Guiding Lines: All Change

In the opinion of the overwhelming majority questioned (96 per cent, 91 per cent and 72 per cent accordingly), there have become more traffic jams in the last few years. In Moscow, by the calculation of experts, there is a lack of about 300 km of roads, and their construction and repair does not keep up with the aggressive growth of the number of cars, which has increased almost 14 times in post Soviet years.

Capital officials understand, that banning the entrance to different parts of the city will not solve the problem. The scientific research institute of the general plan and the mayoralty intend to reduce the stream of motor transport on Moscow’s streets in the near future, by getting car owners to use the underground, trams, trolley buses and regular buses. According to their calculations, the alleviation or just the stabilization of the conditions in the streets could be obtained if 70-75 per cent of Muscovites and visitors to the capital used public transport. How realistic are these plans and can their realization unload the capital’s roads? Till now there has been no exact data on the volume of transport. The underground, according to www.mosmetro.ru, transports 57 per cent of the capital’s total volume of passenger traffic, while Mosgortrans (trams, buses, etc) transports about 47 per cent (www.mosgortrans.ru). If you add to this 8 per cent of passengers who, according to Yuri Luzhkov, use over ground trains within the city’s boundaries, the total is... 112 per cent. And this does not include taxis and minibuses. One thing is clear: it involves enormous streams of people. If you combine just the data from the official sites of the Moscow metro and Mosgortrans, then we are talking about 20.5 million people. Lets compare this to Paris and the Parisian suburbs: RATP, which operates the metro and over ground public transport in the French capital, states that about 10.2 million passengers per day use the metro, buses, trams and RER trains (over ground trains connecting the suburbs and within the city boundaries supplementing the metro). But to this number it is necessary to add almost 3 million people who use three lines of the RER operated by the national society of railways.

In Moscow there are 5,100 buses, 1,300 trolley buses and 700 trams; On one line of the underground more than 500 trains pass. In Paris the over ground transport pool is more modest – 4,100 buses and 80 tram trains. In the French capital, the metro has 700 trains, and there are over 350 RER trains. However the trains in Paris’s metro are much shorter than in Moscow, and as a rule only have 5 wagons. If you take into account that the average train on Moscow’s underground has seven wagons it works out that per unit of rolling stock in Moscow there are more than 2,000 passengers per day. In Paris, the loading is a little lower - almost 1,700 people per unit, on the busiest branches of the RER two-storey wagons are used. According to the French sociological company TNS-Sofres, which has questioned the inhabitants of the Parisian region, 68 per cent of respondents positively assessed the operation of public transport, while only 24 per cent assessed it negatively. They consider it convenient and safe. And this is curious: with smaller loading and more municipal transportation the popularity of municipal transportation is not as much as expected.

According to TNS-Sofres, 46 per cent of inhabitants of the Parisian region use the underground, buses and RER more often than once a week, and 25 per cent use them more than 1-2 times a month. But even if Moscow buses, trolley buses and underground wagons would be as convenient as Paris’s, and new lines of the underground would not simply continue from the old, increasing the crush into the center, and will instead connect with minibuses and buses into the suburbs including those outside the MKAD, it won’t reduce the traffic of private cars in the city by much. The fact is that Muscovites quite often abuse the city’s buses, trolley buses and the metro for their inconveniences and over flown interiors and so Parisians use public transport more often.

According to the Public Opinion fund, 62 per cent of Muscovites use public transport often, 29 per cent use it rarely and 9 per cent use it never. The situation, probably, can be changed. Officials can support the appeal for people to go by municipal transportation by personal example. In this case, the allocation of special lanes for buses and trolley buses and the modernization of public transport depots will make sense. And in the end, the number of cars jamming Moscow’s streets will be reduced.