chapter-4-bucharest

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HELLAvatrip 2022 – εις την Πόλιν – Chapter 4 – Bucharest, not to be confused with Budapest

Another stop on our journey to the city of the cities, the mightly Constatinople. The capital of Romania, one of the capitals of the Balkan region. The city welcomed us with an interesting ticket offer (metro is not part of the same transportation system as the terrestial transport (buses, trams, trolleybuses), therefore we had to buy a metropolitan ticket to use everything (it feels like home), with the price of 40 leu for 72h it was not the cheapest ticket (20 leu for 24h and we needed it for almost 48h, so it was the smartest idea to buy just the 72h one and just don't care about that later), a ticket office in M4 metro line that was not able to sell us 5 metropolitan tickets (so we had to go to the ticket office in the M1 line station, only cash BTW), deserted M4 metro station (it was positively creepy) and a train in a abysmal state. Off to a good start (I was unironically enjoying that).

The capital of Romania is full with absurdities, both interesting ones and these more annoying. The ticketing is so interesting, because the metro network is owned by the Romanian state and not by the city (somehow similar to the situation with the ZTM Gdańska and SKM). The trams are in a rather bad shape (and some lines were actually removed after the metro line was put underneath, they are now being partially reconstructed, but c'mon), a large part of the city centre (Civic Centre) is a monument to the Ceaușescan lack of sanity, some parts are the sign of the large economic development that the city and the whole of Romania experiences. Overall, I would say that the city reminds me of Warsaw 10-15 years ago, not counting in the architectural styles, which are of course very different.

Please enjoy the sightseeing of Bucharest and thanks ~~SüdVPN~~ Wikipedia for ~~sponsoring this video~~ providing the information I needed.

I strongly suggest looking at Transport in Romania as well.

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The metro network in Bucharest has 5 lines (and M6 in planning, M5 and M4 are on the other hand still in a phase of main expansion, and M2 is being slightly expanded), but what's important is that it is now owned by the city of Bucharest, it's not a part of STB, the public transport organization of Bucharest, but it's owned by the horribly centralized Romanian Government through the Ministry of Transportation. According to Wikipedia, there were plans to merge the underground and overground transportation systems into one authority subordinated to the City of Bucharest, however these plans did not come to fruition. The problem is e.g. the ticketing – there are separate tickets for ground transportation and metro (and regional rail, but it's not that heavily used in the city traffic), you can buy a metropolitan ticket of sorts, but it's still weird.

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