Initial title: From Primăverii to the Theatre, with Four Children and a Notebook of Grievances
A July walk through a small Romanian city, or on how a town deflates beneath the feet of its own children
We set off at about half past five in the afternoon. The hour was chosen because, in July, Botoșani[^1] has two faces and neither belongs to it: at midday the tarmac breathes like a frying pan left on a switched-off hob, while late in the evening, around nine, a false quiet settles in, of the sort in which every car that passes down Strada Primăverii seems to be crossing your sitting room. Half past five was, as my father used to put it, the hour at which "the sun packs up its tools". He spoke of the sun as though of a workshop colleague finishing his shift, and those words come back to me every time I decide to leave the house in summer. My father was a car mechanic and he had his own way of measuring the world: in spanners, in stroke, in millimetres of play. A great many fragments of this vocabulary have dissolved into the way I look at cities. The millimetres I sometimes look for in the kerbs of Botoșani's cycle infrastructure. I don't find them, but that's a separate conversation, and one I'll come to soon enough.
We had agreed to start out from my flat on Strada Primăverii and walk, at a Sunday-afternoon pace, to the Mihai Eminescu Theatre.[^2] It wasn't Sunday; it was a plain Wednesday. But we each had one reason more to go, and several reasons fewer. The one reason more was a play we wanted to reach early, to secure good seats on the left of the auditorium where the acoustics swallow less. The reasons fewer were, in turn, the fatigue, the humidity in the air, a piece of political news that had spoilt the morning for all of us, and, further down, a refusal to take the car once more for less than two kilometres. That, I think, was the initial decision from which the rest flowed: a small form of resistance, in which I did not want to contribute yet another vehicle to the already thick air of the town.
The friends arrived one by one. Andrei with Ilinca, his daughter of eleven, holding a skateboard she is not allowed to ride in the places she would like to ride it. Mihai with Tudor, a tall boy of thirteen, already almost one metre seventy, with an adolescent's stride. And Cristi with Sara, ten years old, her hair caught up in a high ponytail, on a folding bicycle she guards as she would an exotic object. The fourth pair was me and V., my son, sixteen years old, who over the last month has grown again so that his trousers now sit short on his ankles. I saw him each evening at supper, and yet that growth I only registered on stepping out into the street, when I looked at him properly and was startled, as though only now was I seeing him as he was.
Four men between forty and fifty, four children between ten and sixteen, eight pairs of shoes of eight different kinds and eight different walking rhythms. These were, in short, the conditions of an urban design experiment which no designer in Botoșani appeared to have anticipated.
Primăverii, or the kerb that told us everything at the start
We left the building and turned left. On our side of Strada Primăverii there is a cycle lane. That is the official phrasing: "there is". In the language of the people who walk on foot and try to use it with children, the correct phrasing is different: "it is drawn". Between "existing" and "being drawn" a fine ontological distinction has crept into Romanian urbanism which I have not yet seen codified in any treatise. A thing that is drawn is a thing that appears on the orthophoto plan, in the acceptance report, in the town hall press release, and on the cyclists' map. A thing that exists is a thing you can actually ride on without breaking something.
Ilinca lunged first to put down her skateboard. Andrei called out to her at once, more from reflex than from concern, since we were not yet at a crossing. "Stay with us," he said. She rolled three metres along the cycle lane and the skateboard stopped abruptly. "Why does it stop?" asked Sara, walking behind with her small bicycle at hand. Ilinca gestured with her chin towards the tarmac behind her. "There's a pothole," she said. It was not a pothole; it was a step of about three centimetres between two sections of tarmac, one older, one newer, laid a year apart, with some filling strip that had since receded. Three centimetres. In my father's vocabulary, three centimetres was the measure at which the difference was made between a serviceable part and scrap metal. Here, three centimetres was the measure that a designer had, presumably, considered "acceptable at the interface with the existing section".
We walked on in silence for about fifty metres. Enough for me to understand, looking left and right, what I had known abstractly for several years but had never inventoried step by step: the cycle path we were walking on was, in fact, a strip of pavement, about a metre wide, delimited by a white line painted directly on the pedestrian slab. No physical separation. No background colour. Only the white line, in the places where it was still visible. Pedestrians walked across the white line without knowing and without caring, and cyclists, whenever they appeared, passed between pedestrians as through slightly thicker water. It was not a cycle track. It was a strip of conflict between pedestrians and cyclists painted onto an already narrow pavement.
Tudor, walking alongside V., said at one point, with a naturalness that hurt me: "So the cycle lane is on the pavement. That is, is it for cyclists or for us?" V. shrugged. "Both," he said. "That is, neither," Tudor corrected. It was a line I could not shake. A boy of thirteen had, in the first hundred metres of the walk, formulated more clearly than I could have formulated in three articles the first structural mistake of our town: the deliberate ambiguity of allocating space between vulnerable users. It is what the European good-practice handbooks call "conflict among the vulnerable", and the phrase invariably appears in the chapter on mistakes rather than the chapter on solutions. In our country, it appears, systematically, in the design.
I turned my head towards Andrei, walking with Ilinca hand in hand. Andrei is a civil engineer, works for a road-building firm and I like to provoke him, sometimes unfairly, because I know he never decided any of what is wrong in this town but has the patience to hear out my irritation. "It's designed," I said to him, "as though the bicycle were a slower form of car allowed to use the pavement." Andrei laughed briefly and said: "It's designed as though the bicycle were a faster pedestrian allowed to use the white line." We each stayed with our own version. Both, I think, were accurate.
Coherence, or on cycle paths that end where their continuation would matter most
There was no traffic light. There was not even, in a technical sense of the word, a pedestrian crossing. There was a corner of a street where Aleea Scipione Bădescu[^3] peeled off from Primăverii like a joke that no longer laughs, and the eight of us turned onto it as naturally as one turns onto a housing-estate lane. This was where the real revelation happened, I think, the one that would accompany me for the whole one-point-three kilometres to the theatre: on no metre of the route, in total, did we encounter a single set of traffic lights. Not at the exit from Primăverii, not on Vârnav, not on Unirii, not at the mouth of Cuza Vodă. An urban route of thirteen minutes on foot, with four children, through the centre of a county seat, with no signalised sequence anywhere. It is the kind of statistic you don't find in any report, because there is no one to compute it. It is an absence, and absences are not measured.
On Scipione Bădescu, as though the problem were not clear enough already, the cycle lane from Primăverii did not continue. It did not narrow, it did not transform. It quite simply ended, at the last metre before the alley, with a white transverse stripe that looked, in the evening light, like a smear of spilt paint. The children walking ahead did not notice the change. Only Ilinca stopped again with her skateboard, because on the alley the surface was paved with slabs rather than tarmac.
We walked on with the children by the hand. A few paces later, a second beginning of a cycle path appeared, without any connection to the first — thirty metres of pavement-without-anything, in which any cyclist had to fend for himself with his own moral conscience and with the pedestrians out for the evening air.
This is the sort of discontinuity which, in the vocabulary of the Delft manuals[^4], is called a lack of network coherence. It is the CROW principle[^5] that studies indicate as the most frequently ignored. Not directness, not safety — coherence. Because it is the easiest to postpone. Because each street can be ticked off separately, in a separate report, with a separate budget, on a separate date. And so the result is that the town has forty pieces of cycle infrastructure and zero cycle infrastructure. I said this to Andrei and he, who expected as much anyway, replied that it was worse than that: "Every piece is designed by a different firm which doesn't talk to the firm that did the previous piece, because they are on different contracts, with different contracting authorities, from different years." We walked on for a while without speaking. Sara pedalled behind, gently, on the pavement. Cristi walked a pace behind her. Ilinca's skateboard was now in Andrei's backpack.
The park, or on the comfort that melts on a Wednesday evening
We turned onto Strada Vârnav and, a few minutes later, entered Unirii with Parcul Mihai Eminescu on our left, a promise without being a choice. Here, in principle, our route required us to continue along the perimeter, on the pavement, with the park just beyond a low fence. In practice, on a July day of twenty-eight degrees at six in the evening, four men with four children do not continue along the perimeter: they enter the park as though it were a changing room. We veered left through a side entrance, by tacit assent, since such assent requires no phrase. Sara put her foot back on the pedal. Ilinca produced the skateboard. V. remained beside me, his hands in his pockets, the way he always walks when he is somewhere he would rather not be walking. Not that the outing disturbed him. What disturbed him, I think, was that he could not yet tell whether it was tiring him or calming him. It is the age at which such matters can flip from one week to the next.
On the alley inside the park, someone had at some point in recent years painted two parallel white lines, with a schematic silhouette of a cyclist between them. The colour of choice, whatever it may have been — acrylic paint, perhaps — had yielded to the springs and summers between then and now. The alley was, theoretically, mixed: pedestrians on the western side, cyclists on the eastern. In practice, during the several minutes we spent in the park, I counted eleven pedestrians on the "cyclists'" side and two cyclists on the "pedestrians'" side. I was counting because, for some time now, I have got into the habit of counting. It is a form of private vigilance I have not been able to do without, I think, because of the way I work professionally. When one spends years tracking security vulnerabilities on digital networks, one develops a kind of instinct for counting vulnerabilities everywhere. I want to laugh at myself when I catch myself doing it. I laugh, and then I make a note.
The most visible vulnerability on the alley was, of course, an old cherry tree grown right along the line of the cycle path. Not to one side. On the path. That is, between the two white lines. Someone had designed the alley, someone had planted the tree, someone had painted the lines, and none of them had spoken to the others. The cherry has forty years behind it, probably, far more than the white lines, and it is plain that it is not the cherry that made the mistake. But the cherry is there, and the path that runs through it splits to left and right into two strips of about thirty centimetres each, that is, impossible to use as a cycle path. Sara, when she saw the situation, dismounted of her own accord. I did not even have to tell her. "It's a shambles," said Cristi. "It's a designed shambles," I replied. Cristi shot me a glance which meant I ought to be quiet. Children have no need to hear everything we think.
Further on, the alley intersected a second path coming from the east. Here occurred the second situation I made a mental note of. At the intersection of the two alleys the cycle-path markings disappeared entirely, over a distance of six or seven metres. It was not a solution, it was an omission. Andrei explained to me, as we walked, something which I think I knew abstractly but had never articulated: the marking is broken off at intersections precisely because it costs more to paint on curved surfaces and over joints. The reason for a safety mistake is, often enough, an accounting one.
We rested on a bench on the southern side of the park. Sara laid the bicycle on the grass. Ilinca sat down on the skateboard. Tudor took out his phone, glanced at it for three seconds and put it away, being still at the age when he obliges himself not to bring it out often in his father's presence. V. leaned back with his eyes shut. A flock of pigeons was lifting and settling on the same tree with the regularity of a cuckoo clock. Mihai broke the silence, in a way I liked. "I like that we've come out," he said. "You don't see it much. That is, you don't often see four children in a place where they're walking."
He is right. Children in Botoșani no longer walk very much. They travel by car from home to school, from school to after-school, from after-school to home. It is, I think, one of the things I most often say on the evenings when I think more than is good for me: that a town through which children no longer walk is a town that has severed itself from its own future generation. That a child who grows up in a car does not learn to read the street, and at twenty, he will drive with the poor education of one who has never been vulnerable on a road. I did not say this on the bench. It was not the kind of conversation to be cursed aloud on so quiet an evening. Instead I smiled, and said: "Yes — I hope it isn't the last time for them."
We left the park by its eastern side and rejoined Unirii. Here we entered the serious town, the town that shows its face. Unirii is the street on which Botoșani keeps its dignity, with all that this implies — banks, chemists, shops, pavement cafés. I said pavement cafés and, for a moment, lost the good mood that had gathered in the park. Because on Unirii the cycle lane has been drawn, years ago, on the carriageway, exactly between the cars parked at the kerb and the traffic flowing north. That is, for anyone not versed in the technical language of the mistake: exactly in the zone where the driver's-side doors of parked cars open.
The door zone. A strip of about one hundred and twenty centimetres, measured from the kerb outwards, in which an opening door turns a cyclist travelling at twenty-five kilometres per hour into a practical lesson one would rather not witness. In the European studies, the figure quoted with the greatest consistency is that between twelve and twenty-seven per cent of urban car-cyclist collisions involve a door being opened. That is one in four, in the worst cities. And in Botoșani, the cycle path on Unirii — the one that appears on the town-hall maps as "the cycling infrastructure of the Municipality" — passes exactly through this zone. We walked with the children on the pavement, but I followed the cycle lane with my eyes, on my side, for about five hundred metres. I calculated that, over that distance, some forty car doors would have had to stay shut that evening for a notional cyclist to have passed alive.
"What if someone does come along the cycle lane?" asked Tudor. "They come along it rarely," I replied. "Why do they come rarely?" "Because it is made badly. If it were made well, more would come. But it was made badly because it was made for those who don't come anyway." Tudor looked at me with an expression of pure perplexity, and Mihai, behind us, laughed. "You're teaching him formal logic in real time," he said. "No, I'm teaching him budgetary logic," I replied.
At some point on our side of the pavement, the cycle path of the pavement-with-a-white-line kind ran directly into a pavement café. A bar terrace. Eight tables, with parasols, placed exactly over the section marked as cycle path. The waiter stood at the entrance with his tray. The customers, in white shirts, were drinking their beer in the open air. Nothing in the world was wrong with that picture, save one mean reality: the cycle path ran beneath their tables. "What do you do now?" Sara asked. "Do we go through the bar?" The adults laughed, and Andrei answered: "We go past the bar, on the road." That is, for a few seconds, cyclists who wanted to obey the rule would have had to descend onto the carriageway, into the door zone, between parked cars, in order to skirt a legally sited pavement café.
Here I stopped again and did what I usually do when I am gathering material for a future article: I took out my phone and photographed the route. V. saw me and understood what I was doing. "You've got a picture for tomorrow," he said. It is a formula of his, when he sees me writing in my head. "I've got several," I replied.
Five minutes later we stopped at a bus stop. The younger children were slightly tired, and Cristi wanted to buy Sara a bottle of water from a shop on the corner. We remained on the pavement, waiting. It was an ordinary bus stop, with a metal shelter and a bench. A bus pulled up right in front of us. The doors opened. The passengers stepped down. The place where they stepped down was, predictably, right across the cycle path. There was no boarding island. There was no protected contact zone between the bus and the cycle path. Cycle path and pavement and bus stop were all one and the same surface, with a white line painted between them, which only cyclists and the designer knew about, and the two had not met for a long time. The lady in the yellow dress who stepped down first brushed me with her large leather bag as she got her bearings. I shrugged. She said "sorry", though she was guilty of nothing.
We walked on, towards the theatre, and at one point our pedestrian route crossed a stretch in which the cycle path shifted, abruptly and for no visible reason, from our side of the street to the other. It was not a junction. It was not a side turning. Quite simply, somewhere by a block of flats with red balconies, the cycle path ended in a sign, and on the other side of the street, thirty metres further, another sign announced that it had begun again. It is as though cyclists were teleported, in the planners' view. Between the two ends, I could see a cyclist of about sixty, with tinted glasses and a plastic bag hooked over his handlebars, arrive, register the end of the cycle path, shrug, and continue on the carriageway, in traffic, heading north. I kept my eyes on him for a couple of hundred metres. Nothing happened. But I kept them there, as though on a bet I would rather not have placed.
Directness, or on the walk that cost us three hundred extra metres
The most beautiful word in the theoretical manuals is, I think, the word "direct". It is the principle which says that a route for cyclists must be the shortest possible path between origin and destination, because a cyclist is the user who most keenly feels, standing on his own two wheels, the detours we impose on him. A pedestrian endures detours. A driver does not feel them, except as time. A cyclist feels them as effort. And if, in the street, we require of him a great detour for the sake of illusory infrastructure, he will choose to stop listening to us, and we shall write about him in the local press "see how the cyclists don't obey the rules", when in reality the rules had condemned him to a logistical indignity which was not fair to ask of him.
Our route, on foot, required a sequence of zig-zags from Primăverii to the theatre which I did not comprehend until Andrei began to count them aloud. Left onto Scipione Bădescu. Right onto Vârnav. Left onto Unirii. Right onto the Unirii Pedestrian Precinct.[^6] Right onto Cuza Vodă. Six turns in one point three kilometres, four of them to the right in succession, a slalom choreography for a route which, as the crow flies, could have been walked on two straight lines. "We're on the sixth turn," Andrei told me at one point, as though beating a gong. I did not answer him. I noted, in my mind, a single sentence: that a route designed for a pedestrian may not require more changes of direction than the user has the patience to memorise. And we were already over the ceiling.
The second thing Andrei said, rather more profoundly, stayed with me with a precision I could not shake once I got home. "Petru," he said, "it is impossible for anyone to come to this town on a bicycle and take it seriously as a town." It was not a rhetorical formula. It was a statement. An experienced cyclist, choosing to come to Botoșani for a day, would step off the train with his bike and understand, in the first thirty minutes, that the town was asking of him a double detour to reach his destination, through unsuitable points. It is what Andrei called, in the argot of the roadbuilder, "a route of shame". The town, for those who come to see it on two wheels, is a form of planned shame. Not explicit. Only implicit. Not vindictive. Only lazy.
The theatre, or on the safety that plays out at a single junction
At the junction between the Unirii Pedestrian Precinct and Cuza Vodă, where our route turned right for the final time, came the moment I had been dreading for the rest of the walk. Not that I was particularly frightened. But I knew it would come. This is the junction at which, for cyclists, every thread is lost. The Unirii Pedestrian Precinct is, by law, a shared surface — cyclists are permitted to ride there at reduced speed among pedestrians and café tables. Cuza Vodă, ninety metres further on, becomes an ordinary road with cars. Between the two regimes, at the junction, there is no signalling whatsoever to announce the change. No traffic light, no marked entry lane, not the slightest visual clue that the cyclist is about to leave the shared space directly for mixed traffic. A "no vehicles" sign ends, and the cyclist's life begins to depend on his own reflexes. The NACTO manuals[^7] require, at such points, an advance stop line box, called a "bike box". The CROW manuals require a coloured continuity marking. Here there was not even a white line.
We stopped at the corner. Not at the traffic light, because there was no traffic light. We stopped instinctively, in the way pedestrian groups with children stop when the carriageway resumes after a hiatus. Sara, with the bicycle in hand, pressed herself against Cristi's leg. Ilinca held the skateboard tight against her chest, like a cat. Tudor scanned the street left and right, with a vigilance I approved of. V. had his hands in his pockets, but I knew that his eyes were recording. It is an age at which one says little but registers everything. We crossed carefully. Each of us held his child's hand. A car slowed, more out of the driver's courtesy, I think, than out of any technical obligation. We reached the other side in fourteen seconds. The theatre was already visible, on the left, less than a hundred metres away.
We climbed the theatre's steps with a mixed feeling. Relief, at having arrived. Fatigue, for the route, which measures one point three kilometres on the map and seventeen minutes on Google's clock, had consumed more than forty minutes of our time and a reserve of nerves for which we had not budgeted. Shame, because I realised, on those steps, that despite being a man who writes about this town and who makes a kind of civic duty of documenting its mistakes, I had walked with my son too rarely. V. was sixteen, and walks like this, with a group, at a Sunday pace, we had had far too few of in our shared memory. It was something I was going to make up for. Not as an article subject. As a way of being a father.
Coda. What my father said to me that evening, though he is no longer here to say it
We entered the auditorium ten minutes before the three gong-strokes. The seats were good. On the left, as planned. The acoustics were clear. I watched the children settle in. V. on my left, Tudor on Mihai's right, Ilinca between Andrei and her mother, who had come straight to the theatre, and Sara between Cristi and V., because she had asked V. herself, in a very low voice, as though she were asking an older brother she does not have.
The play began. I shall not say what it was about. It has no bearing here. Or, at least, not the bearing I want to draw.
What I want to say, in closing, are two things.
First: on the way home that evening — which we took by taxi, since it was late and the children were tired — I was left with the very clear sense that this town loses something each evening. It is not only cyclists it loses, though it does lose them. It is not only pedestrians it loses, though it loses them too. It loses the idea that the public realm can be a place where four children walk together on a Wednesday in July without anyone being frightened, without anyone being humiliated, without anyone being confused. It is a loss that does not show up in numbers. It shows up in what, between friends, we pass to one another without saying: in the way Andrei, on leaving the park, moved Ilinca's hand from her left to her right, because he wanted himself to be between her and the carriageway. Or in the way Cristi lifted Sara off her bicycle before I could ask him, because he had seen where the crossing would fall. These are small gestures. They are gestures of adaptation to a town we have grown accustomed to serve, rather than one that serves us.
The second thing has to do with my father. My father died some time ago, and my walks through the town, especially the long ones, done on foot, are the moments in which he returns to me most clearly. He was a mechanic. He repaired cars. What haunts me, in his connection, is that this was not a metaphor of his. He was good with cars because he was good with cars. His spanners were his spanners, not the symbol of spanners. His millimetres were millimetres. When he told me "it is not well made", it was a technical judgement, not a posture. And I, who no longer have him to ask, sometimes think that he, had he seen our cycle lane on Primăverii, had he seen the white line painted on the pavement, had he seen the cherry tree grown in the middle of the cycle path in the park, had he seen the doors opening into the cycle lane on Unirii — he would not have written a five-thousand-word article. He would have said, in a single sentence: "Whoever did this did not measure." And the pause he would have made after that sentence would have been worth more than this whole essay.
That, I think, is our problem with the town, a problem greater than all the design errors one might catalogue. Those who make our town do not measure. Not that they lack the instruments. They have them. They have guidelines, they have standards, they have the Romanian national standards SR 10144-1 and SR 10144-2 of 2024,[^8] they have the CROW manuals, they have the ministerial guides. The instruments sit on the shelf. They are not brought down from the shelf into the field. And in the field, in the evening, a girl of ten dismounts from her bicycle because, in the middle of her cycle path, there grows a cherry tree.
And the cherry tree, if you ask me, is the only thing that remains, at the end of the walk, with which I have no complaint.
— Petru Cojocaru, Botoșani, July 2026
Online bibliography
Romanian legal and technical framework
- ASRO — SR 10144-1:2024 and SR 10144-2:2024, contextualised via the Bucharest Velo Masterplan: https://www.asro.ro/masterplanul-velo-al-capitalei-565-km-de-piste-pana-in-anul-2035-standarde-si-implicarea-comunitatii/
- MDLPA — draft order approving the Guide for the design of cycling infrastructure: https://www.mdlpa.ro/pages/proiectordinaprobareaghidproiectareinfrstructurabiciclete
- Guide for the design of cycling infrastructure (public version used in the Brașov / Calea Verde consultation): https://www.brasovcity.ro/file-zone/dezbateri/docs/23/1.%20Documente%20consultare/Ghid%20de%20proiectare_Calea%20Verde.pdf
- AFM Programme "Realisation of cycle paths" — framework and conditions: https://oportunitati-ue.gov.ro/en/program/programul-realizarea-pistelor-pentru-biciclete/
International manuals and studies
- IURC — Cycling Design Best Practices Report (2024): https://www.iurc.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Cycling-Design-Best-Practices-Report.pdf
- Lonardi, Szell, De Bacco — Cohesive urban bicycle infrastructure design through optimal transport routing in multilayer networks, J. R. Soc. Interface (2025): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11793972/
- Demand-driven design of bicycle infrastructure networks for improved urban bikeability (arXiv, 2022): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.06708
- BikeDNA: A Tool for Bicycle Infrastructure Data & Network Assessment — typical topology and classification errors (arXiv, 2023): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.01223
- Bicycle Infrastructure Design Principles in Urban Bikeability Indices: A Systematic Review, MDPI Sustainability (2024): https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/6/2545
- Impact of cycling infrastructure on cyclists' experience and sense of flow in two cities, Discover Cities (2026): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44327-026-00218-y
Door-zone and recurring design errors
- CyclingSavvy — How to ruin a buffered bike lane: https://cyclingsavvy.org/2024/06/how-to-ruin-a-buffered-bike-lane/
- CyclingSavvy — Dooring: Enhanced or Avoided by Bike Lane Design: https://cyclingsavvy.org/2018/08/bike-lanes-dooring/
- CyclingSavvy — The Real Door Zone Tragedy: https://cyclingsavvy.org/2018/05/the-real-door-zone-tragedy/
Romanian press for comparative context
- How cycle paths ought to be designed and built — arenaconstruct.ro: https://arenaconstruct.ro/cum-trebuie-proiectate-si-executate-pistele-de-biciclete/
- Iași without cycle paths. The existing ones did not meet the conditions — Newsweek România: https://newsweek.ro/actualitate/iasul-fara-piste-de-biciclete-cele-existente-nu-indeplineau-conditiile-altele-nu-se-construiesc
Ten questions worth remembering, with elegant answers
1. Why is a thing called "a cycle path" when it does not function as one? Because administrations confuse the existence of a marking with the existence of an infrastructure. A marking can be reported. An infrastructure can be used. A report cannot be ridden on two wheels.
2. Why are pavement-based solutions chosen over separated cycle tracks on the carriageway? Because the pavement has no driver to speak against it at the public meeting. Pedestrians are silent. Cyclists are few. Drivers shout. Municipal politics does the arithmetic of shouting, not of needs.
3. Who is responsible when a cycle path ends abruptly? Everyone and no-one. The contracting authority signed off the works. The designer delivered against the brief. The contractor built to the design. The client paid. The party at fault is called "the brief", and the brief cannot be taken to court.
4. Why is a badly built cycle path more dangerous than none at all? Because it generates a false certainty on two sides at once: the cyclist thinks he is protected, the driver thinks the cyclist has somewhere to go. Each releases the vigilance he would otherwise have kept. The illusion of safety kills more people than acknowledged insecurity.
5. What is the "door zone" and why does it matter? It is a strip of about one hundred and twenty centimetres from parked cars, in which an opening door turns a cyclist into a victim. It matters because, in the European cities studied, between twelve and twenty-seven per cent of urban car-cyclist collisions involve a door. In Botoșani, the cycle lane on Unirii runs straight through this zone.
6. Why do children no longer walk in small Romanian cities? Because parents — myself included — have learnt, over the past thirty years, that the town is dangerous and the car is refuge. Each child driven to school is a small abdication. Each small abdication is a brick in the town of twenty years hence, in which the generation raised on the back seat will decide what the streets look like.
7. What does "coherence" mean, in a cycling network? It means being able to leave one end of the town and reach the other without being forced off your bicycle. It is the most frequently ignored principle, because it is the most expensive and the least photogenic. A stretch of cycle path with a red-painted kerb shows up in the press release. A coherent network shows up only after five years of use.
8. What does a cherry tree grown on a cycle path tell us? That someone painted lines on the ground without looking up. That a designer never walked his own route at six in the evening. That the town has departments which do not talk to each other: green space, roads, street furniture. And one further, less pleasant thing: that the cherry, in this account, is more honest than the design.
9. Why does the SR 10144 series of 2024 matter? Because, for the first time, Romanian municipalities have a manual which is officially recognised and reduces the risk of design mistakes. Without it, each town reinvented cycling infrastructure, badly, on its own. With it, a mistake becomes, at least in theory, imputable. A standard means an identifiable culprit, and this is the first condition of public accountability.
10. What would a mechanic father say if he saw a cycle path in this town? "Whoever did this didn't measure." The rest is commentary.
Author's note
How the article came to be. I did not leave the house intending to write a piece on the CROW principles. I left to go to the theatre with my friends, their children, and mine. The idea for the article arose, honestly, at two separate moments. The first was at the turn off Primăverii, when Tudor said "that is, neither", and the phrasing, so clean and so unsparing, made me take out my phone and jot down three words. The second was in front of the pavement café on Unirii, when Sara asked "do we go through the bar?" Between those two questions, between fourteen words spoken by two children, the architecture of ideas of this text gathered. The rest — bibliography, principles, terminology — was added at home in the evening, like a pair of glasses laid over a photograph already taken. I must be honest: this article was not written about Botoșani. It was written from a walk. The difference is greater than it seems.
The limits of this text. Three, that I can see and flag myself. The first: the sample is minute. One walk, one route, one evening. I have no municipal figures, no accident reports, no flow maps. What I offer is a piece of participant observation with eight people, four of them children. A researcher would reject such material. An essayist cannot dispense with it. The second: I am a subjective user. I walk and I cycle. I have already declared my allergy to hasty public decisions. I cannot pretend that my gaze is neutral, and any reader is entitled to temper each paragraph with their own experience. The third, perhaps the most important: I have interviewed no-one from the town hall. I have not asked the designers for their view. I have not confronted my thesis with the counter-thesis of someone who might say "no, we did what we could with the money and the street we had". This is a deliberate choice, but a choice that leaves the text incomplete. I own the incompleteness, but I flag it.
Tensions within the text. The first tension, the fundamental one: the piece presents itself as a personal narrative, and is, at the same time, a technical indictment. The two voices do not always sit well together. When I speak of V. at the theatre, I am a father. When I speak of the door zone, I am someone who has read too many standards. The reader will sense, here and there, that the two voices step on each other's toes. I have chosen not to separate them. The second tension: the confessional register I practise here calls for vulnerability, while the indictment calls for authority. Vulnerability and authority are difficult to hold together. The third tension: the figure of the mechanic father. It is an anchor which always helps me speak of technical honesty, but it is also a figure that risks looking like a rhetorical prop. I invoke it because it comes to me for real, but I understand that it can be read as artifice. It remains, with the risk assumed.
Comparisons which do not appear in the text but shaped it in the background. Amsterdam does not compare to Botoșani, and to draw the comparison at face value helps nothing. What I compare, more honestly, is the principle, not the execution. Amsterdam has coherence because it decided to have it, on a slender budget relative to the GDP of the era in which it decided. Copenhagen has directness because it decided to take cars off its central axes. Groningen, at its own smaller scale, is comparable to a town like ours and, in the 1970s, decided to invert priorities. These comparisons do not appear explicitly because, in a personal text, comparisons with "abroad" carry a whiff of defensive superiority and rarely convince anyone. I flag them here, in the note, as a form of bibliographic honesty.
Subjective mistakes I own. I generalised, in two or three places, from a particular observation to a thesis about the whole town. When I say "this town loses", I skip over the evidence that it loses evenly. It is a rhetorical move, not a valid induction. I made another, smaller mistake, but one I think deserves mention: I described the cycle lane on Primăverii with a confidence that only measurement can give. I did not measure the width. I estimated it. I could be twenty centimetres out. A more rigorous person would have brought a tape measure in his rucksack.
The lizards in the text, decoded. In Romanian polemical tradition there is a technique called șopârle — literally "lizards" — small embedded arguments in Aesopic form, addressed to the informed reader without being visible to the surface reader. I identify three that I know I placed, because they form part of how I work.
The first: the phrase "the hour at which the sun packs up its tools", attributed to my father. It is true that he used it. But I chose to open the piece with it not from nostalgia, but to position myself, from the first paragraph, as the son of a man who worked with his hands, that is, within a lineage of technical honesty. It is an implicit legitimation of the authority with which I speak about design. Anyone who accuses me of having no right to criticise designers is not accusing me — they are accusing my father. It is a rhetorical move that deserves unmasking.
The second: the sentence "the instruments sit on the shelf. They are not brought down from the shelf into the field." This phrasing is an indirect criticism, with a very precise address, directed at the local administrations which received the national standards in 2024 and are not applying them. I have not named the administrations, because I do not want a lawsuit. But anyone who works in the field will know whom I mean. It is a professional lizard: the ordinary reader sees a metaphor, the informed reader identifies the target.
The third: the closing sentence of the coda, in which I say that the cherry tree is "the only thing I have no complaint about". The metaphor plays on the superimposition of two ideas — the cherry as a species, and the cherry as a figure in Romanian literary tradition, where it often signals an order older than recent administrative decisions. The surface reader sees a bitter joke. The second-level reader sees a thesis: that things which grow slowly and organically are better made than things designed in haste, and that the town's planners might learn from how a tree grows, rather than the other way around.
Rhetorical instruments used consciously. I list them briefly, for anyone who wants to see the workshop:
- The witness-narrator with a contract of sincerity. I own the limits at the end of the piece, and this buys credibility for the sharper claims.
- The child-as-oracle. Sara and Tudor formulate, in short questions, the central theses. The reader resists an accusation made by a child less easily than the same accusation from a columnist.
- Calibrated enumeration. The numbers ("twelve to twenty-seven per cent", "three centimetres", "six turns", "zero traffic lights") are inserted at points of tension. The effect is that the text seems to measure.
- Lexical repetition as rhythm. "It loses. It loses. It loses" at the end of a paragraph is a device borrowed from public rhetoric which we all know. I use it deliberately, aware that it is a common tool.
- Descent into the particular at critical moments. Ilinca with the skateboard, Sara with the folding bicycle, V. with his hands in his pockets. The concrete detail stops the text from abstracting. Each abstraction must be preceded or followed by an object.
- Closure through the paternal figure. The coda with my father is a strategic choice. It closes the piece within an emotional circle that transcends municipal politics. It is a risky instrument, because it can seem manipulative. I take the risk, aware that it is an instrument.
A call to action. What you can do tomorrow
1. Walk, once a week, with a child. Not necessarily your own. A niece or nephew, a godchild, a friend's child. The same distance you would have driven. Choose an urban route, not a leisure one. Observe. You will discover things you would never have seen from behind the steering wheel. It is the only way not to become an adult who drives with the poor education of one who has never been vulnerable on a street.
2. Photograph a design mistake and send it where it needs to go. Not to your personal social media, where it dies in twenty-four hours. To the town hall, by formal request (there is usually an online registry). To your local cycling advocacy group.[^9] To the local press. A photograph with an exact address and a minimal technical description carries more weight than a post charged with emotion.
3. Ask to see the design brief for the next cycle path funded in your town. In Romania it is a public document, requestable under Law 544/2001 on access to public interest information.[^10] In other jurisdictions, equivalent instruments exist under the general heading of freedom of information (in the UK, the Freedom of Information Act 2000; in the EU, Regulation 1049/2001; elsewhere, national FOI regimes). You do not have to be a journalist, a lawyer or an NGO. You send a request, you receive a reply within a set period. The simple existence of the request disciplines the administration.
4. Learn three terms and use them when speaking of the town.Network coherence. Door zone. Continuity at junctions. Three technical formulations that shift the tone of a public consultation. Correct vocabulary is the cheapest instrument of civic reform you have to hand.
5. Support a young designer who has read CROW. They exist. Not many. A few graduates of architecture and urbanism, a few civil engineers, trained on the Dutch, Danish and American manuals. Be their client. Be their reference. In a small town like ours, two or three projects done properly can change a generation of local standards.
What to avoid, and what not to do
1. Do not vent generalities on social media, of the "This town is a dump" variety. This kind of collective release produces, at the town hall, exactly the reaction you don't want: they feel attacked, they retreat into defence, they close the technical dialogue down. Refrain from sweeping statements. Be specific about one path, one junction, one guideline.
2. Do not contribute to the myth that "cyclists don't obey the rules". Anyone who says this starts from the premise that the rules exist and are correct. See the article above. In many cases, the cyclist who "does not obey" is in fact making the only rational move in an irresponsible piece of infrastructure. When you hear the phrase, ask politely: "Which rule, and on which cycle path?" The conversation shifts.
3. Do not support "at least there's something" quick fixes. This is the classic trap of small towns. "Let's do at least something as a cycle path, let's paint it on the pavement, it's better than nothing." No. It is worse than nothing. A safety device that creates the illusion of safety without providing it kills more people than the absence of the device. Support either infrastructure done properly or honest non-provision. The middle ground is the most lethal.
4. Do not blame individual designers when the mistake is systemic. I have made this mistake myself. It is easy to find a name and attack it. It is harder — and more productive — to identify the chain of decisions which produced the mistake: the brief, the budget, the contracting authority, the tender criteria, the absence of a technical pilot, the absence of post-completion audit. The designer is often the last person who can answer. Those who kept silent upstream of them are the ones who should be named.
5. Do not wait for the town hall to invite you to consultation. They will not. Real public consultation occurs because citizens organise and require it, and the requirement has a legal form. In waiting for the invitation, you wait in vain. Send requests, take part in the debates that are called (even on the day they are called, even at inconvenient times), ask questions in writing. A town changes only insofar as its citizens become the fatigue of an administration that would rather not be bothered.
— P. C., Botoșani, July 2026
Explanatory notes
[^1]: Botoșani is a small city of about 100,000 inhabitants in north-eastern Romania, in the historical region of Moldavia, seat of the county of the same name. It sits about 130 kilometres from the border with the Republic of Moldova and about 400 kilometres from Bucharest. Alongside Iași and Suceava, it forms part of a broader cultural triangle historically dense in Romanian literary figures, most famously Mihai Eminescu (b. 1850), the country's national poet, born nearby.
[^2]: The Mihai Eminescu Theatre is Botoșani's principal cultural institution, housed in a nineteenth-century building at the eastern edge of the historic centre. As with most Romanian county-town theatres, it is publicly funded and serves both a resident company and touring productions.
[^3]: Romanian street-name conventions preserved throughout: Strada = Street, Aleea = Lane / Alley (typically a smaller residential thoroughfare), Bulevardul = Boulevard, Pietonalul = Pedestrian Precinct or Pedestrian Street. I have kept the Romanian originals to preserve local specificity; the equivalent English designation is given on first appearance.
[^4]: The Delft manuals, a general shorthand in the field for the design tradition developed in the Netherlands from the 1970s onwards, codified today primarily through the CROW Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic.
[^5]: The CROW principles are the five criteria for cycling infrastructure design established by the Dutch national technology platform CROW: coherence, directness, safety, comfort and attractiveness. They form the reference framework of European cycling design, adopted (in principle) by the Romanian national standards SR 10144-1/2:2024.
[^6]: The Pietonalul Unirii — literally "the Unirii Pedestrian Precinct" — is a pedestrianised segment of Strada Unirii, one of Botoșani's central commercial streets. As is standard in Romanian pedestrian precincts, cycling is legally permitted at low speed, but the transition points between pedestrian and vehicular regimes are typically unmarked.
[^7]: NACTO is the American National Association of City Transportation Officials, whose Urban Bikeway Design Guide is a widely referenced counterpart to the European CROW manual. The two share most fundamental principles but diverge in detail on marking, signalisation and junction treatment.
[^8]: SR 10144-1:2024 and SR 10144-2:2024 are the revised Romanian national standards, published by ASRO (the Romanian Association for Standardisation) in November 2024, establishing dimensions, cross-sections and safety requirements for streets, pavements and cycling infrastructure. Their publication marked the first time in Romanian post-1989 urbanism that a national reference existed for the design of cycle paths.
[^9]: In Romania, the reference cycling advocacy body active on standards work is HaiCuBicla ("Come With Your Bike"), based in Bucharest, a member of ASRO. Smaller local groups exist in most county capitals. In other jurisdictions the reader will have their own equivalents — Cycling UK, the London Cycling Campaign, Fietsersbond in the Netherlands, and so on.
[^10]: Law 544/2001 is Romania's Freedom of Information equivalent, enabling any citizen to request public-interest documents from public authorities, with a statutory reply window of 10 to 30 days.
[^11]: The Romanian phrase episod politic care ne stricase dimineața is not tied to any specific event and reflects a general condition of daily political news that many Romanian professionals will recognise; readers may substitute their own recent morning.