Note to the alien anthropologist: whatever terms such as "town", "city" or their older brothers "urbs" and "polis" used to denote about some particular settlements at the time when they were formed, there are times, such as the twenty-first century, when "the town" meant simply: a place where people gathered together by simple virtue of a temporary spatial concentration of resources. While this aspect has proven to be beneficial for the economy of human societies throughout history, in times such as the twenty-first century, the same aspect decoupled from social and cultural cohesion has lead poor humans to some interesting paradoxes. One of these many paradoxes, which I briefly discuss in this article, arises when decades of work to build an entire echafaudage of technology and human activities oriented towards efficient intraurban transportation yield a net result that's more of a hindrance than any help at all.
In particular, the town where I live, Bucharest, has been the target of quite a bit of flak on this blog over time. 'Tis very much a personal matter, of course, but whether you believe it or not, I am largely shielded by most urban problems nowadays; for example, I can hear the rooster each and every morning instead of the autovehicular traffic permeating the boulevards and I don't use public transportation (anymore). Which is why I won't even touch the subject of public transportation in the Bucharest of 2021, I simply don't know what's there and they could simply dismantle all the infrastructure for all I care. On the other hand, everyone and their dog in Bucharest owns a car (bought on credit, of course, of course) and uses it for their daily commute, which makes this settlement more of a large autopark1 than anything else.
Everyone except yours truly. I prefer using other people's automobiles, if only because there are so many, and among these so very many, you'd expect there are plenty of drivers willing to take their fellow citizen from point A to point B. For example if you take a walk to the nearest large boulevard and look at the cars sitting in traffic at nine o'clock in the morning, you'll notice most of them are going towards the centre and most of them are populated with one, maybe two people. You'd expect many of these people would be eager to hitchhike a potential friend to the centre, right? Well of course fucking not, they got them cars to isolate themselves from other people in the first place, that's how much they hate each other -- and themselves.
Anyway, one'd expect that the obvious mode of transportation for the paying individual in Bucharest in the year 2021 is the yellow taxi. I for one haven't used those since 2017, for the simple reason that they're operated by the lowliest of the lowest of the orcs who are dead set on ripping one off. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind paying twenty bucks for a ten-kilometer ride; I just entirely loathe being asked for this sum "as a suprise", when the official fare was advertised as fifty cents per kilometer, only because them dudes are coaxed into keeping tariffs low. No, I don't negotiate with terrorists, especially when it's blatantly obvious that the terrorists in question are looking to scam me. So yes, in 2017, after resorting to simply walking as an alternative to taxis, I finally bit the bullet and got myself one of these USG-operated surveillance devices called Ubers, which then became my only alternative for intraurban transportation, apart from my very own legs and the motorized ones owned by my bourgeois friends.
Four years in, the difference between yellowcabs and Ubers reduces itself to... not much, really. When you call an Uber, you will be asked to wait any interval of time between two and twenty minutes. And if you're waiting for twenty minutes, you have no option to search for a quicker ride, and if you're waiting for only two, you're warned to not keep the driver waiting for too long. Moreover, most times you'll go with an actual taxi driver with an Uber shirt2, the kind of dude who, without being asked, will yammer on about how his life is so hard, he's got seven kids at home while the gas prices are going up and he can't keep up with it unless surge pricing goes into effect... and it's not like it doesn't, since the demand has skyrocketed since covid times and more often than not you'll end up waiting for a ride for twenty minutes rather than the proverbial couple.
The naïve reader will now go "Lucian, why not try taxis again? maybe the services have improved meanwhile". If by improved you mean that they've gotten worse, then yes, I agree with you. Back in 2017 I was having this issue at midnight, when taxipeople somehow magically turned into sharks under the pressures of demand, or winter, or whatever the fuck. In 2021 they're practicing their scams in broad daylight with the local police nearby, ready to pull out their bats if you have the nerve to call the dispatch ladies and file a complaint. Funny how, for all their ceaseless complaining, them orcs don't like complaints, huh.
I expect this won't last long. In the future, either in the best case private transport services will entirely devolve into Turkish-style price haggling, or worst case they'll disappear altogether and I'll have moved to a small town in the middle of wherever, 'cause I sure as fuck won't walk ten kilometers by foot to reach point B, where I need to solve urgent issues.
Now perhaps you see what I mean when I say that Mangalia, the small townlet by the shittoral that wasn't blessed with all the facilities of the fabled capital, is actually much more of an "urbe" than Bucharest, which is meanwhile crumbling under the pressure of cars, garbage, rats and (temporarily) network effects.
Yesterday I took some time for myself to stroll down the alleys, streets and boulevards downtown. And I must say, while I have no pity whatsoever for miserable chauffeurs, that I entirely understand the predicament they're in. Most of what they do in this town all day long involves simply... sitting. Whether in an alleyway or on a boulevard, the driver has no choice but to sit until a lane is free or until the guy in front of him moves. Each street, no matter how small, is at some point during the day full of automobiles that are either sitting in the parking lot or otherwise sitting waiting to move.
Bucharest has become one big parking lot, from seven in the morning to nine in the evening.
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