Romania, Bulgaria Mull Two New Danube Bridges

Romania on Tuesday approved the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Bulgaria to carry out feasibility studies on the construction of two new bridges over the Danube.

The bridges will connect Nikopol in Bulgaria with Turnu Magurele in Romania, and Silistra in Bulgaria with Calarasi in Romania.

Construction of the new bridges over the Danube will cost around 200-250 million euro, and funding will be granted under the cross border cooperation program Bulgaria-Romania 2014-2020.

The common application will be submitted next year and the overall technical preparation will then begin, novinite.com reports.

Bulgaria and Romania have expressed a wish to build as many bridges as possible over the Danube in order to link the poverty-stricken localities in the area and increase the flow of investment.

Currently, only two bridges connect the neighbouring countries. The 1.7-kilometre-long bridge linking Vidin in Bulgaria and Calafat in Romania opened in June 2013, after years of delays due to technical difficulties.

Before that, Bulgaria and Romania only had a single bridge along their 500-kilometre river border, between Giurgiu and Ruse.

This Communist-era "Friendship Bridge" is now over 50 years old and is heavily congested, with the two road and rail lanes wholly inadequate for today's larger volumes of traffic.