Hungary’s now-famous roundabout looks like an infrastructural anomaly. Looking at it from above, it seems like someone or something dropped it in the middle of a field and just forgot about it, but the truth is that it is the result of failed government promises.
When it was first announced, in 2021, the roundabout between Zalaegerszeg and Zalaszentiván made perfect sense. It was supposed to serve a new logistics center and container terminal of Metrans, a private logistics giant, allowing goods arriving by rail from the Adriatic Sea to quickly travel through Hungary towards countries like Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland without having to detour through Budapest.
In February 2021, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Szijjártó Péter announced plans for the new logistics center near Zalaegerszeg, and the municipality quickly applied for EU funds needed to build the access road and the roundabout leading to the future container terminal.
By 2023, the roundabout had been built with approximately 1.25 million euros in EU non-refundable funds. The only problem was that the work on the container terminal hadn’t even begun. Fast forward three years, and we are in the exact same situation. No work has been done on the logistics center, so the roundabout is just sitting there, waiting to connect to something.
In order for the Metrans terminal to make any sense, it should attach to a new railway passing through it, but that project is still in the procurement stage, with not even a real estimate of when work on it should begin. Whoever wins the procurement contract will have more than two years to build the track, which means the railway could become operational by 2029, at the earliest. At this pace, it’s difficult to say if Hungary’s roundabout to nowhere will ever be usable, or if it will just become a bizarre tourist attraction.
