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Yugoslavia Transportation and Communications
The reconstruction period of 1945-47 emphasized repair of the
transport network destroyed during World War II. Even in 1990,
road and rail communications in many regions, particularly the
mountainous areas of Kosovo, eastern Bosnia and southern Serbia,
were still inadequate
(see
fig. 11). In addition, the Dinaric
Alps, running along the Adriatic Coast, were an obstacle to
efficient transport of interior resources to the coast for
shipping. Only two main rail lines, the Zagreb-Split-Sibenik line
and the Sarajevo-Ploce line, cut from the interior to seaports.
These deficiencies had a profound effect on the ability of
Yugoslavia to develop its mineral and hydroelectric resources.
Transportation lines in the northern lowlands and southward
along the Vardar and Morava rivers were better developed because
they served international traffic and linked the republican
capitals of Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Skopje. Routes from
Italy and Austria converged at Ljubljana, and several important
road and rail lines ran north into Hungary from the area between
Zagreb and Belgrade.
The tourism boom that began in the 1960s led to the
construction of a number of new highways, most important of which
was the Adriatic Coastal Highway running from Rijeka to the
Albanian border. From that highway several link roads were built
into the interior. In 1990 plans called for the interior roads to
link the coastal main highway with the Brotherhood and Unity
Highway, which ran from Yugoslavia's northern border with
Austria, through Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Skopje, and
across the southern border into Bulgaria. Two-thirds of the
highway were to be open as a six-lane road in the mid-1990s, with
the southern portion remaining a two-lane road. In 1988 about
105,000 kilometers of Yugoslav roads had hard surfaces, another
15,000 kilometers were dirt surfaces. In 1987 three million
passenger cars and 207,000 trucks were registered in Yugoslavia.
In 1990 the country had about 9,300 kilometers of rail lines,
of which about 3,800 kilometers were electrified. All rail lines
were standard-gauge, 1.435-meter track; 10 percent of them were
double track in 1988. Yugoslavia had 184 usable airports in 1988,
of which 54 had permanent-surface runways and 23 were longer than
2,440 meters. The largest airfields were in Belgrade, Zagreb,
Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Skopje, Dubrovnik, Split, Titograd, Pula,
and Zadar. The Yugoslav national airline, Yugoslav Air Transport
(Jugoslovenski Aero Transport--JAT) flew 5.8 million passengers
in 1986.
In 1988 the Yugoslav merchant marine included 269 ships,
totaling 5.4 million deadweight tons; Yugoslavia also owned
twenty-one ships, totaling 347,000 deadweight tons, registered in
Liberia and Panama. The merchant marine fleet included 134 cargo,
seventy-two bulk, fifteen container, and fourteen roll-on-roll-
off ships, and nine petroleum tankers. Yugoslavia also had 1,194
river craft, which navigated inland on 1,620 kilometers miles of
rivers, 640 kilometers of canals, and lakes Skadar and Ohrid. The
major Adriatic ports were Rijeka, Split, Koper, Bar, and Ploce;
Belgrade was the major inland port, located on the Danube.
In the 1980s, telecommunications in Yugoslavia were quite
advanced in comparison with the national transport systems. The
Yugoslav Radio and Television Network (Jugoslovenska
Radiotelevizija) operated 250 radio and television stations in
1986; its main broadcasting centers were in Belgrade, Ljubljana,
Sarajevo, Novi Sad, Pristina, Skopje, Titograd, and Zagreb. Both
national and local programming were offered, and Radio Koper also
broadcast in Italian. In 1986 4.8 million radios and 4.1 million
television sets were in use in Yugoslavia. Two multipurpose
satellite dishes of the International Telecommunications
Satellite Organization (INTELSAT) were located in Yugoslavia,
supporting international telex, television, and telephone
communications. The government-operated national telephone system
included ten phones per hundred residents in 1982; all phones
were direct-dial by 1980, and they were evenly divided between
business and residential installations.
Data as of December 1990
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