Vivid Foreword September 2004

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Wanted: an urban plan for Bucharest

September 2004

A news report titled, 'Bucharest Becomes Crowded Capital', written by the Associated Press' resident journalist Alison Mutler flashed across my computer screen recently. ''No parking spaces. Crippling traffic jams. Sky-high rents. Is this London, Rome or Athens?'' it began. ''No, it's Bucharest, where communism and capitalism have conspired to make it Europe's most crowded capital.''

Virtually everyone living in Bucharest would agree. And every year it gets worse, as time passes without anything being done to ease the congestion. The streets snarl with traffic, fraying the nerves of everyone with the misfortune to be stuck in it.

Bucharest has become, in driving and parking terms, a free for all. Anything goes. Drive through the city and you witness thousands of illegally parked cars, left where a space isn't quite large enough, with the back or front end of the car either parked on the pavement blocking the access to pedestrians or jutting out into the road, blocking free access of the road to other cars. This makes walking in the city virtually impossible. Wouldn't it be interesting to quantify first, how much collective time is wasted by a car jutting half out into a street, forcing all drivers that pass it to brake, look in the mirror, wait for an oncoming car to pass, and then resume driving, or secondly, how many injuries to passersby and accidents to cars are endured due to cars that are parked halfway into a street? It isn't surprising to see how driving brings out the worst in Romanians. Residents of Bangkok laugh about their traffic problems whereas driving here transforms otherwise placid Romanians into snorting, swearing, gesticulating hooligans.

Try it yourself, and you can see why this is so. You'll be snaking your way through a city street and come up behind a driver with his engine running while he waits for a colleague to come out of a building. This of course blocks all traffic behind him. The driver behind you starts sounding his horn which encourages you to sound yours too, and the driver in front of you shouts, ''Only 30 seconds, what's the hurry?'' as if to say, ''If my life is unhurried, why shouldn't yours be too?'' Later, you'll be in one of two lanes at a roundabout waiting your turn to proceed, when a car will come up beside you, creating a third lane, then another car will come alongside the car next to you, creating a fourth lane. Then another car will steal a place next to the car in the first lane, creating a total of five lanes, at a place where there is only room for two. Drivers make illegal turns across several lanes of oncoming traffic, block the path of trams, drive the wrong way down one-way streets as if there were no traffic laws at all. It is a common sight to see cars and buses jumping red lights. The greatest irony is that Romanians need to complete thirty hours - yes, thirty - before qualifying to sit a driving test. Just what, pray, do they actually learn?

Sweeping changes are required to ease the city's congestion problems. But there have been no major projects to confront the congestion problem that only worsens with time. Where are the large-scale projects, such as underground tunnels or flyovers? There is currently a tremendous logjam of traffic during working hours on weekdays between Piatas Unirii and Victoriei - imagine what effect an underground tunnel connecting the two would have on city congestion.

It is time that Bucharest's city planners began to get tough with drivers. If the plan for a tunnel is too ambitious or expensive, a line around Bucharest's central radius could be drawn, with Piata's Unirii and Victoriei as its southern and northern points, and perhaps Bucur Obor and Gara de Nord forming some its eastern and western boundaries. A token system needs to be introduced, in which drivers are forced to pay to enter this downtown zone. The payment should be something people can afford, but just enough to encourage more people to use alternative forms of transport, or look at the possibility of car pooling (which should not be terribly difficult to organise amongst residents of apartment blocks). The introduction of wheel clamping illegally parked cars is a worthwhile deterrent, but isn't anywhere near as widespread for it to be effective. (Nor should the clampers hang around and wait for clamped drivers to return to their cars, then offer to unclamp wheels for a vast discount off the original fine, as is the current practice.)

There are car parks, but unimaginative planning sees them occupy spaces which should be made much more of, such as Piata Victoriei or Piata Revolutiei, both of which have great aesthetic potential. Hasn't anyone ever heard of underground car parks? Or above ground car parks, for that matter.

Bucharest has the infrastructure of a large town with the population the size of a city. It has experienced growth in recent years at a rate that will most probably continue for the foreseeable future. But growth for its own sake is meaningless. In the same way that a child matures, a city needs to develop as well as grow, and in recent years, Bucharest has grown but it hasn't developed. True, the roads may be marginally better than they were, and Gara de Nord is no longer the hell on earth it once was. Much to the delight of residents, some parks have been weeded and generally prettified. But with local government elections out of the way, Mr Basescu now has four more years to prove to residents that his influence on the city is more than cosmetic. Let's hope he confronts the problem of congestion head-on.