Are the roads in Bulgaria safe and who is responsible for the alarming rise in ‎road traffic accidents? 

If we look at the black statistics, since the beginning of ‎this year, 3,448 serious accidents have been registered in Bulgaria with 260 ‎victims and 4,575 persons injured. 

In just 20 days, since the beginning of July, ‎‎446 serious traffic accidents have been registered in Bulgaria in which 35 ‎people lost their lives and 600 were injured. 

In the last 24 hours, there were 24 ‎serious accidents, 29 persons were injured and two died...‎

According to the law, the drivers who do not comply with the road conditions ‎are to blame, and according to the drivers, the roads in Bulgaria create ‎conditions for road accidents. Not to mention the control and enforcement of ‎the law, or rather the lack of it. Among the frequent complaints of drivers are ‎the lack of markings and poor maintenance of the road network, which does ‎not meet European standards. It even comes to the point of absurdity that a ‎driver, driving on an unlit section of the road falls into a pothole, breaks his ‎car, and instead of receiving compensation, risks being given a speeding ticket. ‎

The cases of a well-paved road turning into a lunar landscape, where drivers ‎need to zigzag between potholes, are also not rare at all. And this is because the road ‎infrastructure is divided into local and republican, which means that the ‎responsibility for the road maintenance is lost between different institutions. ‎

Miroslav Markov is an international driver and has been living and working in ‎Spain for over 20 years. Every time he returns to Bulgaria, he bitterly notes ‎how huge the difference in road maintenance is between Bulgaria and other ‎European countries:‎

‎"In Bulgaria, you need to drive by instinct until you get into a pothole, of ‎course," commented Miroslav Markov. “Always, sooner or later, every ten ‎kilometers there are one or two big holes. Very often the guardrails are also ‎missing and you directly enter what was once a ditch. And since the ditches are ‎filled, there is no water drainage, which is where the erosion of the road surface ‎occurs. There is no such thing as road development in Bulgaria. Even before I ‎left Bulgaria, I was always on the road and I have observations. Just for ‎comparison, Romanians paved their roads in three years when they joined the ‎European Union. There is active marking everywhere that ‎can be seen. These ‎are rhombuses that you can feel with the tires when you drive through them”.‎

According to Miroslav,‎‏ ‏‎ given the money coming into our small country, the ‎roads should have been better than those in Switzerland a long time ago. ‎Corruption is everywhere, he notes, but despite this, the roads are built and ‎maintained to the finest detail, unlike in Bulgaria, where the construction ‎works have been going on for years, but the funds are never enough. As for ‎road accidents, if in Spain, for example, it is found that a certain section of the ‎road is dangerous, the section is immediately corrected, Miroslav Markov ‎explains.‎

During his entire stay in Spain, he only once came across a crash with a ‎motorcycling and immediately raised the alarm, and the reaction of the ‎authorities was in a matter of minutes. Unfortunately, in Bulgaria we can only ‎hope for such adequate actions, and not because there is a lack of goodwill, but ‎because the emergency teams are not enough. 

Not to mention the control of the ‎road, which is difficult to implement, due to the drastically reduced number of ‎employees from the Automotive Administration Executive Agency, who spend ‎‎70% of their working time travelling:‎

‎"We are below the sanitary minimum of number of employees in the ‎Automotive Administration Executive Agency," notes Alexander Ivanov, a ‎road inspector in the Plovdiv Regional Directorate. “In the European Union, ‎there are 4.5% inspectors per 10,000 inhabitants. Here we are 0.05%, which is ‎below the sanitary minimum for European standards. With the cuts they made ‎over time, they treat us as an administration, not as a control body. We are now ‎only three teams in one directorate, which have to be responsible for three ‎administrative districts. I'll give you an example: Burgas, Sliven and Yambol ‎are one directorate with three traffic control teams to check companies, points ‎for annual technical inspections, training companies, taxis, buses, bus stations. ‎This is grossly insufficient. On the other hand, in our work, such internal rules ‎have been prepared that even if you see violations, you cannot react since you ‎have a specific task and you must not deviate from it.”‎

And as long as the institutions turn a blind eye and refuse to take the ‎responsibility for the ridiculous accidents on the roads, the blame will always ‎be on the drivers. And as to those who overtake in prohibited areas and drive ‎like fighter jets on the highways, endangering the lives of everyone - they still ‎remain above the law. That's why the construction has started of rubber barriers ‎between lanes with two-way traffic to limit head-on collisions on the sections ‎with the highest rate of accidents.‎

Photos: BGNES