Universidad Autónoma de México  Higher school of economics

Course  - economics

The essay:

Road traffic in Moscow under Sobyanin: are

economic

measures effective?

Written by:

Maga Ivanova

Group №193  MDI program

05.04.20

Road traffic in Moscow has always aroused strong debates. After his

appointment in 2010, Sergei Sobyanin immediately called traffic jams as one of the  main problems in Moscow. The priority was to streamline the parking space. “We  need to put things in order with parking, especially in the center of Moscow.  Nowhere in the world it is allowed to throw a car “wherever I want” - across the  sidewalk or the road. It is impossible to solve this problem in such chaos“, Sobyanin  said in his interview for the newspaper “Vedomosti”. The pilot project for the  introduction of paid parking started on November 1, 2012 from the Karetny Ryad.  An hour of parking cost 50 rubles. Parkons examined the payment; they were cars  with video clips. In the absence of payment, a fine was given automatically. Its size  was 2500 rubles. For parking in the wrong place the fine was 3000 rubles. Such  fines are valid even now.

Within a few months, paid parking began to spread around the city gradually,

and in 2015 they went beyond the Third Transport Ring (TTK), and their maximum  cost in the center and on the embankments of the Moscow River reached 200  rubles per hour. Today the city has 80,000 paid parking. Most of them are located  in 85 districts of the city, in 36 districts parking remains free of charge.

According to Viktor Osipkov, the project manager at “Probkovorot”, it was

the draconian fines that influenced the fact that people stopped throwing cars  anywhere, and the average speed in the city began to grow.

“If it were not for the Moscow Parking Space project, a transport collapse

would have occurred in the capital of Russia”, says a representative of the transport  department. “Every day, the number of cars on the roads would be about 10%  more than the current traffic (3.9–4 million), and Moscow would be in 9-10-point  traffic jams”, he adds.

“Today, Moscow is no longer the world champion in traffic jams,” Sobyanin

said recently. “Motorists are increasingly refusing to travel to the city center by  their personal cars”, a spokesman for the transportation department said.  According to him, today in Moscow 70% of the population uses public transport.  This is one of the highest rates, in European cities it is about 60%.

But paid parking is believed not to affect the traffic situation in any way -

traffic jams still remain. Kirill Yankov, a member of the public council at the Ministry  of Transport of Russia, believes that in the center, on the contrary, they have  increased. “The number of parking spaces has been drastically reduced, but there  are categories of citizens who do not refuse to travel by personal transport, now  they come to the center and travel in circles in search of parking,” the expert  indicates. In his opinion, Moscow needs a large-scale program for the construction  of underground parking in the center like in European capitals. “But if the real goal  of the authorities is not to unload the roads, but to remove business life from the  city center completely, then their strategy is correct”, Yankov summarizes.

But it is possible to convince people to change their own cars to public

transport. Squeezing people out of personal vehicles, it is necessary to create  alternatives for them. The rejection from personal transport should be stimulated  by introducing the MAAS (mobility as a service) service, which will allow planning a  trip by public transport in real time. And it is necessary to provide a convenient  opportunity to compare the duration and cost of various combinations of transport  means through “one window”, configure the integration of public transport with  taxis, car sharing and other services.

Under Sobyanin, the city built more than 650 km of new roads, reconstructed

departure highways and interchanges, accelerated the construction of new lines  and metro stations, and commissioned passenger rail services along the Moscow  Central Ring.

Ground transportation has become more comfortable, but not enough, as

Yankov believes. “People have to walk for 15–20 minutes to the nearest metro  station. The metro is built mainly on the periphery, but it is not being developed in  the center of Moscow. In the center of Paris, for example, metro stations are very  densely located, while in Moscow the lines are much longer.

More than 100 kilometers of roads will be built in Moscow this year. And

almost all are complex engineering structures with viaducts, overpasses and  tunnels.

Excellent traffic management, reducing the load on major roads gives

positive results. Such measures maid by the state are really effective.

