I’ve joined the ranks of the bloggers, with encouragement of friends who have listened to me ranting about the trials of living in Bucharest. I think this might be a better way of letting off steam than offending or boring my patient Romanian friends. There are plenty of advantages to living in Romania and I’ll write about them in time. But winter in Bucharest is not conducive to optimism. So my first blogs are likely to be none too flattering.
I hear that the Dakar Rally this year is to be rerouted and raced through Hungary and Romania: the Central European Rally. From recent driving experience to and from my home in a suburb to the north of Bucharest, I would say that Romania is a fitting place for rally drivers to try out their skills. Driving around town is an exercise in avoiding potholes the size of manhole covers, in fact in some places they are manholes where the covers have been removed or stolen. 
On some stretches of road the trucks have churned up the road so badly you might as well be driving over corrugated iron. There are feeble attempts to fix the roads: filling them with sand but this only lasts to the next rainfall when the rain washes it all away; repairing with asphalt but without levelling the repaired patch with the original road surface so the end result is a completely new set of lumpy bits. And of course there are roads which haven’t been surfaced at all yet.
I live in a newly residential area in Voluntari. This is known as a “fiţe”(pronounced fitzeh) zone. Fiţe is a peculiar term in Romanian which is both complimentary and derogatory at the same time. It can mean wealthy, trendy and fashionable, but it can also mean nouveau riche with the implication of lack of class that goes with the term in English. Poser comes to mind. But more on fiţe another time. The point is that the area is teeming with massive 3 or 4 story villas, high walls and fences, luxurious instant gardens created almost overnight with imported plants from Italy and topsoil hijacked from the forest. A former international footballer and a record producer are among those who live near my modest semi. Yet the roads to these villas are either unpaved or so badly damaged by the construction traffic that they are pretty much impassable to anything but a tractor. How can this be, you might ask? Don’t these people pay lots of taxes? Indeed they do, and the town or commune of Voluntari is now the proud owner of a spanking new town hall. But our road is still not paved! And the main route from the airport road to the ring road is almost as bad. That car in front of you swerving from side to side is not driven by a drunk, contrary to your first impression, but trying to avoid the holes and/or the road works without having to slow down. Maybe the mayor is hoping that if he leaves the roads as they are the Central European Rally will be routed through his town and bring unimagined new tourist opportunities and wealth to the area.
In the meantime, drivers resort to one of two courses of action to cope with this; either drive so fast that you skim over the top – this only works if you have a very large SUV or you don’t own the car you’re driving; or crawl over the lumps and around the holes in a feeble attempt to avoid destroying your undercarriage. Three guesses as to which the timid foreigner chooses. But so far my car is still intact, even if the colour is barely recognisable from the mud. A plea to Mayor Pendele, please do something before the rain that is forecast for April. And in the meantime if you are thinking of entering the rally, be warned. If any Bucharest drivers are entered, you’ve got no chance of beating them. They’ve been practising for years.
How do your friends or neighbors feel about the roads? Are they used to them so much that they just cope with the conditions?
Are the roads only the provision of the town, or, since they must run to the town to be part of an international rally, do they maybe also fall under some sort of national oversight?
I think the idea that they might be a part of this road race may yet have some possibilities. If all these rich drivers learn that the roads are bad… well… they may either try to change what roads they’ll drive on, or maybe they’ll put forward a bit of money to get them patched up.
Just a thought
Two stories:
We live at the end of a dead end with 5 other houses. Our neighbours asked the other three owners whether they would be prepared to share the cost of paving our very short strech of road. They refused.
A well-known millionaire here recently bought a huge mansion. The pavements around his house were cracked, crumbling, broken up with tree roots, neglected for years by the city authorities. He decided to replace the pavements himself. The mayor fined him for not having the necessary authority. Fair enough. But the mayor then had it all dug up and redone at public expense. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up!
Would it be expensive to pave that short stretch of road? Do people fix their houses up fairly well in this neighborhood?
I don’t see there necessarily being any solution. It sounds like the authorities need some sort of kick if they’re going to change.
Sorry, maybe I’m reading this the wrong way– It’s not like my town has the best roads.
Am I mistaken in thinking that maybe a lot of people look at this as not so much an issue of roads as an issue of power? Like, the suggestion that the road gets fixed among neighbors is rejected because the idea comes from someone else? And the same with the rich fellow and his road. If the road wasn’t up to standard, I can see the whole thing happening anywhere, but if it was sufficient, then, yes, it’s petty and a bit loony.
I almost want to see more pictures of the road