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European route |
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.
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The route numbering system, defined by UNECE since 1975, went through a major change in 1992 and is now as follows:1
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.
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.
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The E-road network in Belgium
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The E-road network in Bulgaria
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The E-road network in Finland
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The E-road network in Germany
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The E-road network in the Netherlands
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The E-road network in Poland
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The E-road network in Romania
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The E-road network in Turkey
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The E-road network in Belarus
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