Bad Parking Jobs in Bucharest

If you want to be like a local in Bucharest, you can learn to eat like one.

Or drive like one.

When it comes to parking in Bucharest, there are no boundaries. It’s an absurd and chaotically amusing car show. Kind of like watching the anarchy of cars loop around the arc de triomphe in Paris. In Bucharest, every stretch of pavement has a car half-parked on it. Trying to manoeuvre through the sidewalks is like playing a game of pedestrian-hopscotch. Drivers find anyway to park their Renaults – sideways, reversed, backward, angled, over the line, on the line, not even close to the line.

Truth be told, there is a lack of parking spaces in Bucharest with only a handful of underground parking lots. The fall of communism and the opening of the free market increased the number of cars way over the capacity of the city. I asked a local about laws and parking tickets. Surprisingly, they do exist. But police don’t bother because they know there is no where else drivers can go. I haven’t seen any cars tagged with yellow slips and I wonder if there is such a thing as tow truck drivers in Bucharest?

These cars did not get here by accident.

Good luck manoeuvring the streets of Bucharest. Public transit is good though.

 

If you want to see more absurd and bad parking jobs in Bucharest, Craig at bucharestlife.net has an awesome gallery full of ’em! I would love to return to Bucharest. Even if it’s just to watch Romanian drivers park.