Nearly 1,500 miles of the rivers are considered navigable. All of the Danube—over 900 miles—that is within or along the southern border of the country is navigable and, in fact, connects the Black Sea and Romania with all points upstream—through Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria to Ulm in West Germany. The Prut, flowing along much of the eastern border with the Soviet Union, accounts for most of the remaining navigable mileage. Other streams are useful in some degree for timber rafting and for floating agricultural products downstream. Rapid currents in hilly sections, silting and meandering streambeds in the lowlands, and fog and ice in winter months, however, limit the commercial usefulness of the rivers. Ice stops traffic on the Danube River for an average of more than one month per year and on the other streams from two to three months.

The country's topography does not lend itself to the development of an extensive system of canals. There are short canals in the western lowlands. Two of them connect to the Tisza River in Yugoslavia but, as with this pair, further development of the waterways in this portion of the country would be economically advantageous only when they connected to points in Hungary or Yugoslavia. Most of the northern and central regions are hilly or mountainous.

Cargo shipped on rivers and canals in 1969 was less than 1 percent of that carried by the other transport systems, but most of it was transported for relatively long distances along the Danube River. Passengers carried constituted an even more minute percentage of the total and, because the largest numbers of them rode river ferries, the relative passenger mileage percentage was even lower.

Airlines

Commercial aviation is altogether state owned and is operated by an office in the Department of Automotive, Maritime, and Air Transportation that, with the Department of Railroads, is part of the Ministry of Transportation. Romanian Air Transport—always referred to in common and in most official usage as TAROM, derived from Transporturi Aeriene Romane—serves a dozen or more cities in the country and contacts about twenty national capitals outside the country. These include Moscow, all of the capitals of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact) member nations, and about a dozen capitals in Western Europe and the Middle East. Service to nearly all of the external points consists of no more than one round trip flight weekly to each. Domestic service has expanded steadily since 1950 but varies throughout the year to provide more frequent trips during the holiday and tourist seasons.

The line carries some cargo but an insignificant amount when compared with other modes of transportation. It has, however, begun to carry a more significant number of passengers. This traffic increased from less than 40,000 in 1950 to about 780,000 in 1969. Each year since 1965 it has carried approximately 100,000 more passengers than in the year preceding.

Pipelines

Most liquid petroleum products and natural gas are moved via pipeline. The largest network of liquid lines serves the large oilfield in the Ploiesti area and the smaller one in west-central Walachia. They connect the fields with refineries and transport the refined products to Danube River ports and to Constanta on the Black Sea coast. Lines also transfer crude oil from the Moldavian oilfield to its refineries, but there were no lines in 1970 to transport finished products from those refineries.

Natural gas is piped to all parts of Transylvania from sources in the center of the province, but the Carpathians are an obstacle to its distribution to other parts of the country. One major line crosses the Transylvanian Alps to serve the Bucharest area, and another crosses the Moldavian Carpathians through Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. It serves areas to the southeast as far as Galati, on the Danube River.

Merchant Marine