Guiding Lines: Without extra hands

It’s disagreeable paying scruffy people in grubby green-yellow waistcoats, but if you refuse to pay you risk finding a scratch on your car, a punctured tire or even a broken window when you come back. Or even discovering that your car is missing. Towing companies working in a team with parking attendants take the cars of unyielding owners away to the next streets or to compounds in the suburbs of city.

Muscovites had hoped that a reasonable amount of parking meters would appear on the streets, changing the look of the city centre, making parking civilized, and at last, disaccustoming motorists from parking their cars in any old court yard.

The city authorities also showed interest in it.

Hundreds of thousands of square meters of parking are real contributors to the budgets of large cities of the world: Parking in the center of Paris costs up to 40 euros a day, in London - up to 25 pounds sterling, in Munich - up to 20 euros. By the roughest of calculations, that is hundreds of millions of euros a year. With the official cost for parking in the center of Moscow at 40 rubles per hour - the gains to the capital treasury are insignificant.

The majority of money collected from car owners settled in the pockets of the owners of legal and illegal parking, and the lesser part – in the pockets of the waist-coated parking attendants.

We all waited with baited breath.

Experimental parking meters appeared opposite the building at 15 Tverskaya ulitsa in 2005.

However it didn’t go further than an experiment, the devices often broke.

There were various reasons: drivers and crafty local parking attendants disappointed with loss the of income from one of the fruitful areas of the center of the capital, inserted old invalid coins, metro tokens, or simply round pieces of metal in the coin receptacle. But really, who would be satisfied with the official 40 rubles per hour, when unofficial rates for 2 hours parking, for example, at the zoo at weekends costs up to 500 rubles?

At the beginning of 2006 on the same Tverskaya street new parking meters appeared that accepted only notes. First deputy chief mayor of Moscow Peter Aksenov promised that parking meters would soon be established at all parking bays of the capital. But a new misfortune prevented this: January and part of February 2006 were the coldest in the last 25 years. And the city authorities, that didn’t expect such a dirty trick by nature, bought usual European parking meters, which unlike those made in Canada, Norway or Finland could not sustain the Russian frost. However, after being repaired they met budgetary expectations: the income from them exceeded the income the city received from similar quantities of legal bay parking by 20 per cent.

At the beginning of 2007 on Tverskaya street 20 parking meters of a new model appeared. They have been installed with a radio and equipped with a GPRS and a communication system with a head office which provides information on the number of parked vehicles and parking time paid for. But this obviously was not enough, though.

At the beginning of this year in the capital it was announced that there would be another 150 new parking meters. But, as so often happens in Russia, the innovations meant to make the life of the population easier and cheaper, deliver only more inconveniences.

Contrary to the assurances of Moscow’s officials, not all Allocard kiosks sell the payment cards for the parking meters. Mobile phone shops, Mosgortrans kiosks, and Rospechat kiosks also don’t sell them. Meanwhile not all of the new parking meters accept notes.

As a result many Moscow owners who stop in the center, having wondered around a parking meter, have been compelled to pay money not to the robot-attendant, but to the habitual fellow in the scruffy waist-coated uniform. And they, contrary to the order of the city administration, have no mini cash register and do not give drivers a receipt.

It looks like, in the near future, parking meters will not improve the serious traffic situation in the centre of Moscow. However, they also cannot be a panacea: a complex solution is required. Some of which are unpopular: the introduction of a congestion charge to enter some areas, the allocation of separate lanes for public transport, and finally, a ban from entering the city in cars that break ecological regulations.