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>> I found Warsaw’s cafes especially excellent I was in south east Poland for the last 2 weeks and the cafes I went to there were definitely a cut above what I

>> I found Warsaw’s cafes especially excellent I was in south east Poland for the last 2 weeks and the cafes I went to there were definitely a cut above what I’m used to in the UK. The article doesn’t mention how good the roads and rail have become. When I first went to Poland about 20 years ago I spent all day on a train that stopped at farm fields and travelled no faster than 20mph. The main roads I drove on were hilariously bad, utterly destroyed by long lines of HGV trucks. Even many roads in more affluent areas like around Krakow were poorly engineered (flooding). The roads this time were massively better. I still found plenty of old bad roads in more rural areas but the top tier roads (autostrada) are better than anything we have in the UK. The tier below that are generally better than most motorways current state of repair in the Uk - but it helps that the Polish high speed roads (~120kph - where the top tier autostrada are 140kph) are just better designed. Now there’s high speed high quality rail (again quite a bit better than my experience in the UK), maybe the old PkP rolling stock is still there somewhere but I only saw modern high speed or freight trains.

brnt 2y ago
UKians don't like to hear this, but from a Dutch perspective it is really a notch below the rest of Western Europe. Most Dutch people experience underdevelopment when they go south in certain parts of France, but these regions are generally rural and remote-ish. In the UK major road connections are ungraded, narrow roads occasionally still going through town centers,; French departmental route level if you are lucky. On British highways, you will just suddenly drive into a roundabout... Time stood still. It reminds me of eastern Europe pre-EU.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  Thatcherism took hold and the Tories keep winning. This is your country on trickle down economics -- the roads suck and nothing changes.
- rswskg 2y ago
  No british motorway has a roundabout on it. A road's yes. Same as in france.
  - brnt 2y ago
    I was being generous by including A Roads in 'highways'. Britain has the same length of highways as the Netherlands if you only consider M classification, which is to say, deplorably little. Over 5x less than Germany and France. But if you insist, sure, the few miles of British motorway don't include roundabouts. They do tend to start or end with them though ;)

brnt 2y ago

UKians don't like to hear this, but from a Dutch perspective it is really a notch below the rest of Western Europe. Most Dutch people experience underdevelopment when they go south in certain parts of France, but these regions are generally rural and remote-ish. In the UK major road connections are ungraded, narrow roads occasionally still going through town centers,; French departmental route level if you are lucky. On British highways, you will just suddenly drive into a roundabout... Time stood still. It reminds me of eastern Europe pre-EU.

red-iron-pine 2y ago
Thatcherism took hold and the Tories keep winning. This is your country on trickle down economics -- the roads suck and nothing changes.
rswskg 2y ago
No british motorway has a roundabout on it. A road's yes. Same as in france.
- brnt 2y ago
  I was being generous by including A Roads in 'highways'. Britain has the same length of highways as the Netherlands if you only consider M classification, which is to say, deplorably little. Over 5x less than Germany and France. But if you insist, sure, the few miles of British motorway don't include roundabouts. They do tend to start or end with them though ;)