motorway construction involves the standard Balkan cocktail of EU procurement scandals, contractors going bust, political interference, and sections that get re-tendered two or three times. The country’s road agency has been restructured repeatedly. Projects routinely miss their deadlines by years.

Despite being a country where the average monthly wage was under €300 a decade ago, where roads are still maintained with a vignette system rather than tolls, where the entire national highway plan amounts to about 850 miles of which barely half is finished – Bulgaria has managed to lay more motorway per capita than the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

What happened here?

Britain’s motorway network was built in a burst of post-war ambition between the late 1950s and the mid-1980s. The M1 opened in 1959. By the time Margaret Thatcher left office, most of the major routes existed. Since then, the country has essentially stopped building.

The numbers are startling when you look at them closely. Between 2014 and 2024, Britain added 65 miles to its motorway network – and a former Department for Transport official has pointed out that most of that gain is probably the Ordnance Survey measuring road curves more precisely, not actual construction. The real figure for genuinely new motorway built in the last decade may be as low as 24 miles⁶ – an astonishingly low two and a half miles a year, slower, as it happens, than the annual roaming range of a garden snail.

The reasons are familiar to anyone who follows British infrastructure. The planning system makes new routes phenomenally slow and expensive to approve. The Treasury’s cost-benefit methodology systematically undervalues long-term capacity in favour of short-term “improvements” to existing roads. National Highways (the government company responsible for England’s strategic road network) has been fixated for years on smart motorway conversions, which the AA’s president says can actually make congestion worse. And there is a deep cultural reluctance in British policy circles to build anything new when you can instead rebrand what already exists.

Bulgaria, for all its dysfunction, still builds things (even if just barely). When the EU offers structural funds for a motorway, Bulgaria – eventually, chaotically, sometimes on the third attempt – builds a motorway. Britain, which is three times as wealthy per head, debates for a decade whether it really needs one, commissions a multi-modal study, cancels the scheme, and then spends £900 million fixing the smart motorway it built instead.

At the current rate of UK motorway construction (generously call it 12 miles a year) it would take centuries ⁷ to match Bulgaria’s per-capita stock. Bulgaria will likely finish the Hemus motorway before the UK adds another meaningful section of anything.

Looking back on my experience of sitting in the dark on the A303, rain hammering the windscreen, watching lorries overtake on a blind bend on a road the government has been promising to fix since 1971, I thought about the Trakia motorway – the road from Sofia to Burgas. It was built by a country with a fraction of the money, a fraction of the institutional capacity, and no fraction of the excuses. It took them 40 years and it’s not perfect, but it does actually exist. You can drive on it today! It has two lanes in each direction and a hard shoulder and lighting and services.

The A303 has been under discussion for longer than the Trakia was under construction. The difference is that Bulgaria eventually built the road.

Edit (April 2026): Since I started writing this post, the government has announced a new five-year roads strategy. That may yet produce more roadbuilding than Britain has managed in recent years, but given the country’s record of being extremely good at announcing road schemes and extremely bad at actually completing meaningful new motorways, I remain sceptical that this parliament will materially change the picture.