European route

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The international E-road network is a numbering system for roads in Europe developed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). The network is numbered from E 1 up and its roads cross national borders. It also reaches Central Asian countries like Kyrgyzstan, since they are members of the UNECE.

In most countries, roads carry the European route designation beside national road numbers. Other countries like Belgium and Sweden have roads with exclusive European route signage. E-roads in the United Kingdom are not signposted at all, and are not recognised by the UK authoritiescitation needed, while the Republic of Ireland has started to place E-route numbers on recent road schemes (2007)citation needed.

Other continents have similar international road networks: e.g. the Pan-American Highway in the Americas, the Trans-African Highway Network, and the Asian Highway Network.

Contents

Numbering system

European Route Sign. This sign is used on the E 40.
Intersection of E 42 and E 451 from over Frankfurt International Airport

The route numbering system, defined by UNECE since 1975, went through a major change in 1992 and is now as follows:1

  1. Reference roads and intermediate roads, called Class-A roads, have two-digit numbers. Branch, link and connecting roads, called Class-B roads, have three-digit numbers.
  2. In general:
    • North-south reference roads have two-digit numbers terminating in the figure 5 and increasing from west to east.
    • East-west reference roads have two-digit numbers terminating in the figure 0 and increasing from north to south.
    • Intermediate roads have two-digit odd (north-south) or two-digit even (west-east) numbers between the numbers of the reference roads between which they are located.
    • Class-B roads have three-digit numbers, the first digit being that of the nearest reference road to the north, the second digit being that of the nearest reference road to the west, and the third digit being a serial number.
  3. North-south Class-A roads located eastwards of road E 99 have three-digit odd numbers from 101 to 129. Other rules mentioned in paragraph 2 above apply to these roads.
  4. Class-B roads located eastwards of E 101 have 3-digit numbers beginning with 0, from 001 to 099.

Exceptions

In the first established and approved version, the road numbers were well ordered. Since then a number of exceptions to this principle have been allowed.

Two Class-A roads, namely E 47 and E 55, have been allowed to retain their pre-1992 numbers, E 6 and E 4 respectively, within Sweden and Norway. These exceptions were granted because of the excessive expense connected with re-signing not only the long routes themselves, but also the associated road network in the area, since Sweden and Norway have integrated the E-roads into their national networks and they are signposted as any other national route. These roads maintain their new numbers from Denmark and southward, though, as are other European routes within Scandinavia.

Further exceptions are E 67, going from Estonia to Poland (wrong side of E 75 and E 77), assigned around year 2000, simply because it was best available number for this new route, most of E 63 in Finland (wrong side of E 75) E 8 in Finland (partly on the wrong side of E 12 after a lengthening around 2002) and E 82 (Spain and Portugal, wrong side of E 80). These irregularities exist just because it is hard to maintain good order when extending the network, and the UNECE does not want to change road numbers unnecessarily.

Notes to the listings

In the road listings below, a hyphen ('–') indicates a land road connection between two towns/cities—the normal case—while an ellipsis (three dots, '…') denotes a stretch across water. There are not ferry connections at all these places. Usually the international ferry connections are operated by commercial companies without support or contracts with any government to operate them. This means existing lines can be cancelled.

Class A roads

The E-road network in Belgium
The E-road network in Bulgaria
The E-road network in Finland
The E-road network in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan
The E-road network in Germany
The E-road network in the Netherlands
The E-road network in Poland
The E-road network in Romania
The E-road network in Turkey
The E-road network in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland
The E-road network in Belarus

North-South reference

West-East reference

North-South intermediate

West-East intermediate

Class B roads