In the article Piata Unirii – the killer passage I focused on answering the question “why do drivers with tall vehicles end up somewhere they’re not allowed?” From the point of view of this question, it was completely irrelevant how exactly that prohibition came about, or whether it made sense or not. Precisely for this reason we have concluded the analysis of the accident of 23 December shortly before the moment of impact with the height limiter.
Mihai Alexandru CraciunPhoto: personal archive
This time I will look at why there is a height restriction across the Union Passage, whether or not the height restriction is properly constructed, and whether or not the 2022 redevelopment has ruined the pass. As always, the answers are complex and every detail counts.
But I begin with a confirmation of an assumption of the first article.
The Greek driver didn’t drive for 16 hours!
As we suspected, as details emerge, it becomes clear that the initial information, that the Greek driver had been driving for 16 hours before the accident at Pasaj Unirii, was completely wrong.
The length of the bus route was 900 km, on the route Volos – Larissa – Thessaloniki – Bucharest. Of the 900 km travelled, 550 km were on roads with at least two lanes in each direction and traffic dividers, or on motorways, expressways or state roads with two lanes in each direction, such as the DN5 between Giurgiu and Bucharest.
The total time to actually drive on such a road is around 10 hours, much less than the 16 hours of driving originally talked about. I emphasize that the actual driving time represents the time the vehicle is in motion on public roads, with the engine running, not the time the driver is present in the coach, but not driving!
Compliant European directive EC561/2006, it is perfectly legal in the European Union for a professional driver to drive a commercial vehicle for 10 hours a day, up to twice a week. European legislation refers only to the actual driving time, not to the total time spent by the driver in the vehicle, which can be much longer. The only legal requirement is that the driver takes mandatory breaks between driving sessions.
There is no legal requirement for a commercial vehicle to have two drivers on long journeys, just the legal requirement to meet maximum driving times.
In other words, if it can fit into 10 hours of actual driving, it is perfectly legal for a single driver to drive a bus from Volos to Bucharest on the same day. It’s not recommended, but it’s legal.
In the meantime, however, the information appears that the Greek technician would also have had a second driver, which covered the first 300 km, up to the border between Greece and Bulgaria. Which would mean that at the time of the accident in Bucharest, the driver had only driven the bus for the last 600 km, in around 7 hours of actual driving. Stop times along the way are considered breaks and are not included in the calculation of the total driving time.
For a driver, the difference between actually driving 10 hours and actually driving 16 hours is enormous. The deterioration in attention and reflexes after 10 hours of driving is remarkable, due to the sheer effort of staying focused and alert for such an extended period of time.
In essence, a driver who effectively drives 16 hours in a day has the same level of attention and reflexes at the end of the race as a man in a state of extreme intoxication. Which did not happen in the Bucharest incident.
History of the passage of the Union
To understand the current context of the Union passage, we must take a foray into the context of the 1980s, when the passage was built, because the decisions of that moment are directly reflected in the very low quality of the construction.
Unirii Passage is not the result of any traffic rationalization vision through central Bucharest, mainly because 1980s Bucharest had no traffic problems.
In the mid-1980s, only 100,000 cars were registered in Bucharest, compared to 1.8 million today, of which about 15-20,000 cars were circulating daily through the city, compared to 3-400,000 today. So, in the mid-1980s, car traffic through Bucharest was about 20 times less than today.
Furthermore, there was no prospect of increasing car traffic through the capital, as the ownership and use of personal vehicles was systematically sabotaged by the Communist authorities. They had a policy of limiting the mobility of people, with the aim of limiting the flow of information in the country and avoiding the crystallization of any opposition movement of any kind to the communist regime.
Not only were the roads systematically maintained in a deplorable state nationwide, but in the 1980s the average waiting time to be able to buy a Dacia 1300 was 5 years, while for the recent Oltcit the waiting time was 3 years. The private purchase of an ARO (off-road vehicle) was permitted only to those carrying out agricultural activities, and the private ownership of commercial vehicles (minibuses, buses, vans, trucks) was absolutely forbidden.
Added to all this was the rationalization of petrol sales, with each driver having the right to legally buy only 20 liters of petrol per month. And this after waiting in a line that could last anywhere from three hours to three days. Those 20l were then enough for only 150-180km, given the typical consumption of a Dacia which exceeds 10l/100km.
And as if all this were not enough, on Sundays, the only non-working day of the week, the circulation of cars was allowed only in alternation: on Sunday, cars with even number plates, on Sunday, cars with odd number plates. That is, each machine could only run every second Sunday.
Even the wide boulevards that dotted Bucharest in the 1980s had nothing to do with the vision of a future heavy car traffic, but with the control of the masses in case of protest. Because it is much easier to control the masses concentrated on wide and straight arteries than dispersed on small and winding roads.
So at the level of 1986, when the decision was made to build Pasajului Unirii, there was no question of streamlining car traffic.
Furthermore, Piazza Unirii had already been in a generalized quagmire for a decade, due to the numerous large construction sites in the area:
- Metro line I (1975 – 1979)
- Metro line II (1980 – 1987)
- the horrific redevelopment of the Dâmbovița course as an irrigation canal (1985-1988).
- the demolition of the Brâncovenesc hospital (1984)
- demolition of Union Hall (1986)
- the demolition of over 20,000 homes
- the expansion of the Unirea Store with the Splai and Călărași wings
- building new blocks in the area
The construction of the Pasajul Unirii was the result of a whim of Nicolae Ceaușescu, or the result of an impulsive decision made during one of the many visits he made in those years to the site of the Civic Center, such as the arrangement of the Casa del Popolo, the Piazza si it was then called Unirii and the new Boulevard Victoria Socialismului (present-day Boulevard Unirii).
It was not enough for Ceaușescu that the Civic Center was a North Korean-style mutilation of Bucharest’s historic center, for which more than 40,000 Bucharest residents had already been forcibly evicted from their homes. He was unhappy that urban street traffic, light as it was, was confusing his journeys with the official motorcade through the new Civic Center. For this reason, during one of his visits to the construction site in 1986, he asked for the complete removal of car traffic from Unirii Square.
Passaj Unirii is the underground gallery where the automobile traffic of “mortals” was hidden from the sensitive gaze of the Ceaușescu dictator couple.
This explains the fact that since the inauguration of Pasaj Unirii, on June 6, 1987, through Piața Unirii and on the new Bulevard Victoria Socialismului, access for cars of any kind, including public transport, has been completely prohibited.
Such decisions were typical of the Ceausius pair, some were more sinister than that. For example, the chimney of the newly inaugurated CET Progresu was shortened in the late 1980s from 260m to only 120m, because it disturbed the view of Bucharest from the balcony of the Casa del Popolo. This is even though the shortening of the chimney has resulted in increased pollution south of Bucharest. Fortunately, after 1990, the chimney of CET Progresu was raised to 240 m.Read the entire article and comment on Contributotrs.ro
