The Dorcol Tram Was Not an Accident, It Was an X-Ray

On the Monday after the tram jumped the rails on Dorcol, the train carrying fifteen injured passengers was not the first topic in the cafe where I take breakfast. The first topic was some morning broadcast about Croatia on N1, the second what to do about Vlahovic at Juventus, the third something about the price of imported beans.

The tram came fourth, with the line: “Well, that has to be looked at, it can’t go on like that.” Then we moved on.

A few weeks later, the sociologist notices what that order revealed. Fifteen people had been injured in a Belgrade public transport vehicle, one seriously, two others with serious injuries, twelve with surface wounds. And it was not the first topic.

This is not accidental. That is the sociological weight of the event, and it remains to be said.

A derailment as symptom, not exception

When something is not held to be first, that does not mean it is unimportant. It means that in the shared emotional economy it has stopped being recognisable as an exception. The Dorcol tram derailment in May 2026 was not the exception, it was the symptom.

A symptom of what. The sociologist has to say so before the next paragraph, or the essay disperses.

It is a symptom of the structural age of public infrastructure in Belgrade and Serbia, which has aged chronologically over the past decade, while politics has not decided what to do with that age. Tram line 2, on which the incident took place, has existed since 1936. Individual rails were last replaced in 1981.

The cars running that line average more than forty years old, the newest dating to 2010. The rails on Dorcol, according to a GSP statement on 25 May, “show wear consistent with their installation age, but outside the standards for safe operation in the 2026 season.”

Larkin and the infrastructural visibility crisis

I pivot to the sociology of infrastructure. In “The Politics of Infrastructure” (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2013), anthropologist Brian Larkin describes a phenomenon he calls the “infrastructural visibility crisis.”

Larkin’s claim:

Modern societies are structured around invisible infrastructure (water, electricity, public transport, sewage), which we begin to see only when it fails. At the moment infrastructure becomes visible, it is already in crisis.

The Dorcol tram derailment is the point at which Belgrade’s public transport became visible. Which means it had entered crisis before that, only politics had not named the crisis until it broke against the wall of the Tsarist Adviser’s building.

The numbers that confirm it

According to research by Bloomberg Adria in April 2026, carried out by the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Belgrade, the average year of manufacture of GSP fleet cars is 1989. Half the fleet is older than thirty-seven years.

The rails in central Belgrade average forty-six years of age. The future incidence of accidents with the same cause (human factor and technical factor on the rails) is, according to modelling by the Faculty of Transport in the same year, less favourable than in neighbouring regional capitals:

• Sofia
• Zagreb
• Skopje

Belgrade’s public transport lags behind not only Vienna (which could be explained by historical differences in funding), but also Zagreb, with which it has shared a comparable inflationary position since 1991. The chronological effort to modernise the infrastructure has not been a political priority.

What it says about the class nature of transport

Sociologically, public transport is not a neutral thing. It is a class thing. Who rides Belgrade public transport in 2026, the kind that is not Bolt.

According to IPSOS research in April, the average Belgrade tram user is:

• older than forty-six (54 percent of all users)
• earning under 110,000 dinars a month (61 percent)
• without a driving licence, or with a licence but no vehicle in regular use (47 percent)

Teenagers, pensioners, low-paid service workers, cleaners, waiters, secondary school teachers. The average Bolt user in Belgrade is younger than thirty-eight (66 percent), earns over 140,000 dinars a month (72 percent), has a household vehicle but chooses Bolt for speed and parking (54 percent).

When a tram jumps the rails on Dorcol, the injured are mostly from the first group. Bolt users see it on the news and carry on driving.

Blagojevic-Huson and marginalised normality

Sociologist Marina Blagojevic-Huson, who in “A Book on Invisibility” (Institute for Sociological Research, 2009) developed the concept of “marginalised normality,” describes the phenomenon in which one part of society (gender, class, ethnic group) exists in public space on condition that it remain invisible.

Blagojevic developed the concept in the context of women in Serbian post-socialism, but it can be transposed productively to public transport users. The Belgrade tram user in 2026 is part of marginalised normality. He exists, he is counted, but in public discourse he is not a primary subject.

When fifteen such people are injured in one derailment, the news lasts forty-eight hours and fades. If fifteen Bolt users were injured in one Bolt-vehicle crash, the news would last a month, with a full reconstruction of the cause in all major media.

Modernisation is planned, but not happening

A serious counter-argument. There is a reading, common in circles close to city power, according to which modernisation of public transport is under way, with new CAF trolleybuses (announced in 2025 for 2027-2028) and Stadler trams (announced in 2026 for 2028-2030). By that logic, sociological analysis of failure ignores the time dimension, because modernisation is planned, only delayed.

The argument has partial value. Modernisation is planned. But the question is sociological, not technical. Why have plans for public transport modernisation come every decade since 2000, with every new mayor (Djilas, Mali, Vesic, Sapic), and why has only a smaller part of each plan been delivered.

The answer is political, not technical. Public transport does not get priority because its users are not a loud class, no powerful business centre champions it, and it has no serious civic lobby. The infrastructure crisis is a consequence of a quiet class asymmetry, not a lack of knowledge.

The waiter who walks the last few stops

I return to the cafe after the tram derailment. After five minutes the conversation about the tram moved on. The waiter, a man in his fifties who rides in from Vozdovac by morning bus, arrives before eight and leaves after nine, said nothing about the tram when we paid.

I asked him: “How are you getting home by bus?”

He replied: “I walk the last few stops, because the tram I’m used to isn’t running on that line, something broke.”

That answer captured everything that mattered. The people who use the tram have adapted to it being unreliable on any given day. The question that remains, and which belongs not only to the city authorities but to all of us riding Bolt or our cars, goes roughly like this.

If our public infrastructure, which carries almost exclusively the poorer half of the city, decays slowly and quietly while our private choices revolve around the make of car and the brand of taxi app, how long can the city function as a community. And, worth asking of ourselves, how much have our private choices made public infrastructure not get the attention it needs.