Overview
The entire road is a substandard freeway. The only sector with three lanes has a length of 50 km. The section of the road from the interchange with the A1 motorway in Naples to the Pompeii exit, built during the 1920s, originated as a local turnpike and only later was retrofitted to motorway standard. Many of the junctions along the route have very tight corners and extremely limited de-acceleration fields; this is especially significant on the Naples - Salerno section, where at some junctions there are stop-signs for traffic entering the motorway. Hard shoulders are virtually non-existent along almost the entire route, apart from occasional emergency bays at infrequent locations. Generally speaking, most of the route is often congested.
The southern segment (Salerno-Reggio Calabria) is toll-free and is maintained by ANAS, the state agency for public routes. Located in a mountainous area, it is famous for being prone to very high levels of traffic (especially at the start and at the end of vacation periods) and its bad state of maintenance compared to other Italian motorways. ANAS has been slowly upgrading this segment for the better part of the last three decades. The motorway is currently undergoing heavy modernisation, involving in many cases a complete rebuilding of the road.
As of July 2011, works on 237 km of the road (53%) have been completed. 147 more km of rebuilding/modernization are due to be completed within the end of 2014.
Read more about this topic: Autostrada A3 (Italy)