22,247 km (13,824 mi) of railroad tracks
And 807 km of motorways
In contrast the UK (similarly sized, within 2% of area) has 16000 km of railway and
3688 km of highway
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_ne...
I am joking but my experiences with UK Rail made Polish railways look good.
While the UK has ~1700 million passengers per year traveling by rail, Romania has 61 million.
I don’t live in the EU, but how does public infrastructure funding work? Are there no funds to invest in infrastructure?
It seems like trading partners would benefit a lot from a more connected Romania.
What people seem to remember is who cut the ribbon, so it's a bit of a risk for a party that has a 4 year mandate to build something and not finish it during their term as nobody will remember that they started a project.
For the last two or so years the political alliance in charge of things has been mostly focusing on making the laws more lax as most of them have legal problems, instead of focusing on the peoples' problems. We get what we deserve, since you never really do see a smart people ruled by idiots.
Edit: It’s 80 billion passenger kilometres per year which is a respectable 3+ kilometres per person per day.
From the link: « The London Underground ("The Tube") had an additional 1.34 billion passengers in 2015-16 »
Anyway, 80 billion passenger kilometres, per year is very good relative to 327.1 billion miles driven.
And it definitely does not even have the strategic highways.
Plus you wouldn't want a be stuck in one of our trains going at 60kmph for 6-8 hours, trust me ;)
There are highways between every mainland settlement though, obviously.
I’m pretty disconnected from this stuff back home so this is an honest question :-)
Also, the A96 between Aberdeen and Inverness is still not even dualled, something that has been slated for decades, and will likely come as no surprise to you.
Something that perhaps will come as a surprise is that Aberdeen now has a bypass. The Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route (AWPR) was finally opened recently - although after something like a decade and incredible costs.
Because for Romania, we're asking the same question: "why on Earth don't we?" 30 years after the fall of Communism. That's why people are angry.
Some of the things about railways and road connectivity are even better in poor country like India
It used to be very low in the 90's when it fell from numbers comparable to today's, but the old ones were based on fake, communist numbers.
We were very poor until 1945, close to Third World poor, we still had famines until then. Then the communists helped us industrialize a bit, but then refused the Marshall Plan.
Then from 1963 to 1989 we had a Kim/Mao wannabe dictator building heavy industry and paying external debts while people were starving.
We also sold - literally - our German and Jewish communities to their home countries. About 1 million people out of 23 at the time.
So a combo of uneducated populace, Soviet control, communists headhunting elites (again, literally). We're trying to build something now but these things take decades if not centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Repub...
You "Then from 1963 to 1989 we had a Kim/Mao wannabe dictator building heavy industry and paying external debts while people were starving."
Not defending him, but what I found interesting is that it is the only country that comes to my mind that actually paid its debts off without defaulting:
"By 1986, it paid half its debt[7] and it finished paying its whole debt early in 1989, ahead of schedule." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Roma...
Yup, they did do a few things well. Free primary and secondary school education, giving women access to jobs, increased urbanization, etc.
But you have to keep on thing in mind: this was communist planning and reporting. We even have jokes about it. Stuff like the production being reported as having grown 10x in one year and then people having to bring stuff from home (from last year's harvest) when being asked to hand over this year's production.
Plus, they changed the country from 90% rural and agricultural to 60%. Even in 2000 45% of the population was still working in agriculture. If you compare their results with same-period Western bloc countries, Romanian gains were lower and shorter term ones.
> Not defending him, but what I found interesting is that it is the only country that comes to my mind that actually paid its debts off without defaulting
Well, it was interesting, but it was at the cost of turning us into an autarky. You know who is/strives to be another one? North Korea. Do you know how Ceaușescu got the idea? In North Korea, after a state visit. He wanted to turn Romania into one of the world's poorest states, just so people would shower him with flowers at yearly events...
And regarding our growth numbers ("between the 1950s and 1970s"), guess when Ceaușescu visited North Korea... 1971 ;)
That's like saying "Say what you will about Hitler, but he built some damn good highways.."
I live in Portugal, trust me, I know a thing or 2 about national debt..
So what is the problem with quoting a fact without a judgment?
If it wasn't then I digress.
PS: They can barely build highways in Muntenia, which is flat as a pancake. It would be underwater in case the ocean level rises...
That can be misleading if these are the late 19th / early 20th century railroad tracks which got dismantled in most of the west (due to road competition) especially as it's unlikely they got upgraded. For instance the french railway system has contracted by half since its height in 1914, Belgium's didn't contract quite that much but not far (according to wikipedia there were 5300km of tracks in 1912, today there are 3600).
Many of the smaller single-track ways linking small villages got progressively abandoned during the 50s and 60s, as local train lines were replaced by buses, cars and trucks (for freight).