[sustran] Moscow transport

[Paul Barter]

This appeared on another list.  Sorry to those who have already seen it on
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MOSCOW'S METRO SICKENS AS PRIVATE CARS INCREASE

By Renfrey Clarke

MOSCOW -  No-one who  has lived without a car in both Moscow and
the West  can be  wholly cynical about the achievements of Soviet
society. Whether it's twice-daily Sunday bus services to outlying
suburbs of Sydney, or the budget-breaking, user-pays fares on the
London Underground,  public transport  in the  Western world  has
long been  the target of governments anxious to cut their outlays
and of car-makers out to clean up on people's need for transport.

Urban transit  policies in  the USSR  at least  reflected social
needs. The  sparse traffic  on Moscow streets decades ago was the
subject of  many jibes by foreign correspondents, but millions of
people each  day were  travelling quickly  and  conveniently  for
small-change fares on the city's underground railway, the metro.

Much of  the charm  of the metro remains. The stations are still
clean and  safe, and  the interval between trains is no more than
eight minutes  even late  at night.  For a  standard fare  of two
rubles, about  30 US  cents, you  can travel  to any point in the
system.

But the  ways of  the West  are catching up with Moscow's public
transport showpiece.  Rush-hour travel  on the  metro  is  now  a
succession of  unsolicited whole-body embraces. Changing from one
metro line  to another  often requires  standing with hundreds of
other people  and patiently  inching your  way  toward  a  single
escalator.

Above all,  there are  now huge  built-up tracts in outer Moscow
which are  nowhere near  a metro line. In Soviet times, residents
of new  urban regions  used to  grumble about the slowness of the
metro in  reaching them, but in those days the metro was at least
usually on the way. For today's dwellers on the expanding fringes
of Moscow,  the approach  of the metro has for practical purposes
come to a halt.

According  to  public  transport  planners,  the  current  metro
network of 261 kilometres is at least 100 kilometres short of the
minimum needed.  Big new  investments are essential, but revenues
from fares  only approximately  cover the  metro's running costs.
The bill  for new construction and re-equipping is supposed to be
met out  of federal government grants. And in recent years, these
grants have been cut to a fraction of the sums required.

In mid-January  this year the news emerged that new construction
work on  the Moscow  metro had  come to  a complete  halt;  funds
promised by  the government for the first quarter of 1998 had not
materialised. When  the money  came through,  metro  construction
chief Nikolai  Tarararov told  reporters, conservation work would
be carried  out to ensure that work performed last year would not
be wasted.

The halt  to metro construction has a special symbolic poignancy
for many Muscovites. Even in December 1941, when Nazi forces were
only a few kilometres beyond the city limits, the building of the
Moscow metro  continued. On  the ceiling of Novokuznetskaya metro
station, near  the city centre, are mosaics that were executed in
besieged Leningrad and transported through the fascist blockade.

Symbols, however,  are  presumably  not  the  prime  concern  of
today's residents  of Mitino,  a raw-looking  spread of high-rise
apartment blocks on Moscow's north-west fringe. Every hour in the
morning  peak   period,  overcrowded  buses  haul  30,000  Mitino
commuters to metro and rail stations inside the Moscow ring road.
Promised  a   metro  line,  which  is  still  marked  as  ``under
construction'' on the maps in every metro carriage, the commuters
have now learned they will have to wait indefinitely.

If  the   federal  government  lacks  money  to  develop  public
transport, might  funds be  found in the Moscow city budget? Here
it should  be pointed  out that  the city  regime of  Mayor  Yury
Luzhkov has  found the  money for  a string of grandiose prestige
projects, including  the US$300  million  reconstruction  of  the
Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Capitalism, however,  does not  exist to  serve people  who cram
into municipal  buses in order to get to work, but people who are
driven to  their jobs  in luxury  cars with smoked-glass windows.
What Russia's  new rich need is not affordable, convenient public
transport, but quick passage on their own set of wheels.

In the  course of  the 1990s  the number  of vehicles  on Moscow
streets has increased by several times. This is not the result of
prosperity (though  Moscow is  far more prosperous than any other
Russian city),  so much as of a combination of pent-up demand and
of increased availability of cars, often cheap used vehicles from
the West.

The traffic  jams in  Moscow now rival those of Mexico City, and
for the  people  behind  the  smoked-glass  windows,  getting  to
downtown  offices   each  day   has  become   a  tedious  ordeal.
Accordingly, there  are strong  pressures on the city authorities
to favour  the road  system whenever there are funds available to
be spent on transport.

Alongside conventional  plans  for  new  roads  and  multi-level
intersections is  a proposal  for  turning  Moscow's  inner  rail
freight ring - once mooted for conversion to rail passenger use -
into a  highway. More  patently self-serving is a plan to build a
27-kilometre, four-lane  highway to a settlement in the Odintsovo
region west of Moscow where high-ranking government officials and
wealthy ``new Russians'' have their country houses.

Although this  latter plan  would  involve  demolishing  several
apartment blocks  and numerous small private houses, cutting down
236,000  trees,   and  dismantling  a  passenger  rail  line,  it
reportedly has  the support  of the  Moscow mayor's  office,  the
regional administration  and  the  federal  road  service.  Local
residents dealt  a blow  against the  scheme last  December, when
they voted  overwhelmingly in  a referendum to oppose closing the
rail line.

Votes, however,  are not  usually an  important consideration in
Moscow city politics, and in the anterooms of the mayor's office,
public transport  users are continuing to lose out to the private
vehicle lobby.  The future is easy enough to predict. As the need
to replace  equipment in  the  public  transport  system  becomes
urgent, federal  and  municipal  authorities  alike  will  resist
allotting money. To keep the trains and buses running, fares will
be raised  and off-peak services slashed. Users will be told they
have to pay the real cost of the services they receive.

Muscovites who  can afford a car will be forced to buy and drive
one, reducing  public transport  revenues and  prompting  further
service cuts  and fare increases. The share of municipal finances
spent on  maintaining and expanding the overburdened road network
will spiral upwards. For an efficient, unobtrusive and relatively
cheap   system,    an   expensive,   polluting,   city-strangling
monstrosity will be substituted. Only the car firms will benefit.

Moscow, in  short, seems  destined to  repeat the  experience of
many cities  in the  West where  public vision  has lost  out  to
private greed.

It would  not require any special radicalism for the authorities
in the  Russian capital  to accept  the new  wisdom of  many city
planners in the West: that prioritising public transport, even if
it has  to be subsidised, is the cheap option in the end, and the
only civilised  one. But  in Moscow, whose rulers lavish money on
cathedrals while  worshipping the  market,  public  vision  is  a
commodity as rare as eggs and sugar in a Soviet food store.

** End of text from cdp:headlines **

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