“The CPEC and its related projects will make
Pakistan prosperous.”
–Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, 2015.
In contrast to the state on infrastructure in most of the country, Pakistan has some well constructed and maintained motorways. The first section of the motorway – the M-2, a 367km road between Islamabad and Lahore – became operational in 1997, after a herculean effort to cut a road out of the Salt Range on the Potowar plateau. The road is owned, maintained and operated federally by Pakistan’s National Highway Authority, and was constructed in collaboration with the South Korean company, Daewoo.
Since then a lot of new routes have been added to the original. As of July 2014, operational motorways in Pakistan had a combined length of 679.5 km with another 278 km under construction. Another 1,502 km of motorways and expressways are planned over the next 10 years. This includes the crucial Lahore to Karachi section that will link the whole country. With the CPEC comes another spate on construction which will add other motorways and expressways to the network. In under two decades the network has expanded quite extensively.