Although both Romania and Bulgaria are EU member states, neither country is part of the friction-free Schengen area. This means some checks still need to take place, which in turn creates long queues of traffic that appear to have exacerbated in recent times.
Back in June, a lorry driver told Trans.INFO he had no option but to breach drivers’ hours and tachograph rules as a result of traffic at the Calafat-Vidin border crossing:
“Every day, at the border Calafat-Vidin,from Romania to Bulgaria and Bulgaria to Romania, the row if trucks is constantly from 7km to 24km. We are breaching our legal working hours, we are forced to drive without a card so we can keep a pause on our tacho. We need 4 days for a trip from Greece to Germany. This is unacceptable.”
This week, reports of queues 20 kilometres long a the Ruse-Giurgu crossing have also surfaced.
The problem hasn’t gone unnoticed by the local authorities in Ruse, who want the trucks to stay in outlying areas so that they don’t create logjams within the city limits.
“Ruse will not accept all the world traffic of trucks in its municipality, because we can make it so that the trucks stay outside Ruse,” Pencho Milkov, the mayor of Ruse municipality, was quoted as saying in the Bulgarian press this week.
A Bulgarian MEP has also talked out about the issue, saying he will ask the European Commission to set a maximum checking time of one minute.
“What I intend to do is to amend this regulation, to set a maximum time for checking a truck of one minute. This means that it is the responsibility of the Member States to use that one minute on both sides of the border to check the truck, ” said MEP Andrey Novakov.
The Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior is also said to prioritising action to alleviate the issues at the border with both Romania and Turkey.
According to Bulgarian news outlet Bulgaria On Air, “in order to solve the problem once and for all, in Ruse they are coming round to the idea of building a large buffer parking area nearby the Danube Bridge.”
Photo: NAC, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (illustrative image)
