Picture this: it is 8.30-9am on a typical work day. You are in your car, fighting the hellish traffic jams in Sofia. You know your route well and have long ago figured out when to start for your office, so as to make your way through the columns of vehicles blocking every major Sofia boulevard and still be there on time. And then, just when you think your perfectly crafted traffic-survival plan will once again secure you a more or less timely arrival, something unexpected comes up.

You either suddenly realise you have spent more than the usual amount of time waiting at a certain point or you find yourself stuck in traffic in some street that is usually not that busy. You look more closely out your window, searching for the cause and there it is – a refuse-collecting truck imperturbably doing its job at the busiest time of day.

Although this may seem hard to believe, it has somehow become part of everyday life for a number of Sofia residents. Having received a number of complaints from its readers and with most of its staff having such experiences on a regular basis, The Sofia Echo decided to take a closer look at the issue.

Elissaveta Blagoeva, head of the concessionary control department of the Sofia municipality inspectorate, said that it was the concessionaire who decided on the schedule of the refuse trucks. Currently, three companies hold the concession for refuse collection in Sofia, Wolf 96, Ditz and Chistota-Sofia. All three are owned by investment fund Equest.

Blagoeva said that the trucks collected the refuse in two shifts – a night one and a day one. The night shift started at 8.30pm, when the trucks left their depots, and finished about 2.30-3am. The night shift, however, collected the refuse only from the central part of Sofia. All other areas of the city have their refuse collected during the day shift, which starts at 6am and ends at about 3.30-4pm. Their schedule was fixed, Blagoeva said. According to this schedule, one can see when the trucks are supposed to collect the refuse from a specific street. “The only thing that can change this schedule is if the truck breaks down or some other technical problem occurs,” Blagoeva said. In this case, the trucks can either be early or late and not able to transport the refuse until the evening (if they are on the day shift).

So it turned out that collecting refuse during the rush hour is something regular and according-to-schedule rather than an exception to the rule. Although it does not occur on the major Sofia boulevards, but in the smaller (but still not less busy at this time of day) adjoining streets, it is distressing and nerve-racking to many Sofia residents, both drivers and people living in the nearby buildings.

“I’ve been working for two years now on Shipka Street. I go to work with my car and usually park on Veliko Turnovo Street. The area is packed with offices, embassies, diplomat residencies and apartment blocks. The streets are narrow, most of them one-way, so you can imagine the trouble the refuse trucks cause almost every morning. One can set his or her watch right by the arrival of the trucks, because they come to collect the refuse at exactly 9am, when everyone is trying to park or leave for work. This morning was no exception to the refuse trucks’ schedule. A truck was on Veliko Turnovo street at 8.40am, it blocked the whole street and consequently caused a jam on Assen Zlatarov, Shipka and Oborishte streets,” one passer-by who asked to remain anonymous told The Sofia Echo.

“I live on the corner of two busy streets in the centre of Sofia. It’s considered a nice area, and it is, but three rubbish bins outside our block are not enough for all the waste produced over the course of a day. And this is not collected until the next morning, when the refuse truck comes. It seems that someone would think to move this to a different hour – at 9am the majority of Sofia is on the road, including on our street, and the noise caused by idling vehicles and honking horns is horrendous,” local resident Amalia Darjany said.

And it only seems logical that the schedule for collecting refuse be set so as to avoid such misadventures. Asked whether she thought having the refuse trucks doing their job during the day was expedient at all, Blagoeva said they received a lot of complaints from people who were awakened by the trucks during the night shift.

Obviously, having the trucks work only at night is not an option, but, as another Sofia resident angry with having to deal with the trucks put it, “it is not rocket science to just find a way to collect the refuse in the 7.30-9am interval”. A possible solution to the problem that easily comes to mind is that the trucks either stop working for this hour and a half in the morning or concentrate their work in the least busy areas.

Blagoeva said that the long-awaited global position system (GPS), which had to be installed on all refuse trucks to monitor their activity, was expected to start working on March 15 2008. The installation of the GPS was entirely financed by the concessionaire. “I received information from the concessionaire that most of the trucks were already equipped with such a system, what was left was for it to become operational. We will have a control centre equipped with the whole tracking system here at the inspectorate, there will be such a centre at Sofia municipality as well.” So, together with the concessionaire’s control centre, the trucks would be monitored from three places at once.

Asked whether she thought GPS would help alleviate the inconveniences caused by the refuse trucks, Blagoeva said: “We hope it will help avoid such problems, so when we see where there is traffic, the truck could, for example, hold up and go there later, or could go earlier so that such jams do not occur”.

One thing is for sure, with more than 64 million leva earmarked for cleaning Sofia in the draft budget for 2008, it is an absolute disgrace that Sofia residents have to deal with such misfortunes on a daily basis. “This money is for the concessionaires, but whether they will receive all of it depends on the amount of work they do. [...] There were a number of cases when the concessionaires were sanctioned for not doing their whole job,” Blagoeva assured The Sofia Echo.

The Sofia Echo tried to contact, Equest spokesman Dimitar Dimitrov, but he could not be reached for comment.