Mount Bolu Tunnel (Istanbul Ankara direction)

My first notice was for the road between Istanbul and Ankara. Yes, in all these years they built a new road and with new road technologies, they have so many things now for the hardest winter days, for fogs, for ice, etc. and in the past while it was taking such a long time to arrive Ankara, today it was almost 3,5 – 4 hours… Especially the road which was built into the Mount Bolu, by a long tunnel, made the road much more shorter. The tunnel is a part of the Gümüşova-Gerede Highway withing the Trans European Motorway project the Turkish Bayındr and Italian Astaldi joint venture since April, 1993. It has twin 17 m bores and carries three lanes of traffic in each direction. And also this tunnel crosses the North Anatolian Fault. The November 12, 1999 Düzce earthquake (MW=7,2) caused substantial damage to the tunnel and viaducts, which were under construction at the time of the earthquake. On September 4, 2005 the excavation of the tunnel in the Istanbul-Ankara direction was finished. The excavation for the tunnel in the Anakara-Istanbul direction was completed at the beginning of August, 2005. The Istanbul-Ankara direction of the tunnel (2,788 m) was opened to traffic on January 23, 2007 by the Turkish Prime Minister and Italian Prime Minister. And two months later the Ankara-Istanbul direction of the tunnel (2,954 m) became operational too.