European Road Network


The IRPUD European road network contains all motorways and national roads as well as additional principal roads in agglomerations and important car ferries. Currently the road network contains 48,797 links and 34,195 nodes. In addition to current roads all future projects of the trans-European transport network (TETN) programme of the European Union as specified in Decision 1692/96/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council and specified in the TEN implementation report (European Commission 1998) as well as so-called TINA networks (TINA = ‚Transport infrastructure needs assessment‘; TINA 1999) for the 12 candidate countries and the Helsinki corridors for the remainung east European countries are included in the database.

The road network database contains, inter alia, the following link attributes (see Data Formats):

 - country code
 - length of link
 - link category
 - national road identifyer(s)
 - European road identifyer(s)
 - inclusion in the TETN programme

The road network database contains, inter alia, the following node attributes (see Data Formats):

 - country code
 - node identifier
 - node type (e.g. motorway interchange, motorway exit, border node)
 - location (x, y coordinates)

A subset of the road network is the 'strategic' road network' used in the DGVII projects STREAMS, SASI, STEMM and other research projects performed at IRPUD. The strategic road network contains the trans-European road links as specified in Decision 1692/96/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council, the TINA networks for the candidate countries and the "Helsinki corridors" for the remaining east European countries as well as selected additional links in eastern Europe and links to guarantee connectivity of regions and centroids. The Strategic network is dedicated as a transport modelling network, e.g. for accessibility calculations, on the European level and currently contains about 5,000 links and 3,500 nodes. For modelling purposes, it also contains virtual access or connector links linking the centroids of the transport zones to the network. The transport zones correspond to the NUTS-2 regions of the system of region as defined by Eurostat.


European road network

European strategic road network



Inclusion in the trans-European road network

The trans-European road network contains important existing trunk roads as well as planned links and roads under construction.

Planned TETN links are coded with their current characteristics and reflect the situation in the mid-1990s. The attribute "planned" means that in future some development will take place either in form of upgrading, e.g. from a national road to a motorway, or by construction of a new road or motorway. If the alignment of the planned link is known, it is assumed that the upgrading will take place on that alignment. If the future alignment is not known, it is assumed that the development will take place in a corridor along the present link.

The TETN roads cover not only the present member states of the European Union but also the TINA networks of the candidate countries and the so-called "Helsinki Corridors" towards the remaining east European countries. The projects in the "Helsinki Corridors" are recommendations only.