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The highway of ... tomorrow in Romania. Neverending story

or lack of. Because the term highway is a SciFi term in Romania’s authorities dictionary or fact books.

Most of the Western Civilisations prefer to build up highways for speeding up the expedition of goods from one place to another, but also to cut the traveling time by personal car between cities. In Romania, 20 years after the fall of the pro-soviet regim we have around 200km of highway, all starting from Bucharest  and ending up on the leisure points for the capital of Romania citizens: Constanta – at the black sea, or Brasov (mostly still underconstruction after 7 years) and the rest of the winter ski resorts in Carpathians Mountains.

While most of the border countries – like Bulgaria, Serbia or Hungary – prefer to build up between 70-200km of highway / year we still struggle with our 22 million people to get the country highway kilometers to 200. In total. As road infrastructure of Romania, it’s a known fact that the EU countries started building the better roads towards West; Austria did the best job on getting closer to Swizerland, Hungary to Germany, Czech Republic and Austria and even Bulgary did a great job in building highways and national roads towards West – Serbia.

The government of Romania doesn’t give a penny on others did right or wrong. They have their own way: the corruption way! This is why the most important city in the civilized Romania, Timisoara is not having right now an road to get the traffic that comes from Arad to Lugoj (North-West) out of the city and this is why it takes about 10-11 hours to get from Timisoara to Bucharest, which is 550km away; Budapest (200 km ~ 2.2 hrs drive), Belgrade (120 km ~ 1.5 hrs drive) and Wien (900km ~ 6 hrs drive) are cities that you can get easier and faster from Timisoara if you travel by car.

Basically, the structure of the roads in Romania is on ground zero, with only 200 km (most of them still underconstruction, on repair or with speed limitation) for a country that has 300.000 square km and 22.000.000 people living in it. And it’s a member of EU since 01.07.

If you think you can come to Romania and use the car (perhaps your car?) to move from one place to another, think again. Or get an helicopter rented. Or just skip coming, you’ll get your nerves drained on the road.

If you want to build up a highway here, this is the place to do it: the price that you can ask for the roads are 300-1.500% higher than you would ask in Croatia (think about the mountains, tunnels, bridges that you will have to build in Croatia) or EU. We have a range between 5 and 60 milion euros / km of build highway in the plain, while in a mountain country (Croatia, Slovenia) you would have to build each km with only 3.5 millions euro.

Btw, the introduction sequence of Borat movie is filmed in Romania. Do you remember that wonderful blue car? that’s the national Dacia vehicle – still in use on the country roads, build and used in Romania by people who doesn’t have the money to upgrade to Renault’s Logan version.

… but, the flipside of the story is that in Romania you’ll find the newest Mercedes, Lamborghini or Ferrari cars before they hit the autostores in rest of the world. And that’s another story

social bucharest, highway, roads, Romania, status of romania transportation, timisoara