Bucharest Is Chocking While City Hall Officials Are Looking On

The city projects in capital Bucharest had been stopped in their tracks by the fight between the two political camps: on the one side the city mayor, Traian Basescu, [head of the opposition Democrat Party], and on the other hand the councilors of the [ruling] Social Democrat Party.

The General Urban Planning was completed in 2000, but its guidelines were ignored ever since. For the past four years the plans deriving from it that would have made traffic flow easier in the city took a second place to political bickering.
"As an author of the General Urban Planning [of Bucharest], I witnessed the policies concerning the city aimed at accomplishing political targets, and not city planners’ programs," said Alexandru Sandu, Dean at the Faculty for Urban Design.

Since all infighting concentrated on attracting votes, chaos took over and traffic jams turned to be the major problem Bucharest dwellers now have, as the two projects aiming to solve the traffic issue were dropped.