Mamalyha – Kriva border queue today

What kind of crossing this is

Chernivtsi region, the Novoselytsia direction; the Moldovan side is Criva. This crossing on the road towards Briceni takes cars, coaches, pedestrians and lorries — an unusual combination for the small Moldovan direction, and it is precisely what makes Mamalyha the anchor post of this stretch of border.

By volume it is a calm crossing: the queue is short for most of the week, and Monday is the lightest day of all. But Mamalyha has a wider range than its averages suggest — individual hours on Tuesday afternoon and Saturday evening produce surges an order of magnitude above the usual level. In other words, what is calm here is most days, not every day.

For a driver that means Mamalyha is worth checking before you set out rather than trusting to its reputation as a quiet post. Its additional value is that it is one of the few on this stretch that reports live data: when neighbouring Kelmentsi, Sokyriany and Rososhany are silent, it is the queue at Mamalyha that gives the best sense of what is happening across the northern Moldovan direction as a whole.

This crossing handles: Cars, Buses, On foot.

You can cross here on foot — 4 of the 9 crossings on this border allow it.

Scheduled coaches have a lane of their own.

Right now it ranks 2 of the 9 crossings on this border that report data: 15 min outbound against 15 min at the fastest one (Kelmentsi – Larga).

Our calibration allows 6 minutes per car here. Across all crossings that constant runs from 4 to 10 minutes, and 4 of them are slower than this one.

Hence the formula for this crossing: 15 minutes for the crossing itself plus 6 minutes for every car ahead of you. Document checks, customs inspection and delays on the neighbouring side are not in that number — we count the queue only. The full method, and what this figure leaves out →