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RBT: Beyond the pressing need for investment in infrastructure, which anti-crisis measures with an impact on the transport sector should be considered as urgent by the authorities?
Dan Cotenescu: I do not think that the Romanian government will be able to take anti-crisis measures. And not because we have less efficient specialists than others, but because I think the whole anti-crisis measures story is a mere eluding game sold to the people… If there was something to be done, we could have seen it performed in the countries affected by the crisis before us. I have no idea how we’ll manage to get out of this embroil. In transports, anti-crisis measures from the Government could come as a relaxation of the taxes paid by the Romanian carriers, but I do not think there is enough money. In short, an anti-crisis measure would be to halve the road tolls this year.
RBT: Could intermodal transport be a solution to overcome the current problems caused by the poor infrastructure in Romania and by the excessive severity of the neighbouring country – in this case in Hungary?
D.C.: Unfortunately, intermodal transport in Romania remains a story, in my opinion. Firstly, because of the rail infrastructure that causes awfully high transit times. Secondly, because of the costs involved in transporting containers by rail, as when talking about intermodality, we talk about containers. It isn’t normal to load onto trucks all the containers brought by a ship in Constan¡a, as opposed to going by rail. And yet I see that road transport continues to dominate, which means that it’s quite convenient. If it were cheaper, they would certainly use rail transport. We could have talked about intermodal transport when the oil was priced at 150 dollars a barrel. Then we were constrained and we would have worked according to possibilities and not to preferences…
