Guiding Lines: Green Parking


And in fact for car owners this is not a joke. They are tired of looking for parking near their offices, and for a decent place in the yard under a window are ready to fight with the visitors of neighbors who have borrowed the best places. They hate the white collar drivers from the nearby business center that eternally flood the convenient grassy areas outside their buildings with foreign branded cars. In Moscow there are more than 3 million cars, not including cars that just pass through and only 1.5 million actual parking spaces, according to the department for town planning policies.

Now in 2007 there is a situation where investors do not wish to build car parks because they can't sell them, and car owners are not ready to buy a space for $20,000 and above. Investors will not reduce their rates of sale because of the high cost of construction ($10,000 per space and more, according to market players) and other known risks and charges which push up the price of any garage in Russia, be it underground, multi-storey, outdoor or a mechanized complex. If each flat in a 22-storey, 1,000 apartment building had a car and each business center provided one car space for every 100 sq.m of rented space, it would be necessary to build a similar size area in each case for parking; on the roof, underground or nearby, and this is hardly likely to be envisaged in a project. For the investor such variants are unprofitable. And there the vicious circle lies.

In the meantime in the first bright spring days in the capital, first assistant to the mayor Peter Aksenov, announced, as he so likes to do, several subbotniki (Saturdays when people work to make the area nice) and days of accomplishment. These days are useful and those who take part make grassy areas neat, and mend things that are broken in courtyards, streets and lanes. But is it not necessary for town governors, heads of prefectures, local authorities and the management of housing and communal service companies of the city to look more closely at the courtyards of Moscow? Namely for what and for whom they are doing this for. It is impossible not to notice that flowerbeds in our courtyards became parking spaces a long time ago. In fact, if all subbotniki are for the people, and for beauty and order then why not approach the cardinal problem of parking and partially adapt grassy areas in courtyards for cars? The economic departments of the capital have a good program that, apparently, yields results. If, with this program and all the resources from subbotniki, they adapted some grassy areas, which take up a lot of space in the city, imagine how much parking space would suddenly be available both in the center and in the suburbs! And then the remaining grassy areas would remain untouched and pleasant to look at. Annually, under the city town administration program 330 hectares of the city's grass areas are repaired. But the grass does not grow for long for in areas where buildings are numerous cars park in self-made spaces on these strips of green vegetation, turning lush nature into bald waste ground.

How to convert grassy areas for parking is a problem for economic departments. Should they only form narrow strips of grass and asphalt the rest? Should they completely get rid of grassy areas and only place flowerbeds right outside building entrances? Last spring they brought peat for the grassy areas so probably next year they will find money for asphalt. A good example in relation to this is Kurkino. Here they have laid tiles. Now dirt is not smeared along the street, grass makes its way through the trellised asphalt, and they say that the ground will not be affected.