Brussels' New Traffic Nightmare: Hungry Mice

Decaying road tunnels have left Brussels in a perpetual state of traffic chaos, but repairs are apparently on hold due to what CityLab deems possibly "the world's worst excuse for poor infrastructure": hungry rodents. Because the transportation department was housed 25 years ago in a hotel (apparently when the responsibility for the roads passed from federal hands into local ones) and didn't have a lot of space, the original construction blueprints for some of the city's major tunnels were instead filed away in the pillars under a highway bridge, Reuters reports. Apparently the four-legged creatures got to them before their two-legged counterparts.

The Telegraph reports the plans were stored in that less-than-ideal location for two decades, and were moved to a typical storage facility in 2010. But by then "they were apparently eaten by mice," the ex-chief of Brussels' infrastructure department informed city officials on Wednesday. (Well, they do say city mice are smarter than country mice.)