Make a list of good public services in Bucharest.
Finished?
Thought so.
There are not that many public services in Bucharest which approach anything that could even be said to resemble ‘good.’ But there are a few…
Rubbish collection is one, at least in our sector (Sector 3). We get our rubbish collected twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays: rain and snow do not stop the rubbish boys. When we tell people in the UK that we have our rubbish collected twice a week they go green with envy. (In the UK, the ‘let’s uphold moral-rectitude’ brigade are pushing for fewer and fewer rubbish collections, in order to make people consume less. They are as misguided as they are wrong. See here).
Schools are another decent public service, and we’ve discussed just why we think so before.
Public transport in Bucharest is also worthy of note. Cheap and reliable if woefully underfunded, we again discovered this morning that the city would be lost without it.
On mornings such as today, when Bucharest goes a bit Doctor Zhivago, the city is kept moving by RATB: the local public transport operator.
We took number one son to school this morning by tram. A tram that runs in all weathers. Even in February when the snow was thigh-high, when schools were closed and the city froze, RATB’s buses and trams kept running. They kept the city moving.
Yes, RATB is probably overstaffed, too many people don’t pay for their tickets, and buses and trams can be very crowded (because there are not enough of them): but by and large it works, and works well.
So it was disconcerting to read yesterday that Bucharest’s mayor, Sorin Oprescu, thinks that RATB is a drain on the city’s budget.
He insinuated that more could be spent on improving Bucharest’s roads if less money was spent on public transport.
It’s nice to know his priorities.
Or maybe he has a point?
Maybe he should do away with public transport altogether (after all, it’s only the little people like us who use it). People should either buy a car and use it in all conditions, or stay at home. Why should they expect the city council to provide public transport for them?
Imagine: no buses or trams to get in the way of all those cars.
Think how wonderful it would be to drive around Bucharest then.
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ce inteligenti sunt unii romani… stiu engleza, mie mi se pare imposibil sa o invat.
Poate cineva sa-mi spuna ce trebuie sa fac ca sa invat repede engleza?
Oh, and if I might add, what Bucharest needs is a congestion charge – and set at the London equivalent of about 35 RON this would surely concentrate minds! Fact is that Bucharest has pretty good public transport (okay the metro could be more extensive and have shorter gaps between stops) so there is no compelling reason to take a car into the centre.
Agree about the congestion charge, have long said Bucharest should have one. Trouble is, unless the police start doing their job, the black jeep crowd will simply refuse to pay, and will not be put off driving. As always in Romania, it would be the poor who had to pay.
My first thought when I saw your comment was to say that traffic cameras would sort that out, but then it’s of course the question of who’s looking at the cameras! The only thing I can think is that you get an automatic fine when you cross the line.
Marius:
As I have said before, the Romanian police do not police, at least at EU and Western standards. I am unsure what the do each day except drive around in non-imposing toy looking Dacia Logans. It is the fitze crowd who rule the streets of Bucharest. A 100,000 euro German SUV or slick looking Mercedes coupe with the mafioso looking guys inside are more imposing figures than the police. Personally, I am unclear why the police here do not enforce laws. I mean they could make much more money with the fines. Instead, there is a perverse lack of desire to police. There is also a lack of civic pride and a lack of a lot of things here. It really does seem that the professor Lucian Boia is right: Ceausescu so twisted the psyche and souls of Romanians that it will have to be, I would think, another 30-50 years before Bucharest might be somewhat like a 21st century European capital city. When the babies around today are middle-aged, Bucharest might be a cool place.
From Lucian Boia’s amazing and illuminating book “Romania” I just picked up at Robert Frost:
“Ceausecu’s problem was his extremely modest background. He had been born in Scornicesti, an insignificant village in the west of Muntenia, in a house on the edge of the village. So he was a marginal person from a family of marginal people. . . His education did not extend beyo d four years of primary school; to the end of his life , he had difficulty reading”.
C’mon you have to be kidding me!
“Bucharest emerged from Communism with quite a different appearance, and above all with a different spirit, a different spirit, a different atmosphere. This once so lively city had stiffened. . . It is far from the relaxed and happy Bucharest of former times.”
“… Not very much of the old Romania is left for the Romanians of today. Communism destroyed much of what went before, and then it too collapsed. Only disparate elements have survived: fragments of folklore and tradition, nostalgias, cultural and and historical reference points. Romania today is a disarticulated country, a collage of ill matched segments of traditional life, inter-war reminiscences, Communist attitudes and structures, and post-Communist evolutions. It is a system that functions with difficulty. . .”
Wow! I have never heard truer words than these. Boia is confirming all that i have always thought about Bucharest but he explains exactly why things are the way they are here. He, too, sees current day Bucharest and its inhabitants as being from a different Romania than the one before World War II and says that there Bucharest is unique in this respect within Europe in the extreme way the people and the city were changed by Communism.
Glad you liked the book! I did recommend it right here.
That was supposed to say ‘starting to sponsor potholes’
I saw an article today saying that in Germany people are starting to sponsor. The money goes towards filling them in and in return the sponsor gets their name/logo etched in the asphalt.
Good idea I thought.
That’s the paradox of Romania: a country that still works, despite it’s citizens.
Nobody pays for the RATB ticket and still we have public transportation. For now…
you obviously don’t get the point of bucharest, it’s priorities, it’s mayor and it’s public transport. Decent school =)))))))))))) that’s a big joke
Many things are weird in the way that RATB functions.
Retired folks get free rides on RATB by showing the last pension paycheck, even if said pension paycheck shows a pension over, say, 3000 RON/mo.
I’m not saying they should scrap the gratuity altogether but it’s just stupid to support free rides for folks that can easily afford paying for them.
The fine for not paying the RATB ticket is 50 RON. It’s so small it practically encourages riding without a ticket. If I remember correctly, Prague had a fine of 800 EUR.
In the UK, HM Queen Elizabeth II took possession of a free London Transport pass when she was 60: it is a right all pensioners have, regardless of their income. This is a good thing and should not be stopped.
Instead, as you say, heavier fines should be handed out to those who do not pay. And do not forget that in many cases the ticket inspectors do nothing about people not paying: they avoid confrontation by simply not asking a certain kind of person to show them their ticket.
I’d have no problem with that if the ticketing system was transparent and fines evenly applied. Example: tickets for the 780 and 783 buses are not interchangeable despite costing the same amount and buses being run by the same company – okay it’s in the small print but it means that tourists get caught out, and in practice it’s only tourists that get caught out. I even met a French woman who was fined despite being told at the kiosk that her ticket would be fine for the 780 – meanwhile Romanians without a ticket at all talked their way out of it. Welcome to Bucharest!
RATB could be even better if the law was being applied. For example, on Unirii Boulevard the first lane is dedicated exclusively to buses (but I did not ever see a police car doling out tickets for those found to drive on it).
Oprescu, instead of dreaming about flying highways, should devise a plan that would allow public transit (+cabs, +motorcycles) to have exclusive use of the first lane.
But it wouldn’t bring much money I guess, so there’s no interest in that.
Marius, the same thing on Kogalniceanu Blvd. but on a smaller scale. It’s much worse on Unirii.
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