Over the past two decades Czechia has quietly moved from patching up its post-socialist infrastructure to redesigning the backbone of a modern European economy. What started as a race to fix crumbling roads and overloaded railways has evolved into a much broader project: completing a strategic motorway and rail grid, building new nuclear capacity, and wiring the country into Europe’s 5G and data networks. The result is a dense, overlapping wave of infrastructure projects that will shape the country’s competitiveness well into the 2040s.

At the heart of this shift is European money and domestic political will. Under the 2021–2027 Transport Operational Programme, Czechia can draw roughly €4.9 billion from EU funds, channelled primarily into road and rail projects, urban public transport and alternative-fuel charging infrastructure. Combined with Recovery and Resilience Facility support and national co-financing, this gives Prague an unprecedented opportunity to close long-acknowledged infrastructure gaps in transport, digital and green investment.

From D1 to D35: Completing the Motorway Backbone

For years the symbol of Czech infrastructure problems was the D1 motorway, the main artery between Prague and Brno, famous for bottlenecks, construction sites and accidents. While modernisation of D1 is finally approaching completion, the strategic conversation has shifted to redundancy and resilience: Czechia is now investing heavily in an alternative east–west route, the D35.

The planned D35 will form a northern link between Bohemia and Moravia, taking pressure off D1 and creating a new, more direct corridor from Hradec Králové via Olomouc towards the Polish and Slovak borders. A key section between Opatovice, Časy and Ostrov has already been co-financed by EU funds to improve traffic flow and remove dangerous at-grade crossings. Further stretches are being prepared as public-private partnerships (PPPs), as the Ministry of Transport’s PPP unit tests new models for financing large motorway schemes with private capital and long-term availability payments.

These projects are not just about shaving minutes off travel times. By completing the motorway ring around Prague, reinforcing north–south links and adding redundancy to east–west routes, Czechia is strengthening its role as a logistics hub between Germany, Austria, Poland and Slovakia. For an export-driven economy anchored in automotive and engineering, reliable motorway infrastructure is as much an industrial policy tool as a transport asset.

High-Speed Rail: From Concept to Construction

If the 2000s were the decade of the motorway, the late 2020s will be defined by rail—and especially high-speed rail. Although Czech Railways has operated tilting trains capable of 230 km/h since 2004, there is still no conventional line in the country cleared for speeds above 200 km/h. This is set to change.

In 2017 the government approved a High-Speed Rail Development Programme based on a set of “rychlá spojení” (RS, fast connections) radiating from Prague. RS1 will link Prague with Brno and Ostrava and then on to Katowice in Poland; RS2 will connect Brno with Břeclav and further to Vienna or Bratislava; RS3 will run from Prague to Plzeň and on to Nuremberg or Munich; RS4 will extend northwards from Prague to Ústí nad Labem and Dresden; and RS5 will connect Prague with Hradec Králové and eventually Wrocław.

The plan combines new-build high-speed lines, designed for 200–320 km/h, with upgrades of existing corridors. New multimodal terminals are being prepared near key motorway junctions—for example, a Prague East terminal near the D11 and a high-speed hub near Jihlava on the D1—to allow easy transfers between long-distance trains, regional rail and road traffic. Construction on the first sections is scheduled to start around 2026, with the aim of integrating Czechia into emerging high-speed axes running from Berlin and Dresden through Prague to Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest.

For Czechia, true high-speed rail has three strategic payoffs. Domestically, it collapses travel times between Prague, Brno and Ostrava to something closer to a single integrated labour market. Regionally, it plugs Czech cities into European business and tourism flows currently dominated by air travel and long-distance motorways. Environmentally, it offers a credible alternative to short-haul flights and long car journeys, aligning transport planning with climate commitments.

Urban Mobility and Cleaner Transport

The infrastructure story is not limited to intercity corridors. EU cohesion money is also being channelled into cleaner urban and suburban transport, including modern trams, trolleybuses, metro extensions and charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. Under the 2021–2027 Partnership Agreement, €4.1 billion from the ERDF and Cohesion Fund is earmarked for projects such as clean public transport fleets and urban mobility systems.

In Prague, investment is focused on the long-planned Metro D line, tram extensions to fast-growing suburbs and park-and-ride facilities that intercept commuters before they reach the congested city core. Other cities—Brno, Ostrava, Plzeň, Liberec—are renewing tram and trolleybus fleets, introducing low- or zero-emission vehicles and upgrading depots and power systems. The cumulative effect is a gradual rebalancing away from private car use toward more reliable, higher-capacity public transport, especially in densely populated urban corridors.

Nuclear, Renewables and the New Energy Backbone

Infrastructure transformation in Czechia is also deeply energy-related. With a target of ending coal-based electricity generation by 2033, the country is betting on a combination of nuclear and renewables to secure its long-term power supply.

The centrepiece is the expansion of the Dukovany nuclear power plant. After a complex tender marred by legal challenges and an EU review of foreign subsidies, Czechia in June 2025 signed a contract with South Korea’s KHNP to build two new APR1400 reactors at Dukovany, following a ruling by the Supreme Administrative Court that cleared the way for the deal. Valued at around 407 billion Czech crowns, the project is expected to bring the first new unit online by 2036 and a second by 2038.

These reactors are intended to replace ageing coal plants and underpin a low-carbon baseload, complemented by growing wind and solar capacity, cross-border interconnectors and upgraded transmission lines. The government’s broader energy strategy calls for significant investment in grid resilience, interconnection with neighbouring markets and flexibility tools such as storage, all of which fall squarely into the domain of “green infrastructure” highlighted in recent OECD assessments of Czech investment needs.

5G Corridors and the Digital Spine

Alongside concrete and steel, Czechia is investing heavily in invisible infrastructure: fibre networks, data centres and 5G corridors. The national digital connectivity strategy sets the goal of ensuring high-capacity broadband and 5G coverage in urban and rural areas and along all main transport corridors.

One flagship initiative is the Munich–Prague 5G corridor, a joint project launched with Bavaria to deploy next-generation mobile networks along the motorway between the two cities. Another is the Baltic-Adriatic 5G corridor, which includes a cross-border segment between Ostrava-Svinov in Czechia and Częstochowa in Poland, supporting connected and automated mobility along a key north–south route.

These corridors are intended as test beds for autonomous driving, smart logistics and advanced traffic management. They also function as high-bandwidth backbones for rural regions and industrial zones located along the same axes. As transport PPPs for roads and high-speed rail move forward, coordination with digital infrastructure planning is becoming more important, so that ducts, masts and edge-computing nodes are integrated from the start rather than bolted on later at higher cost.

The Governance Challenge

Czechia’s infrastructure transformation is impressive on paper, but it comes with governance challenges. Multiple studies, including recent OECD work, warn that the country must improve project selection, coordination between ministries and municipalities, and the capacity of public bodies to manage complex PPPs and EU-funded investments. Delays in permitting, frequent changes in political leadership and limited staffing in specialised units can slow progress even when financing is available.

Nonetheless, the direction of travel is clear. By the mid-2030s, if current plans survive electoral cycles, Czechia will have a more redundant motorway grid, its first genuine high-speed rail lines, cleaner and more integrated urban mobility systems, an expanded nuclear fleet anchoring a low-carbon power mix, and 5G-enabled transport corridors that blur the line between physical and digital infrastructure.

For a medium-sized, open economy at the heart of Europe, these changes are more than technical upgrades. They amount to a rewiring of how people, goods, data and energy move across the country. In the process, they are redefining Czechia’s role in the region—from a transit state with inherited bottlenecks to a deliberately designed hub for Central European connectivity.