Skopje Mayor Orce Đorđievski says the BRT project - the bus rapid transit system that sat stuck for years - is back on. The plan calls for buying 49 vehicles of various types for Skopje and the surrounding municipalities, with 25 million euros going into local roads, backed by the World Bank.

The reason this is needed would be funny if it weren't sad: the current public transit system is over 40 years old and was designed for the Skopje of 1984. The city grew, sprawled, choked on traffic - and the buses stayed in the eighties. The previous mayors - Kostovski, Trajanovski, Šilegov, Arsovska - all took their turn burning time on a tram project that never happened.

At the same time, the city is promising a turnaround on waste collection. The number of working garbage trucks climbed from 16 to 50-60 a day, and 2,600 new containers are being bought - the first big purchase of its kind in a decade. "From September, the waste won't be handled in the media the way it has been until now," the mayor pledged.

And here's where healthy skepticism belongs. Every new mayor of Skopje shows up with the same set of promises - transit, cleanliness, a new era of urban mobility - and every predecessor left behind a tram that never came and containers that overflowed. Maybe this time is different, maybe the 49 vehicles really will roll, maybe September really will bring a shift. But the people of Skopje have heard all these sentences before. So the smartest stance is simple: let them deliver, then we'll believe. A city doesn't change with statements, but with buses that actually run.