Queues: Ukraine–Romania border today

Six crossings, and one of them is not a road

We publish six crossings on the Romanian border, and one of them works on a fundamentally different principle from the rest.

Orlivka – Isaccea is a ferry across the Danube, not a road crossing in the usual sense. A car crosses the border on the deck of a ferry, so the wait depends not only on how long the queue is but on how much space is left on the next sailing. It is the only crossing of its kind on the whole site, and comparing it directly with its neighbours does not really work.

The other five are ordinary road crossings. You can cross on foot at five of the six; the single exception is Diakove – Halmeu. Coach lanes exist at four: Diakove, Krasnoilsk, Orlivka and Porubne.

Porubne – Siret is the only crossing on this border with every lane open at once — cars, buses and pedestrians. If you do not know which one to pick, it is the sensible default.

The quietest crossings on the entire site are here

The Romanian border is much calmer overall than the Polish one, and two of its crossings are the quietest of everything we publish:

• Solotvyno – Sighetu Marmației: a typical week runs from 15 to 23 minutes. There is virtually no difference between days of the week here, which is rare
• Krasnoilsk – Vicovu de Sus: from 15 to 39 minutes
• Diakove – Halmeu: from 16 minutes to 1 hour 32 minutes
• Diakivtsi – Racovăț: from 30 minutes to 1 hour 49 minutes
• Porubne – Siret: from 50 minutes to 1 hour 14 minutes
• Orlivka – Isaccea (ferry): from 1 hour 13 minutes to 2 hours 33 minutes

Porubne deserves a note of its own: across 60 days of observation, the gap between its best and worst day of the week is under 25 minutes. It is the flattest crossing on the site — choosing a day of the week barely helps here, because the queue is much the same whenever you arrive.

When not to go

The heaviest day is spread unevenly across this border, and there is no single rule of the kind that holds on the Hungarian or Polish side:

• Diakove and Diakivtsi are worst on Saturday, peaking in the evening and the morning respectively (Diakove: Saturday 18:00–20:00; Diakivtsi: Saturday 10:00–12:00)
• Porubne is worst on Sunday, but its peak window is Thursday evening, 18:00–20:00
• Krasnoilsk is worst on Monday, peaking late in the evening, 21:00–23:00
• Orlivka is worst on Wednesday; the ferry's heaviest window is Tuesday 14:00–16:00
• Solotvyno is worst on Tuesday, and even then the peak window means about 45 minutes

At the road crossings the calmest windows are the deep night and the early morning. On the ferry it works differently: there is no night-time trough in the same sense, because everything is governed by the sailing timetable.

How the wait is calculated

15 minutes for the crossing procedure itself, plus 6 minutes for every car ahead of you — on this border the calibration is the same at every crossing where we count cars.

The figure excludes document checks, customs inspection and delays on the Romanian side. We do not publish truck queues — those are handled by eCherha, Ukraine's official electronic queue.