Elо Bogatovo, through which the main road from Sevlievo to Veliko Tarnovo passes, now has a traffic sign every 28 meters. This is the result of a public procurement for the installation of signs on roads and highways across the country, valued at a total of 100 million BGN.
Whether placing so many road signs within a short distance has any relation to road safety is highly debatable, as some of the “Priority Road” signs lead to meadows or roadside bushes.
However, this is not the view of the Road Infrastructure Agency (RIA), which is the contracting authority for the public procurement. It covers the republican roads and highways nationwide, is divided among six administrative planning regions, and is scheduled for five years.
According to the agency, the traffic organization project was “prepared by a qualified designer” and is “compliant with current regulations.” To support this, RIA cites Article 54, Paragraph 1 of Regulation No. 18/2001 on road signage. This text states: “In populated areas and settlements, a B3 ‘Priority Road’ sign shall be placed before every intersection.”
But if there are no intersections, why?
You don’t need to be intimately familiar with the traffic rules to quickly notice, when passing through the village of Bogatovo, that someone has overdone it with the placement of vertical road markings.
Some of the signs indicating that the road has priority are placed literally in the middle of nowhere, with one even leading to the approach of a private house. It’s likely that the designer considered stairs below road level as an intersection. Another sign is positioned among roadside bushes, where no intersection is visible nearby. In several places, the priority road sign is indeed placed before an intersection, but there is also a sign after the intersection to ensure clarity.
According to the Road Traffic Act, a “crossing” is a place where two or more roads intersect, diverge, or meet at the same level. However, on the roadside section near Bogatovo, signs indicate the presence of an intersection where, in reality, there is none.
The only plausible explanation for this “overdoing” is that it was a way to justify the allocation of more funds under the project. If not, it remains unexplained why there are unnecessary traffic signs, especially since APИ claims that the traffic regulation in this area is “in accordance with the regulation.”
Unnecessary and costly
The price of a single B3 “Priority Road” sign is 68 BGN including VAT, which covers manufacturing, delivery, and installation with a steel galvanized post and a reflective face – made with glass beads, explain from RIA.
The cost of a galvanized steel post used to install traffic signs is 373 BGN including VAT, bringing the total for one traffic sign to approximately 441 BGN. The price of a “Stop” sign should be roughly the same. These calculations indicate that, for the specific kilometer and hundred meters of the national road, RIA has paid just over 17,000 BGN for traffic signs.
The public procurement for installing traffic signs was divided into six separate lots, corresponding to the six planning regions in the country. In the North-Central region, which includes Veliko Tarnovo, Gabrovo, Silistra, Ruse, and Razgrad, the contract is worth 16.6 million BGN and was awarded to the consortium “Signs North.”
This consortium includes Varna-based companies “A.D. Hold” Ltd. and “Varna Arc Pro.” The second competitive bid submitted for the tender was from “PSP Group.”
The company “A.D. Hold” will also install road markings in three of the six planning regions, with a combined value of nearly 68 million BGN. This means that over the five-year period—the duration of the contract—the company responsible for the signs near the village of Bogatovo will receive from APИ orders totaling around 82 million BGN including VAT, according to publicly accessible information about the procurement.
