Beyond the dubious clauses, the hatred trebling of costs for the Bechtel built Transylvania Motorway shouldn’t be a surprise. At least, not to the authorities, as Barbara Kondrat, state vice-secretary in the Ministry of Transport in Poland reported this phenomenon within a conference in Bucharest since November 2007. Motorway construction got expensive even in Poland, despite its flat landscape, so it should be seen as normal in rugged Romania. For it is a fact that as long as the EU will continue to allot money for road infrastructure, constructors will also ask for more money. The authorities are caught between the anvil and the hammer, being forced to contract the building companies, no matter how expensive the services, as they have to spend the European funds, which would otherwise be returned.
A vicious circle of overshot budgets and missed deadlines, means that from the current exciting but absent phase, Romanian motorways of the next decade will be too little, too late, and especially too expensive.
