At the Giurgiulesti – Galati border crossing point, a coordinated control point will be set up similar to the one in Leuseni, state secretary of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Regional Development Mircea Pascăluță announced during public debates centering on the transport in the Republic of Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. According to him, the establishment of coordinated control will streamline border traffic and reduce waiting time at the border.
The official noted that the Moldovan authorities have excellent cooperative relations with Romania, in particular, thanks to the European interconnection mechanism, which allows financing infrastructure.
“We have a very good relationship with Romania, including through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) program, which provides for the rehabilitation of the railway infrastructure in Giurgiulesti region. It is a joint Ukraine-Romania-Republic of Moldova project. I really appreciate the involvement of our counterparts from Romania. They, having experience in accessing such funds, helped us and continue to help us. Writing projects for these non-reimbursable funds for the transport sector is a good thing we can learn from them. Romania has achieved a very good result in accessing funds, both in the railway sector and in the road sector. And we learn from them,” said the state secretary of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Regional Development.
According to the official, joint Romania-Moldova projects aimed at modernizing road and rail infrastructure and digitizing transport services are under discussion.
“We want to work on new railway interconnection projects. We want the whole process of changing bogies to be much easier. We want to build a number of European gauge lines on our territory, in the border area. We are talking to Romania about this because we have to submit a joint project. Moreover, we have also signed memorandums of cooperation with Romania in transport development. A general-level memorandum, which provides for cooperation in the construction of bridges, the working out of a strategic view in terms of road sector development. We have another separate memorandum aimed at the digitization of transport services. Here, both the Republic of Moldova and Romania are at an early stage, but together we can achieve very good results to pilot more projects that will benefit the carriers,” explained Mircea Păscăluță.
According to the state secretary, in order to streamline the traffic at the Moldovan-Romanian border, coordinated control is to be established at the Giurgiulesti-Galati crossing point. The model will be similar to the one at the Leuseni-Albița border crossing point.
“Recently, we opened joint control at the Giurgiulesti-Reni point, on the border with Ukraine, and now we are in advanced discussions on the opening of a new coordinated control point, similar to the one in Leuseni, at the Giurgiulesti-Galati point. And there we have considerable help from Romania because the Romanian side will provide us with all the customs infrastructure. We will have to use the customs infrastructure so that we no longer have those long queues on the Giurgiulesti-Galati-Reni border segment. The help that Romania offers to us is not limited to aspects of technical expertise. They also provide fairly substantial financial investments,” said Mircea Păscăluță.
The public debate entitled “Transport in the Republic of Moldova, Romania and Ukraine: interconnection and European integration” was the sixteenth edition of the project “Double integration through cooperation and information. Continuity”, funded by the Department for Relations with the Republic of Moldova. The content of the debate does not represent the official position of the Department for Relations with the Republic of Moldova.
