When Kerstin and Markus started to regularly travel from Vienna to Hoerbranz back in the late 90ies of the 20th century the road connection was already pretty good as the majority of the 630 km route was on highways – from Vienna straight towards Munich on the A1 in Austria and the A8 in Germany, a few kilometres on the Mittlerer Ring through Munich and then via the A96 straight to the German-Austrian border. The trip still lasted ca. 5,5 hours as at that time the A96 was not fully completed yet. It was interrupted by 4 short stretches of federal roads and these passages usually cost a lot of time as congestions were normal at the points where the 3 lanes of the highway merge into the 1 lane of the federal road and as trucks and sleepers tended to hold up traffic.
Ongoing construction of the missing links on of the A96 was going slowly and it felt as if it never would end, but in Q4 2009 finally the last stretch of federal road disappeared. When Markus last night got on his way back to Vienna on his own as he has to go back to work while Jakob and Kerstin stay for another two weeks with grandma Heidi he had close to perfect weather and traffic conditions as well as no reason to stop at any service area and so he breached for the first time the 5 hour barrier by a wide margin when he finished the trip in 4 hours and 33 minutes door-to-door. Suddenly the journey feels not so long anymore and a trip by plane can not be much faster (on a door-to-door basis obviously). Further time improvements might be possible, but a significant reduction of travel time can only be reached once Austria abolished or raises the speed limits on the highways. And the latter as highly unlikely to happen
Jakob, Kerstin & Markus
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