# When did modernity reach your town? *Marius Comper · 8 September 2026 · [HTML edition](https://mariuscomper.uk/modernitatea/en/) · [Ediția în română](https://mariuscomper.uk/modernitatea/)* Every year Romania's National Statistics Institute counts, for every locality in the country, the kilometres of water, sewer and gas pipes and the gigacalories delivered through district heating. Laid end to end, the 36 editions become a timeline of modernisation, commune by commune. It shows that modernity arrived in layers: in 2025, 1,065 localities have a water network but no sewerage, and 2.96 million people live in them. In others, the sewer came more than 30 years after the water. And one layer has left: of 382 localities that once had district heating, 56 still do. - **1,065** localities have a drinking-water network in 2025 but no sewerage. In 2010 there were 1,465, the most in the series. - **33 years** separate the first appearance of water (1992) and of sewerage (2025) in the statistics for Ghizela, a commune in Timiș county. - **382 → 56** localities with district heating: those that ever appear in the series, against those still reporting in 2025. - **736** localities have all three basic networks in 2025, water, sewerage and gas. 187 already had them in 1990. The HTML edition has an explorer: search for your locality and see, for each of the four networks, the first year it appears in the statistics and how it has grown since, on a map of all 3,181 localities, year by year from 1990 to 2025. ## Water came first, sewerage came later In 1990, of today's 3,181 localities, 1,349 had a drinking-water network, 520 had sewerage and 311 had gas pipes. All 103 cities had water and sewerage, but only 74 also had gas. Of the 2,627 communes of the time, 1,037 had a water network, 223 had sewerage, 148 had gas and 1,522 had none of the three. By 2025 water reaches 2,740 localities, sewerage 1,696 and gas 1,006. Water had its wave in the 2000s: in 2004 alone 121 new localities appear in the series with a water network, the most in any single year, and between 2004 and 2010 another 506 join. Sewerage waited. In the two decades from 1991 to 2010, 372 new localities appear with sewerage; in the fifteen years after 2010, 915 do. The year of EU accession, 2007, sits right on the boundary between the two waves. The accession treaty gave Romania until the end of 2018 to collect and treat waste water in every settlement above 2,000 population equivalents; the deadline passed, an infringement procedure is under way, and networks keep appearing at the fastest pace in the whole series. About 190 communes created after 2000 enter the series when they were created, so the 2004 peak is partly administrative: 48 of its 121 localities are new communes. Gas follows the geography of gas fields and trunk pipelines: 311 localities had it in 1990, almost three in five of them in just eight counties, Mureș, Sibiu, Alba, Cluj and Brașov in Transylvania, Prahova, Dâmbovița and Argeș in Wallachia, and 1,006 have it in 2025. Even so, 64 of the country's 319 towns and cities have no gas pipes in 2025, among them Borșa, with 28,653 residents, Băilești, Vicovu de Sus, Cernavodă and Calafat. ## How long it takes from the tap to the sewer For localities where both water and sewerage appear in the series after 1990, the distance between them can be measured. There are 679 such localities that already existed in 1992. In 188 of them the two networks appear in the same year. In 473 the sewer comes later, at a median distance of 11 years. In 277 localities the gap exceeds ten years, and in 85 it exceeds twenty. The record belongs to Ghizela, a commune of 1,181 people on the Timiș plain: water appears in the statistics in 1992, sewerage in 2025. Luciu (Buzău), Livada (Arad) and Hoghilag (Sibiu) waited 32 years. Larger still is the group that is still waiting: 891 localities existing in 1992 have a water network in 2025 and no sewerage, and 322 of them have had water since before 1990. The most populous is Vicovu de Sus, a town in Suceava county with 17,842 residents and a water network since 1990. In 2025, 441 localities in Romania still have no public drinking-water network; 1.26 million people live in them. ## Romania with water but no sewer The number of localities with a tap and no drain rose from 846 in 1990 to 1,465 in 2010, when two out of three localities with a water network had no sewerage. It has fallen every year since, to 1,065 in 2025. Counted in people, on the basis of the registered population, 2.96 million Romanians live in 2025 in a locality that has a water network but no sewerage, 13.7% of the population; in 2010 the share was 21.6%. Another 1.26 million, 5.8%, live in a locality with no water network at all; in 1992 it was one in four. The counties with the most localities without piped water are Suceava (40), Dolj (33), Teleorman (33), Botoșani (27) and Giurgiu (27). Among towns, four have no sewerage in 2025: Vicovu de Sus, Milișăuți and Miercurea Sibiului never had it in the series, and Răcari, in Dâmbovița county, had it in 1990 and drops out of the statistics after 2004. Three towns have no water network either: Miercurea Sibiului, Milișăuți and Cajvana, a town of 10,577 people in Suceava county that reports a water network up to 2003 and not after. ## The year of completion For 187 localities, mostly towns and cities, water, sewerage and gas appear together from 1990 or earlier. Another 551 localities existing in 1992 completed the set between 1991 and 2025, more than two thirds of them, 381, after accession in 2007. In 2025 there are 736 localities with all three, and 2,445 without, most of them because sewerage or gas is missing. The year of completion is the year of first appearance in the statistics; the inauguration may be far older. ## How district heating died In 1993, the first year with locality-level data, 330 towns and communes received heat through a public network, 36.3 million gigacalories in all. In 2025 there are 56 localities and 5.7 million gigacalories, 84% less. Of the 382 localities that ever appear in the series with heat distributed, 326 have dropped out of it: 107 by 2000, another 110 by 2005, the rest in a trickle that has not stopped even after 2020. Seven communes still have district heating in 2025. Surviving in the series is not the same as being healthy. Of the 56 systems left, 20 deliver less than a tenth of their peak in 2025: Brașov fell from 1.17 million gigacalories (1999) to 26,572, Galați from 1.08 million to 12,882, Sfântu Gheorghe from 662,000 to about 3,000, Baia Mare from 653,000 to about 2,000. Bucharest, which delivered 9.55 million gigacalories in 1997, still delivers 2.64 million, 46.5% of everything distributed in the country. The exceptions are few: Oradea peaked in 2005 and keeps a third of that, Ploiești peaked only in 2013, and Cernavodă distributes almost as much in 2025 as in its peak year, 2021. Dropping out of the series means the locality no longer reports heat distributed; the pipes may stay in the ground for years afterwards. 53 localities have gaps in their reporting, and for 45 of them the series ends before 2025 anyway. ## The paved streets of the towns For the 319 towns and cities, the institute also reports the length of streets and of paved streets. In 1990, 12,082 of 21,065 kilometres of urban streets were paved, 57.4%. In 2025 it is 24,554 of 32,465, 75.6%. The median town went from 55.6% to 78.0%. In Bârlad the share rose from 49.0% to 72.6%. ## Method Data come from the institute's TEMPO-Online database, matrices by county and locality GOS106B (water), GOS110A (sewerage), GOS116A (gas), GOS109A (heat), GOS104A and GOS105A (streets), updated 27 August 2026, for 1990–2025 (1993–2025 for heat). The institute records a value only if the network exists on the locality's territory; a missing value is the only signal of absence, and the presence of a network leaves open how many households are connected. "Appears in 2004" means the first year with a value, whatever the year of inauguration. 235 localities created after 2000 (no registered population on 1 January 1992) are excluded from the gap and completion calculations. The number of localities with each network matches the institute's summary matrices for 2010, 2020 and 2025, and the locality sums match the national totals in every year. Population shares use the registered (domicile) population (POP107D). Outlines: geo-spatial.org and ANCPI, CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: [TEMPO-Online](http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-online/#/pages/tables/insse-table). European context: [European Commission, SWD(2022) 271](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52022SC0271).