Empirical Research Of Satisfaction Of Users With Croatian Motorways

Development of the road network plays an important role in the economic growth of any country and brings economic benefits that result in multiple effects like better accessibility of the markets, employment and further investments. Proper development of the road network not only lowers the costs of transport, both in the financial sense and regarding time consumption, but it also helps with the integration of different regions. The road network in the Republic of Croatia has helped the country’s development by providing direct benefits from their services in some sectors like tourism, industry and trade. The aim of this paper is to investigate the importance of road transport in the economic development of the Republic of Croatia. The comparison of the data on the development of the road network in Croatia and other European Union Member states shows that Croatia is less developed. Furthermore, for the purposes of this paper, empirical research on the satisfaction of the Croatian motorways users has been conducted via an online questionnaire on the sample of 95 respondents. The findings show that over 60% of the respondents are satisfied with the motorways in the Republic of Croatia. The most frequented motorway is A1 (Zagreb-Split-Dubrovnik), which can be explained by the tourist season in the summer months. Three quarters of the respondents are not satisfied with the prices of the toll charges, and more than 80% think that prices are high. Research results suggest that the respondents are most satisfied with shorter travelling time that motorways provide, along with the possibility of paying with ENC or credit cards. More than half of the respondents do not support cash payment for motorway services.