In Macedonia it seems the easiest thing is to slap a padlock on it. The Vodno cable car won't run all summer, and nobody knows when it will reopen. The reasoning - safety is at risk. And that's fair, no one wants to gamble with human lives.

But the question is different: how did we let ourselves arrive, after 15 years, at a situation where a facility worth millions of euros becomes unsafe? Where were the institutions, the services, the inspections, and the accountability?

And this isn't an isolated case. We have too many facilities, projects and pieces of infrastructure that are easily closed, and then sit forgotten for years. From sports halls, swimming pools, cultural centres, roads falling apart, all the way to tourist amenities that were supposed to bring life and visitors.

The easiest thing is to say "closed." The hardest is to maintain, to plan, to keep a system running. And citizens are rightly asking - if it closes today, does anyone actually know when it'll open again?

It seems with us the temporary very often becomes permanent.