Blinkin transport. Mikhail Blinkin - Road safety. History of the issue, international experience, basic institutions. Afterword to the lecture

Etiology and pathogenesis of Moscow traffic jams

Lecture by Mikhail Blinkin

We are publishing a full transcript of a lecture given by one of the largest Russian specialists in traffic and transport planning, scientific director of the Research Institute of Transport and Road Facilities, Mikhail Yakovlevich Blinkin, on December 20, 2007 at the club - literary cafe Bilingua as part of the project "Public Lectures "Polit.ru" "

Mikhail Yakovlevich Blinkin graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University in 1970. Candidate of Technical Sciences, specializing in “Technical Cybernetics and Information Theory”, the topic of the dissertation is “Macroscopic models of traffic flow in traffic control systems on highways” (1978). Co-author of the monograph “Automated Transport Planning Systems” (1988), scientific editor of the Russian translation of the monograph Inose H., Hamada T. “Traffic Management”. Author of more than a hundred articles on the problems of urban transport planning, theory of traffic flows, traffic and transportation management, road safety, published in 1972-2007. in Russian and foreign publications, including “Automation and Telemechanics”, “Highways”, “Automobile Transport”, “Russia in Global Affairs”, “FORBES”, etc. Regular author and expert of “Polit.ru”. Participated in the examination of large infrastructure projects on orders from the Ministry of Automobile Transport of the RSFSR, the Ministry of Finance of Russia, the Ministry of Transport of Russia, and Rosavtodor. Financial Analyst (Certificate from the London School of Political and Economic Sciences, 1992)

See also:

Law against motorists
Mikhail Blinkin, Alexander Sarychev. Quality of institutions and transport risks (part 1, part 2)
Mikhail Blinkin. Entry fee
Mikhail Blinkin, Alexander Sarychev. Urban transport: a liberal view of the problem
Mikhail Blinkin, Alexander Sarychev. Russian roads and European civilization (public lecture)
Mikhail Blinkin, Alexander Sarychev. Russian roads and European civilization (speech abstracts)
Mikhail Blinkin, Alexander Sarychev. About toll roads and road taxes

Lecture text

Hello. My senior colleague, the famous American transport worker Danos Gazis, once said - a long time ago, back in the 1960s - a wonderful phrase: “Electrical engineering can be learned in two ways: read the user manual or stick your fingers into the socket (option - use your fingers for the exposed wire). Unfortunately, cities are learning traffic engineering strictly in the second way.”

In recent months, it seems to me that my fingers are almost in the socket.

For example, one working day today. A journalist calls and says that their TV channel is doing a story about the Moscow City towers, about where cars will go when these towers are populated. Meanwhile, everyone who travels around Moscow at least occasionally imagines that in those places there was a complete traffic jam long before the towers appeared.

Or, on the third day, the biggest transport bosses of Moscow and the region gathered. We discussed the question: we expanded Leningradka - up to 17 (8+9) lanes at its widest point; where will it end? The fact that at one end it will run into Mokhovaya and Okhotny Ryad, and at the other into densely built-up Khimki, all people who at least occasionally travel around Moscow, in general, imagine.

Another brilliant introductory idea was suggested by Ms. Nabiullina. Speaking at the State Council yesterday, she said the following: it will take 270 years to put our roads in order. I remembered another forecast made by another transport expert - Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, in 1827.

He wrote the following: “Over time (according to the calculation of philosophical tables in five hundred years), our roads will probably change immensely,” and further, a little lower, “... now our roads are bad.” If you do some simple calculations, you can understand that, according to Pushkin’s forecast, we have 320 years left until the onset of universal happiness - according to Nabiullina’s forecast - 270. I don’t know whether Nabiullina has read Pushkin, but the forecasts are obviously consistent.

This is an easy introduction.

Now to the point. This is the first time I'm talking about traffic in medical terms. The audience is unlikely to be dominated by doctors - therefore, I give a clear transcript from the medical dictionary:

etiology- this is the study of the causes of disease,
pathogenesis- a set of processes that determine the occurrence, course and outcome of the disease.

Therefore - as I agreed with my colleague and regular co-author - we will have chapters:

about severe hereditary pathologies;
about acquired diseases that have arisen in recent years;
about complications caused by inadequate treatment, including witchcraft and expensive operations harmful to the patient;
and, finally, about pathologies caused by purely inappropriate behavior of the patient.

At the end, of course, we will talk about possible therapeutic and surgical measures - but they are unlikely to seem pleasant to anyone.

As for the author’s position, I want to emphasize: we came to a certain general view of this transport site from absolutely specific transport studies. Not from journalism, but from purely specific work: with numbers, calculations, models, words - usually scientific routine. Even today we communicate with people occupying a variety of spots on this site: with transport builders, and with specialists in specific types of transport, traffic management, mass transportation - and so on...

So, if we talk about the author’s position, then, perhaps, it is this. There are a few elderly gentlemen left in Moscow from among the last general practitioners who imagine a patient, and not separate nails and teeth separately. It seems that we are included in this list. Now, having finished with the introduction, let's get down to business.
As it should be, let's start with hereditary pathologies.
My senior colleagues - who worked 30 and 40 years ago - said: “Moscow is a city that exists on the sidelines of the largest transport hub.” This fact in itself is neither bad nor good - it is a certain reality coming from Prince Khilkov, Count Witte, Stalin’s People's Commissars - and so on. And in general, the railway is always a very useful thing, from all points of view. The question is that cities in more advanced countries have overcome this situation one way or another. Using various solutions: technical, planning. The most obvious of them is to make enough punctures under the tracks, or overpasses above them, so as not to turn the city into a transport desert. Unfortunately, this severe hereditary pathology has not been overcome in Moscow.
Further. Moscow has extremely low network connectivity. Since this is probably not all mathematicians, I will give a strict definition: the connectedness rank of a graph is the number of edges that can be crossed out without tearing the graph into pieces. A good transport network is a graph with a high level of connectivity. Even simpler: from one point to another you can travel along many paths. In this regard, the Moscow transport network is terrible. Most local chunks have zero connectivity rank. A huge residential area faces the outside world with one single edge (for example, Uralskaya Street on Shchelkovskoe Highway). There is no second way in nature.
There are also such wonderful things: to get to a geographically neighboring quarter, a person travels 12 km along the Paveletskaya railway in search of the nearest puncture, and then travels 12 km back.
What does low connectivity lead to - translated into ordinary language? Moreover, any circumstances are inevitable in the city: an accident, a fire and completely insignificant force majeure, complete nonsense - and one rib is blocked, there are no others - the systemic congestion, like a cancerous tumor, begins to spread from this special point. Here’s another thing: let there be no fires, let there be no force majeure. Let's assume that the situation is quite normal.
In transport science there is a fundamental principle of Wardrop - habitual citizens are distributed throughout the network in some Pareto-optimal manner in terms of generalized travel costs. This is a remarkable fact, confirmed both as a mathematical theorem and through observations in large cities. Why does such happiness happen? The molecule of the transport flow, which is a viscous compressible fluid, is the car in which the driver sits. As a rule - smart. That is why this good distribution is achieved, available in one and only case: these alternatives must be present on the network. If they are not there, then the theorem is, of course, true, but there is no happiness from it.
(In response to a listener’s question, let me remind you that generalized travel costs are direct transport costs plus time costs multiplied by the value of time, that is, the price of time.).
Network defects also lead to such a thing as overrunning. It is clear that no one can run along airways - but with a normal network, this is a children's problem for a math club: draw a square grid and calculate what the average mileage there will be in relation to the air distance. It is, on average, 1.2.
In fact, in cities where this grid is supplemented with some chords, it is even somewhat smaller. In Moscow, this is no longer a theory, but a purely experimental fact; it is 1.53. This figure was calculated by Boris Aleksandrovich Tkachenko - we have such a wonderful friend. I can say that 1.53 is cool. It is difficult to find a city on the map of the Earth where the mileage would be one and a half. You have to try. In Moscow, they tried.
Further. Another serious hereditary disease is the actual geometric structure of the road network. It must be said that all these diseases come in a bunch, a bush... Here is a small historical digression. At the level of pure strategies, there are three variants of the topological structure.
A square grid is the structure of a Roman legionary camp. Ideal from a transport point of view: all the latest IT bells and whistles in traffic management: coordinated-adaptive control of the road network, route guidance for drivers using satellite navigation and driver displays - they fit perfectly into multi-connected road networks of this type. It has one drawback: in order to defend a camp planned in this way, written norms and professional legionnaires were needed. It was necessary to write a Codex Latino Rum and so on... The militias and townspeople could not defend such a thing.
Therefore, another structure is the rings of the medieval city and radial approaches to them. Simply - shafts. An absolutely wonderful structure for defending a city from nomads by a militia of citizens. From a transport point of view, it’s very bad...
Instead of being thrown along chords and tangentials from the center, the traffic flow is twisted and then thrown out onto the already busy radial exits. Moving from science to practice, let’s imagine: what it’s like to get to Volgogradka towards the region from the third transport ring - there is a tail that blocks the main direction of movement of the Third Transport Ring.
In addition, powerful radial roads abut ancient city streets: saturated multi-lane traffic from Leninsky Prospekt to Yakimanka, or even better - from Varshavskoye Shosse to this terrible octagonal intersection near Tulskaya, or... everyone will continue with their favorite area... This is a fundamental drawback of the network .
There is another scheme - it’s called a “herringbone” pattern. It was adopted for toll or fiscal roads - it was invented for collecting taxes. Widely used in agriculture and forestry, for harvesting fields and cutting areas. It is extremely inconvenient for the population. But if we look at the completely undeveloped gaps left by neighboring radii in the spaces outlined by the Third Transport Ring Road and the Moscow Ring Road, then very often the network between these radii is organized precisely like a herringbone. Traffic congestion is inevitable here.
The Moscow transport system is organized in the worst possible way. And here you can’t blame Yuri Dolgoruky. The defects of the Moscow network - topological, incorrigible with no brains and no money - have been brought to the point of absurdity in the last 15 years: a third transport ring has been created and a fourth has already been laid.
And they are almost impossible to fix. There is a problem here of the center - a special point in the center that appears in a radial-ring structure. It is discussed very convincingly based on factual material in the works of my respected colleague Vaksman.
The most interesting thing, however, is not what happens in the center - this is topologically clear. The worst thing happens on the periphery. Congestion in the center - even in the most well-organized cities - is routine. Congestion on the periphery is already nonsense. Because the periphery was not created anywhere by the Middle Ages, it was created by engineers who knew how to count, who owned calculation techniques, and who knew urban transport science. Therefore, talk about too many jobs in the center and the need to distribute them throughout the periphery is incorrect - the situation in the periphery is even worse.
And then another thing comes into play - another severe hereditary disease.
No longer geometric, but with a social nature. This is extremely low residential mobility. In Europe and the USA it is a standard thing: I change my job - I change my place of residence. Moreover, so to speak, not from Sviblovo to Mitino, but even from Voronezh to Moscow. Residential mobility is an excellent means of mitigating transport mobility. In our country, taking into account housing prices, residential mobility is even lower than under the USSR - when the exchange of apartments was quite common. This means that in these conditions, the transfer of jobs to the periphery, unfortunately, does not add anything.
Let me make a small digression: recently Mr. Kuzmin, the chief architect of Moscow, came up with a fundamental idea: if 40% of residents combined their place of work with their place of residence, the transport problem would be solved.
Answering this on the air of one of the TV channels, I said that I know an urban planning recipe in which this figure is not 40%, but even 100%. The boy journalist was very surprised and asked what it was called. It's called a concentration camp...
Actually the question here is this. Bringing your workplace closer to where you live is a perfectly sound idea. Only it presupposes residential mobility, characteristic of wealthy cities with a developed and consumer-friendly real estate market.
This is about hereditary diseases in a nutshell.
I’ll tell you about one more thing - related to the most efficient transport system in Moscow. In fact, there is one system - the metro, which I never criticize - on the contrary, I praise and express every respect. There, firstly, the system itself is reasonable, and, secondly, the level of management is much higher than all other segments of the transport system. But even there, unfortunately, there is a serious hereditary disease: the metro was built not only as a means of transport, but with terrible encumbrances of a mobilization plan. Hence: we need - or don't need - deep deposits, we need - or don't need - large stretches, which are completely unnecessary for urban transport as such...
If European metros are self-sufficient - metro plus a walking approach, then their Moscow counterpart always assumes a mixed metro - bus, metro - tram scheme. This is a hereditary disease due to the fact that our metro is not only a transport system, but also a fortification structure.
No one has ever died from severe hereditary diseases - therapy is known. Unfortunately, there are also many acquired diseases.
The worst of them is a house built across the road. I recently published an article with this title. This is where it came from. Recently, a very nice man called us at the institute, who was working on behalf of the Guardian newspaper. This historian of transport and urbanism, all so Western, so foreign, wrote a work on the influence of the mafia, corruption and all sorts of other things on the transport development of cities. One point is the south of Italy - Naples, Palermo in the 1960s, the second point is Moscow today. I learned this term - “house across the road” from him.
What's the point? In the south of Italy, the usual mafia outrages were happening: kickbacks, cuts, family-municipal partnerships. But there was an absolutely categorical prohibition. You can roll your overly intractable competitor or overly annoying critic into a bridge support. You can’t build a house across the road: you don’t live alone in this Naples. Well, like we are serious people here too - well, that’s not how it’s done. This is some kind of replacement for civil convention, public pressure - I don’t know.
And now - what happened in Moscow? From the point of view of the house across the road. On the map of Moscow back in the early 1990s there were wonderful, long, undeveloped corridors. These were land acquisitions for chord highways. They say that the last of the Mohicans, the real Moscow city planners, cried when looking at the Moscow development plans and realizing that there was no room left for chords.
In fact, this generation of specialists, well, a little older than us, they understood all this perfectly, imagined how Moscow should be built for a hundred years... So, there will be no more chords in Moscow. Or it will be connected with the solution of very serious engineering, technical, financial - God knows what other problems. These are - in the strictest sense of the word - houses built across the road.
In the Center, the same negative role was played by the development of vacant land suitable for parking. There were quite a lot of these little spots in the Central Administrative District, to put it simply - inside the Garden Ring. The city planners reasoned like this: this patch - if Moscow follows the socialist path - with a small number of cars - then good, it will be useful for public gardens and playgrounds. If Moscow follows - as they said - the American path, then these are ready-made drains that will remove cars from the roadway. All these patches have fallen victim to what politicians call “infill development.” Everything is zero. Well that's okay...
After all, there remained, in the end, hopes for intercepting parking lots. Of course, they are being built, but not where they need to be. It is necessary to make a reservation, at the end of the year, intercepting parking lots will be opened where necessary, on the distant approaches...
In the meantime, for example, in my area, one parking lot was built in the Gagarin Square area - no one needs it. If I got from Yasenevo and stood in a traffic jam on Leninsky Prospekt, then I would have to be an idiot to leave the car on Gagarin Square. There are 2.8 km to the Garden Ring. And if I live on Leninsky - why do I need to go from a well-maintained garage or from a parking lot under the windows - why do I need to go these 2 km to a paid parking lot?
What's the point? Where there should have been intercepting parking lots - according to common sense, according to the urban planning plan, according to the general idea of the mechanism of their work - this is the line of the Kaluzhskaya metro station. But let's come to this square and see where the smartest engineer, architect, urban planner here will install an intercept parking lot? Nowhere now. There are options there: demolish two shopping complexes, the Meridian cultural center, or the Space Research Institute, or the Kaluzhskaya electric depot. Of course, the most rewarding thing is to demolish the IKI - who needs it! So, where it is necessary, it is now almost impossible to build intercepting parking lots.

Underground... When far from the center, in an open field, I build an underground parking lot and something on top - no problem. But burying something under an existing permanent building is much more difficult and expensive - but technically everything is possible.
The third bad acquired disease. New, renovated buildings and even entire development areas were built without taking into account the limitations on the local road network's surroundings. There are - the young interlocutor even recalled that the French have introduced this into legislation - restrictions all over the world that a newly built or reconstructed building should not reduce the price of real estate and should not particularly worsen traffic conditions in the area. In fact, this is a rather difficult requirement to fulfill. Do you know where transport happiness is? Yuri Pimenov’s painting “New Moscow” is remarkable - thick, impressionistic colors: one lady in a convertible is driving along the wide Mokhovaya. There is nothing like this anywhere now.
But this condition - not to worsen - is observed quite strictly. In Moscow, it is not observed at all. I will name a few specific examples - I will not dwell on them; I have written about them in sufficient detail. A wonderful cultural and leisure center on Pushkinskaya Square. Due to some public efforts, it most likely will not be built. But another center, on Tverskaya Zastava Square, will almost certainly be built. In fact, such things happen when in a busy transport hub we add an additional load - for example, 100,000 sq. m of a shopping center is some kind of fire extinguishing with gasoline. In Moscow, this disease is new, but extremely common.
Another disease is the squatting of territories and the problem of parking. This is a terrible disease that affects both peripheral and central zones. A similar form of the disease occurs in Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria. But in more or less organized cities such a disease does not happen. Parking space - marked, tariffed, managed; there is no man's land. This self-seizure of territories also led to a terrible stagnation of public transport. I don't like to talk about the happy land of Archaia. In 1989, A.V. Sarychev and I participated in the first and last independent examination of the situation on public transport in Moscow. Both before and after - they were only departmental. Naturally, there was no happiness. All these stories are complete crap. But - to be fair - it was managed very effectively. Routing, schedules, dispatching - all these things were done by smart, qualified people, so despite the terrible overloads with a typical filling of 8-11 people per square meter of floor, it all somehow worked. This is what happened next. As a result of the self-seizure of territories, the fundamental condition formulated in Blaise Pascal's patent of 1654 was violated. The patent formulates as follows: “To organize in Paris the regular movement of public passenger carriages along a pre-announced route and schedule, with a uniform tariff of 5 sous” - this is still a universal form of existence of a public carrier. Buses, trams, trolleybuses become meaningless from an operational, purely practical point of view, if they are forced to move in dense traffic flow - what is the schedule there? Some cheerful man parks a Jeep Cherokee in the second row - the first row is already full. He sets and turns on the emergency lights, so what about the trolleybus? It’s good if there is a second row of wires - the driver will throw the rods.. And if not? Let me give you an even more typical example for Moscow: when a normal, active tram route is closed for the entire daylight hours due to the fact that two guardsmen caused a tin accident with the cost of a thousand rubles between them. They stand there, waiting for the inspector to arrive... Some also call the insurance commissioner - it’s all serious now, everyone has compulsory motor liability insurance - people are all serious, no one is messing around... Despite the fact that on the one hand there is a tin repair, on the other there is a serious, active city carrier . Today the situation is clearly resolved in favor of the participants in the accident.
In fact, somewhere in the 1960s, the International Union of Public Transport issued recommendations that, in general, wherever there are dense traffic flows and real transport problems - that is, in large cities - have been implemented. They are trivial to the extreme: dedicated traffic lanes, priority calling phases at intersections. Well, the latter are relatively new and require some electronics. But separate lanes have existed for at least 40 years. The priority calling phase is to provide a “green street” for public transport.
It is interesting that these dedicated lanes can be used by city services and taxis - but God forbid someone from the authorities will be a political scandal.
Now I will end the topic with the stagnation of public transport. From 1990 to 2007, the urban surface transport fleet decreased by about a third. I have the numbers written out here. Trams - from 1200 to 860, buses - from 7,500 to 5,200 - the route network has been reduced by approximately the same proportion - by about a third. This is about the question of where we will transfer motorists - urban transport reserves do not exist in nature.
Next point: complications caused by inadequate treatment of the patient.
The trouble here is this: the very basic information from the theory of transport planning, the topology of transport networks, the physics of traffic flows has never been included, and to this day is not included in the programs of any mass engineering, economic, and management specialties. Sometimes in a text written on an absolutely specific technical issue, it is necessary, for example, to explain that a traffic light has two functions: relay - at an intersection, throttle - along the highway. A traffic light is also a throttle valve that prevents the flow from accumulating at one point. I once told this trivial fact in an introduction to the specialty course for first-year MADI students, which I read at the request of Professor Viktor Nikolaevich Ivanov, our then director. I myself, in turn, read about this in the American traffic manual, published back in 1956 and translated with my participation sometime in the 1970s.
These kinds of trivial facts are the basis that decision makers need to know.
The Moscow authorities, Moscow architects sincerely believe that the eradication of traffic lights is a good thing. The best example of inadequate treatment is the Great Leningradka project, the global idea of removing traffic lights on this route. Bolshaya Leningradka is a road that at one end ends in Manezhnaya Square and at the other end in the city of Khimki. When one of our English colleagues asked upon arrival in Moscow whether Moscow specialists knew problems about pools and pipes, there was a nervous laugh in the audience. His subsequent reasoning was as simple as a steamed turnip. Guys, you have two terribly shallow pools at either end of the pipe. Why expand the pipe?
It’s like Stanislaw Jerzy Lec: okay, you’ll hit the wall with your head, but what will you do in the next cell? This is from the same area. Nevertheless, the project is being implemented at an accelerated pace.
The second example is the reconstruction of transport hubs as part of investment projects. If we go into any search engine and type in “reconstruction of transport hubs”, a bunch of materials will come up about what wonderful investment projects some large investment company is going to implement. At the same time, it is being seriously discussed that it would be nice to plug 20,000 sq.m into this node. m of retail and entertainment space. At the same time, there is something like a competition going on: the record has so far been set in the reconstruction of Tverskaya Zastava. 110,000 sq. m. underground shopping and entertainment center. A small transport improvement is being made there in the form of an additional puncture under the overpass and underground parking for 1,400 spaces. At the same time, a powerful functional load is added. As a result: about 15 kopecks worth of transport improvements - and a ruble worth of new functional load. There will be such a good jam.
Next - solving transport problems, as a pretext for big commerce and ambitious fantasies. I don’t even know what’s worse: in business there is always at least some kind of rationality. I will give specific examples. The first of them is a monorail from Timiryazevskaya to Ostankino at a cost of 250 million dollars. Operates in excursion transport mode, instead of donkeys and carts. For this money, it was possible to update the entire tram fleet of the city: a decent eurocar costs about 300 thousand, with a fleet of 860 cars - we will come to approximately the same figure. As you understand, the appearance of such cars in Moscow would be a great boon.
There is an even better example: now, finally, they are going to make a connection between Varshavka and Kashirsky, that is, to build a road from Varshavka to the intersection of Kashirskoye Highway and Borisovsky Ponds. This is a very important connection that city planners drew decades ago. At first, when I learned about its construction, I was very happy and thought that I would finally wholeheartedly praise the Moscow government. Then I found out that they were bringing equipment there to dig a tunnel. And in an open field they will dig from Varshavka to the intersection of Kashirskoye Highway. Above is a snow melting point, garages, and a railway exclusion zone. In principle, it was possible to get by with a local puncture under the railway. Or you can go through one overpass, which is cheaper and much faster. But here is the official answer that the Moscow government gave to the public organization “Freedom of Choice”. This, by the way, is perhaps the only organization that dares to disturb him. They were told that the task of fully loading an extremely valuable and expensive apparatus for digging tunnels - the HERRENKNECHT tunneling shield - was being solved. If transport problems are solved in addition to everything else, then they will never be solved.
From the same area - construction at the intersection of Alabyan, Baltiyskaya and Leningradka. A tunnel is being built here, which will apparently become a record-breaking engineering structure: its depth is such that it passes under the metro line. To get out of this tunnel, he will have to go through almost the entire Baltic Street. When asked not even by transport workers - architects - why it is impossible to build an overpass - the answer was given: residents really do not like overpasses, they are noisy, unaesthetic and will spoil the appearance of Baltic Street. How can it be spoiled?
But then I almost simultaneously learn that in Moscow they are seriously discussing the project of the most show-off overpass, where houses serve as supports. This is the so-called STRAßEHAUS (road-house) project. That is, it turns out that simple overpasses, where they are needed, are not being built. But according to this complex and highly controversial scheme, a pilot project is being conducted.
However, the most exotic solution from the field of inadequate treatment is the idea of turning the Garden End in one direction. In fact, the previous attempt was repulsed by colleagues from the traffic police. This department is often criticized - but they have competent engineers who, with the help of their generals, repulsed this attempt. Today this idea has returned again. For those who are not in the know, I inform you: for the normal operation of a multi-lane highway, simple things must be observed. It’s like on an escalator: stand on the right, pass on the left. On the left are express lanes, and on the right are exit ramps. If the road is opened on both sides - and this is a city, there is no other way - intersecting flows will arise, that is, the entropy of traffic will increase. Engineering result: a drop in throughput and an increase in accident rates. Let’s add to this another rerun (the ring will be “wrapped” counterclockwise, that is, from Zubovskaya to Paveletskaya), but someone needs to go from Zubovskaya to Smolenskaya. They will have to dive into the center, where, of course, it is very free and comfortable without them. But this project is back in the works. Serious, smart people, no worse than Alexander Viktorovich and me - normal engineers - but they got a team - they count.
Now - about the patient’s inappropriate behavior.
Let's start with the inappropriate behavior of the elite on the road.
Historical excursion. Within European culture, until the second half of the 17th century, it was considered quite decent to receive subjects while sitting on the toilet, and also to push subjects to the side of the road while passing in a carriage. Sometimes the passenger seat in the carriage was combined with a toilet - this was done quite elegantly - wide dresses, canopies. In Kazan, the carriage of Catherine II was restored, this is exactly how everything is arranged there.
In Europe, such feudal charms disappeared - at least after the French Revolution. The issue is not even a matter of legislative decrees - riding passenger carriages with torches and light and noise effects was prohibited by a decree of 1789. I didn’t find a ban on carriages with toilets - it probably went away on its own.
The post-feudal rules for using the toilet have been internalized by the Russian elite. But, alas, there are no rules for using passenger carriages. The point here is not only about laws, but about basic rules of decency. Alas, the Russian elite has not mastered all this.
There is not only a moral, but also a very interesting technical aspect. He's next. There are 1,800 trolleybuses and 5,200 buses in Moscow - they have no traffic priorities - other than those that are nominally prescribed in the traffic rules. As for cars that legally use priority lighting, according to indirect estimates, there are about the same number of them. These are our priorities in the movement...
Let me give you a very funny example - not at all from liberal practice - Spain during the Franco era. The Generalissimo's motorcade stopped at a red light. The level of motorization in the 1970s in Spain roughly corresponds to ours today, and there was a similar level of transport outrages. Caudillo apparently decided to show the Spaniards an example of correct behavior and began stopping at traffic lights. By the way, this gave very good results, recorded by objective statistics.
Now - no less disgusting thing: the behavior on the road of our average person. Our fellow social activists love the contrast: on the one hand, the arrogant behavior of the elite, on the other, the sacrificial position of the average person. We do not share this point of view: they are all worth each other.
I’ll tell you about one childhood illness - it has been a lifesaver for us so far. This disease is called car use standards. Fortunately, in Moscow the level of car use (the ratio of the number of car-days on the line to car-days in inventory) corresponds to the Soviet level - about 10%. This is happiness, because if a younger generation grows up who doesn’t want to ride the subway...
In everything else, except for this childhood disease, the behavior of the motorized man in the street is terrible. The simplest examples. A car on the sidewalk, at a bus stop, careless driving, dangerous driving - in Moscow - practices - turning right from the 3rd row. Unmotivated lane changes - changing lanes in order to overtake in traffic. In 1946, at the Presidential Conference on Road Safety, it was decided that the speed of traffic in a residential area should not be more than 10 times the speed of a pedestrian, that is, be within 50 km per hour. Of course, this is not implemented overnight, but in the end it was implemented.
When driving at these speeds, overtaking is crazy. Neat, quiet movement. For the “returned joy of driving” - highways, including city ones, are separate, without pedestrians...
Two interesting things happened here. A complete rejection of the practice of developed countries: they have a functional division of the road network into slow streets and high-speed highways. We don't do that. On the contrary, we are speeding up traffic on Leningradka: “We will have a highway from Manege to Sheremetyevo.” In several of my speeches I have called this a banana republic-style highway. After that, the word “highway” was removed and they began to speak more carefully - “a highway of continuous movement.” On the one hand, this is the position of the city and the authorities, on the other hand, a decision dear to the hearts of millions of ordinary people: “Gas to the floor - and God bless them, the pedestrians.”

Reply from the hall. This is a social order of the minority...

Blinkin. There are various studies on this topic. Yes, inappropriate drivers are a minority. But from the point of view of throughput and accident rates, this is very significant. A few numbers offhand: despite the fact that in Russia 33-35 thousand die in road accidents every year, in Moscow - 1,000. It seems that for Moscow, where a disproportionate number of cars are concentrated, this is not much. But you need to take into account that the average accident rate in the country and in the city are completely different things. Because in cities, despite all the hooliganism, people drive slower. So this figure is absolutely terrible. Well, as far as behavior goes, he's creepy. The level of transport risks - the number of corpses per 100,000 cars - is approximately 120 units, which is 12 times worse than in Western Europe, 8 times worse than in the USA.
Let's go back to where we started. To the question “When will they take care of this?” we are used to answering cheerfully - when they stick their finger in a socket... Or a little more seriously - when the first office building, the first block turns out to be unsold - due to the fact that it will not be possible to get to them. So far everything is selling with a bang. Therefore, there are no direct educational measures yet. Alexander Viktorovich claims that traffic jams are the most reliable indicator of the effectiveness of state or municipal government, which cannot be hidden by any statistics or PR. This is partly true...
Now about the way out of the disease. There are three options.
Simple and trivial: there will be cars in the city and there will be traffic jams. This is a kind of consensus between government and society. The government does what it wants: builds houses across the road, preserves the feudal privileges of the 12th century - but it allows ordinary people to park on the sidewalk, at the bus stop, drive the way we drive... Don’t pay - well, where is paid parking? The number of people who bought parking lots at their place of residence is a fraction of a percent. Then they are very expensive. Parking in the city is generally free. Let me remind you that “in the classics” the parking space is marked out, tariffed, equipped with parking meters - this was invented back in 1933, before any electronics. So the current situation reflects the complete consensus of the authorities and society: the first does what it wants, the second does what it can.
The second, rather unlikely - no traffic jams and no cars. I don't rule out its possibility. It’s very simple: strict administrative bans on cars entering the city center are being introduced. No cars, no traffic jams, no problems.

Replica from the hall. Do you think there will be no traffic jams?
Blinkin. No no no. In fact, the market for special passes will open. But taking into account the fact that, like any market, it will be regulated by supply and demand, there will be fewer cars.

Reply from the hall. A small note - you said that if this is handed over to the regulation of the traffic police, there will be special passes...
Blinkin. No - the question is that this option is really very unlikely.
Finally there is a third option. It is completely unlikely for Russia - but, according to foreign experience, it is the only one possible. This option is called civil conventions on the use of urban areas and cars. As soon as they are concluded, absolutely simple, well-known planning, administrative, fiscal, IT and other decisions come into effect. But - conventions come first, and all technology comes later. All major cities in the world live by these conventions. In which there are many times more cars than in Moscow. We have 300-350 cars per 1000 inhabitants. This is, of course, a multiple of 6 times more than in Moscow during the last years of Soviet power. But this is about 2 times less than the average European city. Than in London, Paris, Munich. In New York - and even more - about 900... There is no happiness anywhere, not even in New York - but the city is moving.
What are civil conventions? This is a triad described in the scientific literature: networking, pricing, participation.
Networking is everything related to the network. Development rules, rules for connecting newly built or reconstructed facilities, rules for using the network at the level of automotive technology - including the most sophisticated things related to IT. How is this all done in practice? Through participation.
Now - about pricing, that is, about conventions regarding how and in what form we pay for all this. There is a vast scientific literature on this subject, and the most serious economist of urban transport was Nobel laureate William Vickrey.
This mechanism is designed in such a way that urban society reaches a certain generalized price for a trip. It is driven into it: taxes - I will list a huge list. All road taxes are structured as feedback taxes: we pay upon the fact of owning a car or purchasing gasoline. These taxes are channeled in a certain way and spent on developing the road network. This mechanism has existed for at least 90 years in written form. It was codified in national legislation about 50 years ago. In our country, this mechanism is prohibited by law: read Article 35 of the Budget Code. I always cite a story on this topic that the head physician Morgulis banned television.
In short, this article is about the prohibition of targeted taxes: all income in one bag, all expenses in one bag.

Question from the audience. Why can’t this be done at the budget planning level? What is the difference?
Blinkin. In fact, this is how it is done. It’s just that a mechanism generally accepted in the world works like a good automatic machine: you bought gasoline, the automatic machine splits the money into the municipal, state and federal budgets. And the amount received depends on the traffic. No legislator will be more effective than this machine gun. This is an excellent mechanism for the country as a whole. Unfortunately, it's too rough for the city. There are subtle additional mechanisms for the city. First of all, differentiated parking costs. The price of parking in the area of a remote metro station can be zero or stimulating - it is often included in the price of a metro ticket. There are no free lots in the center. You can leave your car for 15 minutes to go somewhere, but, in principle, a person with an average salary will never do that. In underground parking it is cheaper, but the cut-off price is such that a person whose social package does not have this will be able to afford it if necessary, but not every day. A most delicately constructed thing.
Further. There are fees - different in different cities - related to the environment, cultural and historical heritage... You never know what the legislation of countries and peoples has not come up with... What is the main thing in this? The fact is that all these fees go towards transport.
I must say that all these taxes, payments, fees, agreements on what and where I will build are very harmless things. I would even say - offensive to our consciousness. In Moscow, for example, you can fence off a spot near your restaurant with plastic bollards, install a guest worker - and here you have parking by agreement with the prefecture. Somewhere in Munich this would have ended in a very serious lawsuit for the squatting of municipal land. All these agreements: the use of land, roadways, parking space - a complex system based, from the point of view of participation, on very subtle mechanisms. All this is about 100 years old. I always give a very simple example. The same Danos Gazis said angrily in the 60s that it was easier for Americans to send troops into Vietnam than to build a new overpass in Manhattan. Why? Intellectuals - they always laugh at big politics - but you can’t laugh at municipal democracy... Until there is a consensus between local residents, local developers, the association of city carriers, the Royal Automobile Club - the oldest society of motorists - since 1903 in all English-speaking countries, supporters of the movement CARFREE, environmentalists. They all come to negotiate. And not with a shout: they are offending us! - and with normal transport calculations. The market for developments in the field of urban transport - modeling, calculations - is based on the fact that there are a lot of interested parties who play in this, who are willing to pay for it in order to protect their rights. Plus - a huge culture of transport and sociological sounding. They are interested in how you drive, what you are willing to do and for what... Huge developments - since the 60s, this is already a serious science. The most extreme and funniest case is the transport referendum. For example, for the introduction of a paid zone in Stockholm - a referendum, and a difficult one - 53 to 47 - everything is very serious, and the party that opposed the paid zone won the elections - but the people were in favor - and through complex coordination, the referendum decision, it was introduced.
What can you expect today? The current situation suits absolutely everyone. If I’m a wealthy developer, I’ll come to an agreement with the authorities; if I’m a layman, I’ll come to an agreement with a caretaker technician about a shell, or with an inspector about a traffic violation - so far everyone prefers individual agreements. True, as Grebenshchikov says: “even if you’re a Rolls-Royce, you’ll still be stuck in a traffic jam.” So, not everything can be agreed upon. They say that the practice of hiring ambulances has already emerged to speed up movement around the city. When the need for a social contract will arise is a guessing question.

Replies from the audience. This seems to be a civil society issue that does not exist. ...
In our country, any disagreement is punished by force. ... And the bulk of the measures are usually punitive in nature.
Blinkin. There are two positions: the expert one I outlined and the civilian one. The latter boils down to the fact that all the measures taken by the Moscow government in the field of urban planning, development of the road network and public transport, traffic management, and so on, are correct, since Moscow has just unanimously voted for this government. As an expert, this is deeply disgusting to me. As a citizen, I have to come to terms with the opinion of the majority.
All. Questions please.

We are publishing the full transcript of the lecture, preadone of the largest Russian specialists in traffic and transport planning, scientific director of the Research Institute of Transport and Road Facilities Mikhail Yakovlevich Blinkin 20 December 2007 in the club - literary cafe Bilingua as part of the project "Public lectures "Polit.ru"".

Mikhail Yakovlevich Blinkingraduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University in 1970. Candidate of Technical Sciences, specializing in “Technical Cybernetics and Information Theory”, the topic of the dissertation is “Macroscopic models of traffic flow in traffic control systems on highways” (1978). Co-author of the monograph “Automated Transport Planning Systems” (1988), scientific editor of the Russian translation of the monograph Inose H., Hamada T. “Traffic Management”. Author of more than a hundred articles on the problems of urban transport planning, theory of traffic flows, traffic and transportation management, road safety, published in 1972-2007. in Russian and foreign publications, including “Automation and Telemechanics”, “Highways”, “Automobile Transport”, “Russia in Global Affairs”, “FORBES”, etc. Regular author and expert of “Polit.ru”. Participated in the examination of large infrastructure projects on orders from the Ministry of Automobile Transport of the RSFSR, the Ministry of Finance of Russia, the Ministry of Transport of Russia, and Rosavtodor. Financial Analyst (Certificate from the London School of Political and Economic Sciences, 1992)

Lecture text

In recent months, it seems to me that my fingers are almost in the socket.

This is an easy introduction.

etiology is the study of the causes of disease,

pathogenesis is a set of processes that determine the occurrence, course and outcome of the disease.

Therefore - as I agreed with my colleague and regular co-author - we will have chapters:

about severe hereditary pathologies;

about acquired diseases that have arisen in recent years;

about complications caused by inadequate treatment, including witchcraft and expensive operations harmful to the patient;

and, finally, about pathologies caused by purely inappropriate behavior of the patient.

At the end, of course, we will talk about possible therapeutic and surgical measures - but they are unlikely to seem pleasant to anyone.

As it should be, let's start with hereditary pathologies.

My senior colleagues - who worked 30 and 40 years ago - said: “Moscow is a city that exists on the sidelines of the largest transport hub.” This fact in itself is neither bad nor good - it is a certain reality coming from Prince Khilkov, Count Witte, Stalin’s People's Commissars - and so on. And in general, the railway is always a very useful thing, from all points of view. The question is that cities in more advanced countries have overcome this situation one way or another. Using various solutions: technical, planning. The most obvious of them is to make enough punctures under the tracks, or overpasses above them, so as not to turn the city into a transport desert. Unfortunately, this severe hereditary pathology has not been overcome in Moscow.

Further. Moscow has extremely low network connectivity. Since this is probably not all mathematicians, I will give a strict definition: the connectedness rank of a graph is the number of edges that can be crossed out without tearing the graph into pieces. A good transport network is a graph with a high level of connectivity. Even simpler: from one point to another you can travel along many paths. In this regard, the Moscow transport network is terrible. Most local chunks have zero connectivity rank. A huge residential area faces the outside world with one single edge (for example, Uralskaya Street on Shchelkovskoe Highway). There is no second way in nature.

There are also such wonderful things: to get to a geographically neighboring quarter, a person travels 12 km along the Paveletskaya railway in search of the nearest puncture, and then travels 12 km back.

What does low connectivity lead to - translated into ordinary language? Moreover, any circumstances are inevitable in the city: an accident, a fire and completely insignificant force majeure, complete nonsense - and one rib is blocked, there are no others - the systemic congestion, like a cancerous tumor, begins to spread from this special point. Here’s another thing: let there be no fires, let there be no force majeure. Let's assume that the situation is quite normal.

In transport science there is a fundamental principle of Wardrop - habitual citizens are distributed throughout the network in some Pareto-optimal manner in terms of generalized travel costs. This is a remarkable fact, confirmed both as a mathematical theorem and through observations in large cities. Why does such happiness happen? The molecule of the transport flow, which is a viscous compressible fluid, is the car in which the driver sits. As a rule - smart. That is why this good distribution is achieved, available in one and only case: these alternatives must be present on the network. If they are not there, then the theorem is, of course, true, but there is no happiness from it.

(In response to a listener’s question, let me remind you that generalized travel costs are direct transport costs plus time costs multiplied by the value of time, that is, the price of time.).

Network defects also lead to such a thing as overrunning. It is clear that no one can run along airways - but with a normal network, this is a children's problem for a math club: draw a square grid and calculate what the average mileage there will be in relation to the air distance. It is, on average, 1.2. In fact, in cities where this grid is supplemented with some chords, it is even somewhat smaller. In Moscow, this is no longer a theory, but a purely experimental fact; it is 1.53. This figure was calculated by Boris Aleksandrovich Tkachenko - we have such a wonderful friend. I can say that 1.53 is cool. It is difficult to find a city on the map of the Earth where the mileage would be one and a half. You have to try. In Moscow, they tried.

Further. Another serious hereditary disease is the actual geometric structure of the road network. It must be said that all these diseases come in a bunch, a bush... Here is a small historical digression. At the level of pure strategies, there are three variants of the topological structure.

A square grid is the structure of a Roman legionary camp. Ideal from a transport point of view: all the latest IT bells and whistles in traffic management: coordinated-adaptive control of the road network, route guidance for drivers using satellite navigation and driver displays - they fit perfectly into multi-connected road networks of this type. It has one drawback: in order to defend a camp planned in this way, written norms and professional legionnaires were needed. It was necessary to write a Codex Latino Rum and so on... The militias and townspeople could not defend such a thing.

Therefore, another structure is the rings of the medieval city and radial approaches to them. Simply - shafts. An absolutely wonderful structure for defending a city from nomads by a militia of citizens. From a transport point of view, it’s very bad...

Instead of being thrown along chords and tangentials from the center, the traffic flow is twisted and then thrown out onto the already busy radial exits. Moving from science to practice, let’s imagine: what it’s like to get to Volgogradka towards the region from the third transport ring - there is a tail that blocks the main direction of movement of the Third Transport Ring.

In addition, powerful radial roads abut ancient city streets: saturated multi-lane traffic from Leninsky Prospekt to Yakimanka, or even better - from Varshavskoye Shosse to this terrible octagonal intersection near Tulskaya, or... everyone will continue with their favorite area... This is a fundamental drawback of the network .

There is another scheme - it’s called a “herringbone” pattern. It was adopted for toll or fiscal roads - it was invented for collecting taxes. Widely used in agriculture and forestry, for harvesting fields and cutting areas. It is extremely inconvenient for the population. But if we look at the completely undeveloped gaps left by neighboring radii in the spaces outlined by the Third Transport Ring Road and the Moscow Ring Road, then very often the network between these radii is organized precisely like a herringbone. Traffic congestion is inevitable here.

The Moscow transport system is organized in the worst possible way. And here you can’t blame Yuri Dolgoruky. The defects of the Moscow network - topological, incorrigible with no brains and no money - have been brought to the point of absurdity in the last 15 years: a third transport ring has been created and a fourth has already been laid.

And they are almost impossible to fix. There is a problem here of the center - a special point in the center that appears in a radial-ring structure. It is discussed very convincingly based on factual material in the works of my respected colleague Vaksman.

The most interesting thing, however, is not what happens in the center - this is topologically clear. The worst thing happens on the periphery. Congestion in the center - even in the most well-organized cities - is routine. Congestion on the periphery is already nonsense. Because the periphery was not created anywhere by the Middle Ages, it was created by engineers who knew how to count, who owned calculation techniques, and who knew urban transport science. Therefore, talk about too many jobs in the center and the need to distribute them throughout the periphery is incorrect - the situation in the periphery is even worse.

And then another thing comes into play - another severe hereditary disease.

No longer geometric, but with a social nature. This is extremely low residential mobility. In Europe and the USA it is a standard thing: I change my job - I change my place of residence. Moreover, so to speak, not from Sviblovo to Mitino, but even from Voronezh to Moscow. Residential mobility is an excellent means of mitigating transport mobility. In our country, taking into account housing prices, residential mobility is even lower than under the USSR - when the exchange of apartments was quite common. This means that in these conditions, the transfer of jobs to the periphery, unfortunately, does not add anything.

Let me make a small digression: recently Mr. Kuzmin, the chief architect of Moscow, came up with a fundamental idea: if 40% of residents combined their place of work with their place of residence, the transport problem would be solved.

Answering this on the air of one of the TV channels, I said that I know an urban planning recipe in which this figure is not 40%, but even 100%. The boy journalist was very surprised and asked what it was called. It's called a concentration camp...

Actually the question here is this. Bringing your workplace closer to where you live is a perfectly sound idea. Only it presupposes residential mobility, characteristic of wealthy cities with a developed and consumer-friendly real estate market.

This is about hereditary diseases in a nutshell.

I’ll tell you about one more thing - related to the most efficient transport system in Moscow. In fact, there is one system - the metro, which I never criticize - on the contrary, I praise and express every respect. There, firstly, the system itself is reasonable, and, secondly, the level of management is much higher than all other segments of the transport system. But even there, unfortunately, there is a serious hereditary disease: the metro was built not only as a means of transport, but with terrible encumbrances of a mobilization plan. Hence: we need - or don't need - deep deposits, we need - or don't need - large stretches, which are completely unnecessary for urban transport as such...

If European metros are self-sufficient - metro plus a walking approach, then their Moscow counterpart always assumes a mixed metro - bus, metro - tram scheme. This is a hereditary disease due to the fact that our metro is not only a transport system, but also a fortification structure.

No one has ever died from severe hereditary diseases - therapy is known. Unfortunately, there are also many acquired diseases.

The worst of them is a house built across the road. I recently published an article with this title. This is where it came from. Recently, a very nice man called us at the institute, who was working on behalf of the Guardian newspaper. This historian of transport and urbanism, all so Western, so foreign, wrote a work on the influence of the mafia, corruption and all sorts of other things on the transport development of cities. One point is the south of Italy - Naples, Palermo in the 1960s, the second point is Moscow today. I learned this term - “house across the road” from him.

What's the point? In the south of Italy, the usual mafia outrages were happening: kickbacks, cuts, family-municipal partnerships. But there was an absolutely categorical prohibition. You can roll your overly intractable competitor or overly annoying critic into a bridge support. You can’t build a house across the road: you don’t live alone in this Naples. Well, like we are serious people here too - well, that’s not how it’s done. This is some kind of replacement for civil convention, public pressure - I don’t know.

And now - what happened in Moscow? From the point of view of the house across the road. On the map of Moscow back in the early 1990s there were wonderful, long, undeveloped corridors. These were land acquisitions for chord highways. They say that the last of the Mohicans, the real Moscow city planners, cried when looking at the Moscow development plans and realizing that there was no room left for chords.

In fact, this generation of specialists, well, a little older than us, they understood all this perfectly, imagined how Moscow should be built for a hundred years... So, there will be no more chords in Moscow. Or it will be connected with the solution of very serious engineering, technical, financial - God knows what other problems. These are - in the strictest sense of the word - houses built across the road.

In the Center, the same negative role was played by the development of vacant land suitable for parking. There were quite a lot of these little spots in the Central Administrative District, to put it simply - inside the Garden Ring. The city planners reasoned like this: this patch - if Moscow follows the socialist path - with a small number of cars - then good, it will be useful for public gardens and playgrounds. If Moscow follows - as they said - the American path, then these are ready-made drains that will remove cars from the roadway. All these patches have fallen victim to what politicians call “infill development.” Everything is zero. Well that's okay...

After all, there remained, in the end, hopes for intercepting parking lots. Of course, they are being built, but not where they need to be. It is necessary to make a reservation, at the end of the year, intercepting parking lots will be opened where necessary, on the distant approaches...

In the meantime, for example, in my area, one parking lot was built in the Gagarin Square area - no one needs it. If I got from Yasenevo and stood in a traffic jam on Leninsky Prospekt, then I would have to be an idiot to leave the car on Gagarin Square. There are 2.8 km to the Garden Ring. And if I live on Leninsky - why do I need to go from a well-maintained garage or from a parking lot under the windows - why do I need to go these 2 km to a paid parking lot?

What's the point? Where there should have been intercepting parking lots - according to common sense, according to the urban planning plan, according to the general idea of the mechanism of their work - this is the line of the Kaluzhskaya metro station. But let's come to this square and see where the smartest engineer, architect, urban planner here will install an intercept parking lot? Nowhere now. There are options there: demolish two shopping complexes, the Meridian cultural center, or the Space Research Institute, or the Kaluzhskaya electric depot. Of course, the most rewarding thing is to demolish the IKI - who needs it! So, where it is necessary, it is now almost impossible to build intercepting parking lots.

The third bad acquired disease. New, renovated buildings and even entire development areas were built without taking into account the limitations on the local road network's surroundings. There are - the young interlocutor even recalled that the French have introduced this into legislation - restrictions all over the world that a newly built or reconstructed building should not reduce the price of real estate and should not particularly worsen traffic conditions in the area. In fact, this is a rather difficult requirement to fulfill. Do you know where transport happiness is? Yuri Pimenov’s painting “New Moscow” is remarkable - thick, impressionistic colors: one lady in a convertible is driving along the wide Mokhovaya. There is nothing like this anywhere now.

But this condition - not to worsen - is observed quite strictly. In Moscow, it is not observed at all. I will name a few specific examples - I will not dwell on them; I have written about them in sufficient detail. A wonderful cultural and leisure center on Pushkinskaya Square. Due to some public efforts, it most likely will not be built. But another center, on Tverskaya Zastava Square, will almost certainly be built. In fact, such things happen when in a busy transport hub we add an additional load - for example, 100,000 sq. m of a shopping center is some kind of fire extinguishing with gasoline. In Moscow, this disease is new, but extremely common.

Another disease is the squatting of territories and the problem of parking. This is a terrible disease that affects both peripheral and central zones. A similar form of the disease occurs in Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria. But in more or less organized cities such a disease does not happen. Parking space - marked, tariffed, managed; there is no man's land. This self-seizure of territories also led to a terrible stagnation of public transport. I don't like to talk about the happy land of Archaia. In 1989, A.V. Sarychev and I participated in the first and last independent examination of the situation on public transport in Moscow. Both before and after - they were only departmental. Naturally, there was no happiness. All these stories are complete crap. But - to be fair - it was managed very effectively. Routing, schedules, dispatching - all these things were done by smart, qualified people, so despite the terrible overloads with a typical filling of 8-11 people per square meter of floor, it all somehow worked. This is what happened next. As a result of the self-seizure of territories, the fundamental condition formulated in Blaise Pascal's patent of 1654 was violated. The patent formulates as follows: “To organize in Paris the regular movement of public passenger carriages along a pre-announced route and schedule, with a uniform tariff of 5 sous” - this is still a universal form of existence of a public carrier. Buses, trams, trolleybuses become meaningless from an operational, purely practical point of view, if they are forced to move in dense traffic flow - what is the schedule there? Some cheerful man parks a Jeep Cherokee in the second row - the first row is already full. He sets and turns on the emergency lights, so what about the trolleybus? It’s good if there is a second row of wires - the driver will throw the rods.. And if not? Let me give you an even more typical example for Moscow: when a normal, active tram route is closed for the entire daylight hours due to the fact that two guardsmen caused a tin accident with the cost of a thousand rubles between them. They stand there, waiting for the inspector to arrive... Some also call the insurance commissioner - it’s all serious now, everyone has compulsory motor liability insurance - people are all serious, no one is messing around... Despite the fact that on the one hand there is a tin repair, on the other there is a serious, active city carrier . Today the situation is clearly resolved in favor of the participants in the accident.

In fact, somewhere in the 1960s, the International Union of Public Transport issued recommendations that, in general, wherever there are dense traffic flows and real transport problems - that is, in large cities - have been implemented. They are trivial to the extreme: dedicated traffic lanes, priority calling phases at intersections. Well, the latter are relatively new and require some electronics. But separate lanes have existed for at least 40 years. The priority calling phase is to provide a “green street” for public transport.

It is interesting that these dedicated lanes can be used by city services and taxis - but God forbid someone from the authorities will be a political scandal.

Now I will end the topic with the stagnation of public transport. From 1990 to 2007, the urban surface transport fleet decreased by about a third. I have the numbers written out here. Trams - from 1200 to 860, buses - from 7,500 to 5,200 - the route network has been reduced by approximately the same proportion - by about a third. This is about the question of where we will transfer motorists - urban transport reserves do not exist in nature.

Next point: complications caused by inadequate treatment of the patient.

The trouble here is this: the very basic information from the theory of transport planning, the topology of transport networks, the physics of traffic flows has never been included, and to this day is not included in the programs of any mass engineering, economic, and management specialties. Sometimes in a text written on an absolutely specific technical issue, it is necessary, for example, to explain that a traffic light has two functions: relay - at an intersection, throttle - along the highway. A traffic light is also a throttle valve that prevents the flow from accumulating at one point. I once told this trivial fact in an introduction to the specialty course for first-year MADI students, which I read at the request of Professor Viktor Nikolaevich Ivanov, our then director. I myself, in turn, read about this in the American traffic manual, published back in 1956 and translated with my participation sometime in the 1970s.

These kinds of trivial facts are the basis that decision makers need to know.

The Moscow authorities, Moscow architects sincerely believe that the eradication of traffic lights is a good thing. The best example of inadequate treatment is the Great Leningradka project, the global idea of removing traffic lights on this route. Bolshaya Leningradka is a road that at one end ends in Manezhnaya Square and at the other end in the city of Khimki. When one of our English colleagues asked upon arrival in Moscow whether Moscow specialists knew problems about pools and pipes, there was a nervous laugh in the audience. His subsequent reasoning was as simple as a steamed turnip. Guys, you have two terribly shallow pools at either end of the pipe. Why expand the pipe?

It’s like Stanislaw Jerzy Lec: okay, you’ll hit the wall with your head, but what will you do in the next cell? This is from the same area. Nevertheless, the project is being implemented at an accelerated pace.

The second example is the reconstruction of transport hubs as part of investment projects. If we go into any search engine and type in “reconstruction of transport hubs”, a bunch of materials will come up about what wonderful investment projects some large investment company is going to implement. At the same time, it is being seriously discussed that it would be nice to plug 20,000 sq.m into this node. m of retail and entertainment space. At the same time, there is something like a competition going on: the record has so far been set in the reconstruction of Tverskaya Zastava. 110,000 sq. m. underground shopping and entertainment center. A small transport improvement is being made there in the form of an additional puncture under the overpass and underground parking for 1,400 spaces. At the same time, a powerful functional load is added. As a result: about 15 kopecks worth of transport improvements - and a ruble worth of new functional load. There will be such a good jam.

Next - solving transport problems, as a pretext for big commerce and ambitious fantasies. I don’t even know what’s worse: in business there is always at least some kind of rationality. I will give specific examples. The first of them is a monorail from Timiryazevskaya to Ostankino at a cost of 250 million dollars. Operates in excursion transport mode, instead of donkeys and carts. For this money, it was possible to update the entire tram fleet of the city: a decent eurocar costs about 300 thousand, with a fleet of 860 cars - we will come to approximately the same figure. As you understand, the appearance of such cars in Moscow would be a great boon.

There is an even better example: now, finally, they are going to make a connection between Varshavka and Kashirsky, that is, to build a road from Varshavka to the intersection of Kashirskoye Highway and Borisovsky Ponds. This is a very important connection that city planners drew decades ago. At first, when I learned about its construction, I was very happy and thought that I would finally wholeheartedly praise the Moscow government. Then I found out that they were bringing equipment there to dig a tunnel. And in an open field they will dig from Varshavka to the intersection of Kashirskoye Highway. Above is a snow melting point, garages, and a railway exclusion zone. In principle, it was possible to get by with a local puncture under the railway. Or you can go through one overpass, which is cheaper and much faster. But here is the official answer that the Moscow government gave to the public organization “Freedom of Choice”. This, by the way, is perhaps the only organization that dares to disturb him. They were told that the task of fully loading an extremely valuable and expensive apparatus for digging tunnels - the HERRENKNECHT tunneling shield - was being solved. If transport problems are solved in addition to everything else, then they will never be solved.

From the same area - construction at the intersection of Alabyan, Baltiyskaya and Leningradka. A tunnel will be built here, which will apparently become a record-breaking engineering structure: its depth is such that it passes under the metro line. To get out of this tunnel, he will have to go through almost the entire Baltic Street. When asked not even by transport workers - architects - why it is impossible to build an overpass - the answer was given: residents really do not like overpasses, they are noisy, unaesthetic and will spoil the appearance of Baltic Street. How can it be spoiled?

But then I almost simultaneously learn that in Moscow they are seriously discussing the project of the most show-off overpass, where houses serve as supports. This is the so-called STRAßEHAUS (road-house) project. That is, it turns out that simple overpasses, where they are needed, are not being built. But according to this complex and highly controversial scheme, a pilot project is being conducted.

However, the most exotic solution from the field of inadequate treatment is the idea of turning the Garden End in one direction. In fact, the previous attempt was repulsed by colleagues from the traffic police. This department is often criticized - but they have competent engineers who, with the help of their generals, repulsed this attempt. Today this idea has returned again. For those who are not in the know, I inform you: for the normal operation of a multi-lane highway, simple things must be observed. It’s like on an escalator: stand on the right, pass on the left. On the left are express lanes, and on the right are exit ramps. If the road is opened on both sides - and this is a city, there is no other way - intersecting flows will arise, that is, the entropy of traffic will increase. Engineering result: a drop in throughput and an increase in accident rates. Let’s add to this another rerun (the ring will be “wrapped” counterclockwise, that is, from Zubovskaya to Paveletskaya), but someone needs to go from Zubovskaya to Smolenskaya. They will have to dive into the center, where, of course, it is very free and comfortable without them. But this project is back in the works. Serious, smart people, no worse than Alexander Viktorovich and me - normal engineers - but they got a team - they count.

Now - about the patient’s inappropriate behavior.

Let's start with the inappropriate behavior of the elite on the road.

Historical excursion. Within European culture, until the second half of the 17th century, it was considered quite decent to receive subjects while sitting on the toilet, and also to push subjects to the side of the road while passing in a carriage. Sometimes the passenger seat in the carriage was combined with a toilet - this was done quite elegantly - wide dresses, canopies. In Kazan, the carriage of Catherine II was restored, this is exactly how everything is arranged there.

In Europe, such feudal charms disappeared - at least after the French Revolution. The issue is not even a matter of legislative decrees - riding passenger carriages with torches and light and noise effects was prohibited by a decree of 1789. I didn’t find a ban on carriages with toilets - it probably went away on its own.

The post-feudal rules for using the toilet have been internalized by the Russian elite. But, alas, there are no rules for using passenger carriages. The point here is not only about laws, but about basic rules of decency. Alas, the Russian elite has not mastered all this.

There is not only a moral, but also a very interesting technical aspect. He's next. There are 1,800 trolleybuses and 5,200 buses in Moscow - they have no traffic priorities - other than those that are nominally prescribed in the traffic rules. As for cars that legally use priority lighting, according to indirect estimates, there are about the same number of them. These are our priorities in the movement...

Let me give you a very funny example - not at all from liberal practice - Spain during the Franco era. The Generalissimo's motorcade stopped at a red light. The level of motorization in the 1970s in Spain roughly corresponds to ours today, and there was a similar level of transport outrages. Caudillo apparently decided to show the Spaniards an example of correct behavior and began stopping at traffic lights. By the way, this gave very good results, recorded by objective statistics.

Now - no less disgusting thing: the behavior on the road of our average person. Our fellow social activists love the contrast: on the one hand, the arrogant behavior of the elite, on the other, the sacrificial position of the average person. We do not share this point of view: they are all worth each other.

I’ll tell you about one childhood illness - it has been a lifesaver for us so far. This disease is called car use standards. Fortunately, in Moscow the level of car use (the ratio of the number of car-days on the line to car-days in inventory) corresponds to the Soviet level - about 10%. This is happiness, because if a younger generation grows up who doesn’t want to ride the subway...

In everything else, except for this childhood disease, the behavior of the motorized man in the street is terrible. The simplest examples. A car on the sidewalk, at a bus stop, careless driving, dangerous driving - in Moscow - practices - turning right from the 3rd row. Unmotivated lane changes - changing lanes in order to overtake in traffic. In 1946, at the Presidential Conference on Road Safety, it was decided that the speed of traffic in a residential area should not be more than 10 times the speed of a pedestrian, that is, be within 50 km per hour. Of course, this is not implemented overnight, but in the end it was implemented.

When driving at these speeds, overtaking is crazy. Neat, quiet movement. For the “returned joy of driving” - highways, including city ones, are separate, without pedestrians...

Two interesting things happened here. A complete rejection of the practice of developed countries: they have a functional division of the road network into slow streets and high-speed highways. We don't do that. On the contrary, we are speeding up traffic on Leningradka: “We will have a highway from Manege to Sheremetyevo.” In several of my speeches I have called this a banana republic-style highway. After that, the word “highway” was removed and they began to speak more carefully - “a highway of continuous movement.” On the one hand, this is the position of the city and the authorities, on the other hand, a decision dear to the hearts of millions of ordinary people: “Gas to the floor - and God bless them, the pedestrians.”

Reply from the hall. This is a social order of the minority...

Let's go back to where we started. To the question “When will they take care of this?” we are used to answering cheerfully - when they stick their finger in a socket... Or a little more seriously - when the first office building, the first block turns out to be unsold - due to the fact that it will not be possible to get to them. So far everything is selling with a bang. Therefore, there are no direct educational measures yet. Alexander Viktorovich claims that traffic jams are the most reliable indicator of the effectiveness of state or municipal government, which cannot be hidden by any statistics or PR. This is partly true...

Now about the way out of the disease. There are three options.

Simple and trivial: there will be cars in the city and there will be traffic jams. This is a kind of consensus between government and society. The government does what it wants: builds houses across the road, preserves the feudal privileges of the 12th century - but it allows ordinary people to park on the sidewalk, at the bus stop, drive the way we drive... Don’t pay - well, where is paid parking? The number of people who bought parking lots at their place of residence is a fraction of a percent. Then they are very expensive. Parking in the city is generally free. Let me remind you that “in the classics” the parking space is marked out, tariffed, equipped with parking meters - this was invented back in 1933, before any electronics. So the current situation reflects the complete consensus of the authorities and society: the first does what it wants, the second does what it can.

The second, rather unlikely - no traffic jams and no cars. I don't rule out its possibility. It’s very simple: strict administrative bans on cars entering the city center are being introduced. No cars, no traffic jams, no problems.

Reply from the hall. Do you think there will be no traffic jams?

Blinkin. No no no. In fact, the market for special passes will open. But taking into account the fact that, like any market, it will be regulated by supply and demand, there will be fewer cars.

Reply from the hall. A small note - you said that if this is handed over to the regulation of the traffic police, there will be special passes...

Blinkin. No - the question is that this option is really very unlikely.

Finally there is a third option. It is completely unlikely for Russia - but, according to foreign experience, it is the only one possible. This option is called civil conventions on the use of urban areas and cars. As soon as they are concluded, absolutely simple, well-known planning, administrative, fiscal, IT and other decisions come into effect. But - conventions come first, and all technology comes later. All major cities in the world live by these conventions. In which there are many times more cars than in Moscow. We have 300-350 cars per 1000 inhabitants. This is, of course, a multiple of 6 times more than in Moscow during the last years of Soviet power. But this is about 2 times less than the average European city. Than in London, Paris, Munich. In New York - and even more - about 900... There is no happiness anywhere, not even in New York - but the city is moving.

What are civil conventions? This is a triad described in the scientific literature: networking, pricing, participation.

Networking is everything related to the network. Development rules, rules for connecting newly built or reconstructed facilities, rules for using the network at the level of automotive technology - including the most sophisticated things related to IT. How is this all done in practice? Through participation.

Now - about pricing, that is, about conventions regarding how and in what form we pay for all this. There is a vast scientific literature on this subject, and the most serious economist of urban transport was Nobel laureate William Vickrey.

This mechanism is designed in such a way that urban society reaches a certain generalized price for a trip. It is driven into it: taxes - I will list a huge list. All road taxes are structured as feedback taxes: we pay upon the fact of owning a car or purchasing gasoline. These taxes are channeled in a certain way and spent on developing the road network. This mechanism has existed for at least 90 years in written form. It was codified in national legislation about 50 years ago. In our country, this mechanism is prohibited by law: read Article 35 of the Budget Code. I always cite a story on this topic that the head physician Morgulis banned television. In short, this article is about the prohibition of targeted taxes: all income in one bag, all expenses in one bag.

Question from the audience. Why can’t this be done at the budget planning level? What is the difference?

Blinkin. In fact, this is how it is done. It’s just that a mechanism generally accepted in the world works like a good automatic machine: you bought gasoline, the automatic machine splits the money into the municipal, state and federal budgets. And the amount received depends on the traffic. No legislator will be more effective than this machine gun. This is an excellent mechanism for the country as a whole. Unfortunately, it's too rough for the city. There are subtle additional mechanisms for the city. First of all, differentiated parking costs. The price of parking in the area of a remote metro station can be zero or stimulating - it is often included in the price of a metro ticket. There are no free lots in the center. You can leave your car for 15 minutes to go somewhere, but, in principle, a person with an average salary will never do that. In underground parking it is cheaper, but the cut-off price is such that a person whose social package does not have this will be able to afford it if necessary, but not every day. A most delicately constructed thing.

Further. There are fees - different in different cities - related to the environment, cultural and historical heritage... You never know what the legislation of countries and peoples has not come up with... What is the main thing in this? The fact is that all these fees go towards transport.

I must say that all these taxes, payments, fees, agreements on what and where I will build are very harmless things. I would even say - offensive to our consciousness. In Moscow, for example, you can fence off a spot near your restaurant with plastic bollards, install a guest worker - and here you have parking by agreement with the prefecture. Somewhere in Munich this would have ended in a very serious lawsuit for the squatting of municipal land. All these agreements: the use of land, roadways, parking space - a complex system based, from the point of view of participation, on very subtle mechanisms. All this is about 100 years old. I always give a very simple example. The same Danos Gazis said angrily in the 60s that it was easier for Americans to send troops into Vietnam than to build a new overpass in Manhattan. Why? Intellectuals - they always laugh at big politics - but you can’t laugh at municipal democracy... Until there is a consensus between local residents, local developers, the association of city carriers, the Royal Automobile Club - the oldest society of motorists - since 1903 in all English-speaking countries, supporters of the movement CARFREE, environmentalists. They all come to negotiate. And not with a shout: they are offending us! - and with normal transport calculations. The market for developments in the field of urban transport - modeling, calculations - is based on the fact that there are a lot of interested parties who play in this, who are willing to pay for it in order to protect their rights. Plus - a huge culture of transport and sociological sounding. They are interested in how you drive, what you are willing to do and for what... Huge developments - since the 60s, this is already a serious science. The most extreme and funniest case is the transport referendum. For example, for the introduction of a paid zone in Stockholm - a referendum, and a difficult one - 53 to 47 - everything is very serious, and the party that opposed the paid zone won the elections - but the people were in favor - and through complex coordination, the referendum decision, it was introduced.

What can you expect today? The current situation suits absolutely everyone. If I’m a wealthy developer, I’ll come to an agreement with the authorities; if I’m a layman, I’ll come to an agreement with a caretaker technician about a shell, or with an inspector about a traffic violation - so far everyone prefers individual agreements. True, as Grebenshchikov says: “even if you’re a Rolls-Royce, you’ll still be stuck in a traffic jam.” So, not everything can be agreed upon. They say that the practice of hiring ambulances has already emerged to speed up movement around the city. When the need for a social contract will arise is a guessing question.

Replies from the audience. This seems to be a civil society issue that does not exist. ...

In our country, any disagreement is punished by force. ... And the bulk of the measures are usually punitive in nature.

Blinkin. There are two positions: the expert one I outlined and the civilian one. The latter boils down to the fact that all the measures taken by the Moscow government in the field of urban planning, development of the road network and public transport, traffic management, and so on, are correct, since Moscow has just unanimously voted for this government. As an expert, this is deeply disgusting to me. As a citizen, I have to come to terms with the opinion of the majority.

All. Questions please.

ATTENTION!

Discussion

Question from the audience. When will things change for us?

Blinkin. How many of those present here, seeing a traffic violation, called the police? I think few people.

Replies from the audience. Nobody, nobody...

Blinkin. And in America everyone. Here is Mikhail Vladimirovich (M.V. Donskoy), he often lived in this country, and I lived in the neighboring one, where the rules are the same... So there, any violation leads to a report. Here you go, some scoundrels noticed that the head of the Paris police parked his car in a parking lot for the disabled. This ended with him being fired from his job.

Yeah. This means that if we in Detroit see that some bad person made a right turn from the left lane, we will record it on a mobile phone, and we will not be too lazy to file a civil lawsuit for moral damages and a threat to life and health. Now - there is no need to scold the authorities - which of those present here - Alexander Viktorovich's (A.V. Sarychev) favorite topic, civil lawsuits - is ready for this? Despite the fact that in our country - due to lack of practice - a civil lawsuit is a terribly boring matter. Who's ready to do this?

Reply from the hall. Our judicial system does not work at all.

Blinkin. It works - it works for the benefit of corporations or someone who has a financial resource...

Grigory Ivanovich. Huge housing construction is underway in Moscow. Housing prices are huge. How much of this money goes to the Moscow budget and what is allocated from there for street and road construction?

Blinkin. Let's split the question.

We need to start not with money, but with mechanisms. There are no mechanisms for linking commercial construction to infrastructure development.

Point two - Moscow spends very decent money on road construction.

I had to see the waste of cities with a population of 50-100,000 people. There are cases when these costs come down to the amount required to purchase rags for wiping traffic lights after winter. I'm not kidding! In this sense, Moscow is a rich city and spends a lot. Another thing is that if you dig a tunnel in an open field or expand a pipe between two small pools, it doesn’t matter whether you spend a lot or a little.

Question from the audience. So it's just a matter of the designer's qualifications?

Blinkin. Moscow has very good designers. But one of them is given the task of developing a project to turn the Garden Ring in one direction. I tell him: “Man, you’re going to do this, aren’t you ashamed?” And he answers: “Mikhail Yakovlevich - I’ll turn off the phone so that you don’t fool me.” The designers have nothing to do with it. When red lines were drawn for the designer: the underground space here has been sold, don’t go in here - here is the foundation of a cultural and leisure center, but insert a ramp into these 3.5 meters. He fits in... This is not a question of qualifications - it is economic, institutional... I never scold designers in Moscow...

Reply from the hall. Who makes the order? Architects, as a rule, and they are just not qualified...

Blinkin. Architects are different. There are volume builders who build houses. Excellent specialists, wonderful market. They create beautiful leisure complexes, beautiful neighborhoods... And if they are included in the business, they receive decent money. They don't care about transport and roads. They are building houses.

Urban planners - like Academician Bocharov - they look at the city as if from space, in general, how it works. Bocharov’s voice, despite the fact that he is an academician, despite being 80 years old, despite his global authority, means about the same as mine. They listen to him, they invite him to the radio... Me too.

This year, Moscow's spending budget exceeded a trillion rubles. Of these, either 156 or 165 billion went to roads. By metro - about 9. These amounts are much higher than the current one. Let's see what comes of this in 2008.

I don’t know of a single ineffective project regarding the metro.

Reply from the hall. And we know! For example, “mini-metro”: Moscow City stations, where the width and length of the platforms are reduced, and at the end. In two years, nothing can be done - and the stations will choke...

Blinkin. If we remember also about the Moscow City car exits on the Third Transport Ring, on Shmitovskaya Street. This makes it even scarier to look at.

Metro engineering has nothing to do with the solutions you named.

I saw the faces of their experts when they heard the word “monorail” - it’s on their balance sheet. And when they heard “mini-metro”... Some people make decisions, but others know.

Question from the audience. What action would you take today?

Blinkin. One step I would take not only for the benefit, but also for the sake of public testing. On the Garden Ring, as you know, one row is filled with cars, sometimes there is a second one with flashing emergency lights, and some also park cars in a herringbone pattern and not along the sidewalk. And so on... And there are still a lot of cars on the sidewalks. The transport revolution in Moscow should begin with the allocation of a public transport lane on the Garden Ring. Not just because it's useful. This is also very important psychologically. I am very interested in how this measure will break through the resistance of motorists... This is the simplest measure.

Measure number two is the organization of parking space in accordance with generally accepted rules in motorized countries. The earliest example is Chicago '33. There, as you remember, they shot... This measure requires agreement between the authorities and the average person... But this is measure number two.

True, all this is from Timur Shaov’s song: “They won’t elect a Chuchmek as president!” Likewise, a transport worker will not be elected mayor.

Question from the audience. As for public transport, Moscow City Duma deputies from Yabloko recently said that Moscow is rich enough to make public transport free. Will this help clear traffic jams?

Blinkin. Let's: flies - separately, cutlets - separately. Judging by the results of voting in the Moscow City Duma on issues of transport and urban planning, Yabloko does not have any particular differences with the Moscow Government.

Now about free travel. As practice has shown, this measure does not work anywhere except communist countries - for example, Cuba, Korea. A transport enterprise is a normal business unit, albeit of municipal ownership. Talking about free transport is pure populism.

Now about validators. This, of course, is a double-edged sword. They, of course, delay landing. In the current conditions, when they are superimposed on delays associated with traffic problems, all this, alas, is unprincipled. Western countries have other methods of collecting tolls. And, most likely, you will have to switch to them. In the current conditions, all this is neither cold nor hot.

Question from the audience. You said that there were no unsuccessful metro projects, but what about the light metro? Shouldn't it have been worth just building a few regular metro stations...

Blinkin. There was a terrible mixture of administrative pressure associated with accelerated construction and some severe restrictions. There, urban planning decisions entailed a set of specific transport decisions. Of course, for the metro as a system, all these “light metro” and “mini-metro” are a headache. And all this, of course, will end very badly.

I really want to look at the first experience of fingers in a socket - the non-sale of Moscow City offices. It will be very instructive.

Question from the audience. Regarding minibuses: how do they relate to public transport? Do they have a right to exist?

Blinkin. Transportation on a mixed, taxi-route principle by small-capacity buses is a sure sign of third world countries. However, as distribution routes deep into neighborhoods, they have a right to exist. On city highways - such as Leninsky Prospekt - this is nonsense. When the bus fleet was in crisis, when there were 34 categories of beneficiaries, this made sense. But now... In principle, it will die out on its own.

Question from the audience. How do traffic jams relate to disasters?

Blinkin. A denser flow leads to a reduction in accidents. In principle, only “tinny” accidents are possible in it. All incidents with pedestrians are outside of traffic jams. You cannot hit a person at 3 km/h. So, traffic jams reduce the number of serious accidents, while the number of minor accidents increases.

At the same time, cross-country comparisons show a clear pattern: countries with a high level of traffic management have the lowest values of transport risks (number of fatalities per 100 thousand vehicles) and, at the same time, a low frequency of congestion.

Question from the audience. Sorry, some places in Moscow - turns from the Kremlin, a bend on Profsoyuznaya, traffic management on Sadovoy - suggest that traffic jams are organized. Does the Moscow government profit from traffic jams?

Blinkin. You know, I am a liberal, I stand for the presumption of innocence. I don’t see any stupidity or ill will here. There are sins of two kinds here. Sin of the first kind, which I mentioned in the lecture: ignorance of the basics of the theory of traffic flow, topology of transport networks and other useful sciences at all levels of city government.

The second sin is in linking transport and investment projects. I don't think there is any ill will here. There is simply an objective thing - an investment project, for example, the same shopping center at Tverskaya Zastava - this means jobs, income, including for the city budget. Well, what about transport problems... God knows whether these problems will exist or not? What if these foolish experts are completely wrong, what if their hydrodynamics is actually a pseudoscience...

Specific example. At the intersection of Serebryanicheskaya Embankment and Zemlyanoy Val, a deluxe class office complex with an area of 20,000 sq. m. was built. The hedgehog understands that only the cleaning lady will arrive there by trolleybus. They created a burden for the investor. He built two narrow ramps and a parking lot for 140 cars. The object was accepted solemnly, and it was said everywhere that this is a wonderful example of social contribution, it - attention, this is from the official press release - “will increase the trafficability of the Garden Ring by 25%.” In fact, it’s easy to think that these ramps and parking won’t give anything - a drop in the ocean. I’m afraid that in a wave it will close the traffic from Kursk to Taganskaya... But it’s a very beautiful transport facility. And the money came into the budget. And what - because of the bourgeois pseudoscience of hydrodynamics, break it?

Question from the audience. To generalize a little, is there no system for decision-makers to attract experts who have information?

Blinkin. I don’t like to talk about the happy country of Archaia - but in Soviet times, when there was a professional discussion, naturally, it was impossible to scold Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev or the Politburo, but with numbers in hand it was possible to call the project stupidity. There was a discussion on transport problems, but now there is none. Absolutely harmless, engineering criticism leads to political grievances.

Question from the audience. They want to equate film, video recordings as evidence in court, and then, as, for example, in Germany, if they install cameras that read license plates, will this improve the situation?

Question from the audience. And - in addition, our number does not indicate the owner, is it possible to change anything about this - and then ...

Blinkin. The use of cameras to monitor compliance with traffic rules is based on the following institutions.

First. Registration of vehicles - since 1934 - has been mobilization. With some wild twists: the owner, the manager by proxy, the person... Institute 1 - the number on the car is yours, not a piece of iron. If you put someone else there, that's your problem. You may be heard in court - in the event of a serious accident. In the event of a metal accident, it simply doesn’t interest anyone. If you have a hired driver by proxy, no one is interested in that either.

The second is identification. This number contains an address suitable for billing in your name. Nobody cares where you live. But if the address does not work, the liability will be greater.

The third is a database of driving histories. Because responsibility very much depends on your... trajectory. It is used to calculate the price of your insurance - many violations, few violations... They can set such an insurance price that you will manage without a car for a year... And this is a long story... And also - a very interesting purely IT component - a very reliable system of algorithms and constant contact are required with the public - to avoid mistakes and conflicts.

All this is connected with institutions. The car registration system needs to be changed, driver history files need to be created. By the way, this government decree has already passed... We need to change institutions - otherwise there will be a simple disbursement of funds. For example, satellite navigation on buses. It shows everything very accurately. The driver tells the dispatcher: “I’m stuck in a traffic jam because the tail is turning from Sadovoy to Leninsky and won’t let me pass.” Dispatcher to driver: “And I know that you are standing there”

Question from the audience. So will this do anything?

Blinkin. Until the registration rules and liability rules change, this will not give anything.

Question from the audience. Regarding finding agreement between society and the authorities, in my opinion, there should be no problems - after all, about 70% use public transport

Blinkin. About 80. Public carriers perform 80% of the transport work. Yes, there are 20% of them, but they also exist. They are socially active and also have the right to vote.

Question from the audience. But they are a minority, they are disgusting and they pollute the air.

Blinkin. Air pollution is a very good topic, especially in conditions when powerful stationary pollutants remain in Moscow...

Reply from the hall. 85% of pollution is from cars...

Blinkin. In countries where Euro-4 or even more stringent American standards have been adopted... For example, the road on which Tina Kandelaki crashed, there are a lot of cars on it, and it smells of the sea. It's not about the cars.

Question from the audience. Are you saying that 20% of motorists create a traffic collapse?

Blinkin. Here are numbers from different clusters. We are talking about the fact that cars account for an average of 20% of total passenger transport work. This is not at all small: on many metro lines and bus routes there is physically no reserve to replace this work.

The Moscow road network can support approximately 350,000 vehicles in motion, or 10% of the existing inventory. When there are more of them, the situation on the roads becomes more complicated.

Question from the audience. On the means of monitoring compliance with the rules. With the reform, will our responsibility extend to everyone? It is no secret that now a significant part of motorists are exempt from liability.

Blinkin. This is a very important question from a moral point of view. Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf and Princess Madeleine were fined for illegal parking. They sat down to dinner and parked the car in the wrong place. The office paid the fine and apologized. This is very important from a moral point of view. According to statistics, the majority of violators are not employees of law enforcement agencies, not members of the government - they are ordinary people who are no worse and no better.

Question from the audience. Question from an amateur: Moscow has an internal railway. Is it possible to use it?

Blinkin. This is from the section: can galoshes be used instead of a cap? It was historically intended - and is now used - within the framework of freight logistics. Within the framework of passenger logistics, the issues of approaches and transfers are important. This is - in fact - making one transport system into another. In principle - it is possible. Whether it is necessary or worth the candle is another question.

Question from the audience. It’s just that there was an opportunity to develop it into a four-track one, but after the construction of the 3rd transport...

Blinkin. Yes, this is our style: making a decision that blocks the implementation of any other options.

Question from the audience. Sorry, you were talking about the transport collapse. And what is it?

Blinkin. Have you read "Southern Highway" by Julio Cortazar? There, the traffic jam on the approach to Paris continues throughout the entire story - although it reflects the realities of the early 60s. Collapse is when you arrive not at 23:00, but after 4 days. Moreover, having learned about this from the news, a friend will not ask about it. Three points like the fire on Smolenka - and you have collapse.

Question from the audience. I would say that the Moscow authorities are still acting. Recently, there have been two diametrical decisions: in one case, the tram tracks were removed, in the other, they were left. Regarding the house across the road: they are discussing the idea of a museum of tolerance with 10 meters of pedestrian zone that will block the street. With a tram, cars...

Blinkin. Regarding the tram on Lesnaya Street, it has already been killed. Lesnaya Street was built up with hotel and office buildings with a heavy traffic load: there was not enough underground parking, cars stopped on the streets, moving ones went along tram tracks. The tram operates under constant force majeure conditions. There are either trams or cars.

Question from the audience. What changes are needed in the traffic rules to ensure the movement of public transport?

Blinkin. The dedicated lanes are registered there. And the priority is written there. This is simply not being done.

Question from the audience. What to do? Maybe self-organization?

Blinkin. You know, those who have traveled abroad have seen: if there is an obstacle where two lanes merge into one, then the drivers, like in a kindergarten, take turns: first-second, first-second. This is self-organization. Maybe the next generation will learn...

Question from the audience. As for the relationship between private and public transport: after all, abandoning private transport will only create big problems. You yourself spoke about reducing public transport.

Blinkin. In fact, this is a complex issue. Now it doesn’t matter how many cars you put on the Garden Ring, they will all be stuck in a traffic jam. But if you select a separate lane, it will be possible to organize a very powerful public transport system.

Question from the audience. The project of the 4th transport ring is being considered. Why not provide a high-speed tram line? This would solve several problems at once.

Blinkin. There is no public transport on the third, and there won’t be on the fourth either. I was once asked on one of the TV channels how I feel about the construction of a fourth transport network in general. I replied that I was a transport expert, not a military expert. And that, perhaps, if Moscow is going to defend itself from the nomadic hordes, then the 4th transport will be very useful. For transport - no.

ATTENTION!

Afterword to the lecture

I edited the transcript of my lecture, sent from the editorial office of Polit.ru, while staying in the glorious city of Amsterdam. Inspired by some local observations, I thought it wise to add a few words to what has been said above.

In Amsterdam, the population density is one of the highest in the world, there are twice as many cars per 1000 inhabitants as in Moscow, but there are no traffic jams at all.

The technical side of the matter fits well within the framework of world experience, to which I constantly appeal. I will list only the most notable positions:

developed public transport, including the metro, providing a completely civilized quality of transportation,

a dense tram network operating simultaneously as separate lanes for route buses and taxis,

a deep railway entrance of an overpass, which connects the airport with the central station and does not cut the city into isolated parts,

central streets closed to all vehicles except taxis, emergency and public transport, as well as trade logistics,

highways built onto overpasses and tunnels and, of course, not abutting the streets of the city center,

intercepting parking lots at peripheral metro and urban railway stations,

“iron” priority for pedestrians: either a garbage truck or a van delivering food to a restaurant and goods to a store can drive onto the sidewalk;

clear traffic organization, including separate lanes for public transport and bicycle paths, etc., etc.

In fact, all this is nothing more than trivial technical consequences of centuries-old civic conventions in Amsterdam regarding the use of urban space and public transport routes.

This is how the city guide describes the most important of these conventions: “on the Amsterdam canals there have never been personal carriages like the Venetian gondolas: all citizens, even the richest, walked on foot so as not to interfere with the movement of trade goods.”

The designated convention arose no later than the first quarter of the 17th century; during this era, the richest citizens of Amsterdam were also the richest merchants in the world. Moreover, their rejection of class transport privileges occurred approximately 180 years earlier than the abolition of the same privileges in traffic on the streets of Paris.

In January 2008, the Russian elite had a suitable opportunity to outline their position on a related range of issues: the first “post-holiday” responses to the tightening of sanctions for traffic violations provided for in the new edition of the Code of Administrative Offenses appeared in the media.

Let me give you a few typical quotes.

Here is the sincere confession of one of the members of the Federation Council: “... When I’m late for work, I ask the driver to exceed the speed limit or drive onto the median to avoid the traffic jam. ... The senator’s ID saves me...” And here is the reasoning of his colleague: “... my wife has already brought a receipt for crossing the continuous line. By increasing fines, we wanted to improve road safety. But in the end, people in uniform went out to the highway on holidays to earn extra money: the tariffs are new, but the traffic cops are old.”

Let me remind you that in the law enforcement practice of countries that have stable civil conventions regarding the use of roads and cars, driving into oncoming traffic is called driving dangerous. Such an act is considered as a fraudulent crime, namely, as an attempt on the life and health of two or more persons, committed in a socially dangerous way. So, if we measure this by this measure, then the first of the gentlemen senators gave a confession in the case of forcing a dependent person (driver - personal assistant) to commit a criminal offense, and the second justifies the criminal actions of his own wife.

Here is another sincere confession, this time coming from a representative of a large business: “During the New Year holidays, I overtook barely crawling trucks across a continuous road. So for each such overtaking I paid a fine. ... new traffic rules were introduced not for safety, but to improve the well-being of traffic cops.” Here I will note that in the countries mentioned, the very first violation of our hero would have ended up in his “driving history” file, and after recording the second and subsequent violations, no, even the most expensive lawyer, would have saved him from a short prison term and a long deprivation of his driver’s license.

“For dessert” I will offer an equally simple-minded story from a secular writer: “I’ve already been caught for speeding. My cars are not designed for the speed limit, they are fast and I get stopped often. I “figure it out on the spot”, it’s cheaper...”

First about “my cars”. We must assume that they were made not in Africa, but somewhere in the European Union or Japan, that is, in places where the mentioned civil conventions are unshakable and, accordingly, traffic rules are strictly observed by the vast majority of road users. So you can blame the technique just as well as the mirror!

And finally, about deliberate (I would say, with particular cynicism and insolence!) speeding, characteristic of all representatives of the “rich marginal” class. I wouldn't have any objections if their games of the car version of Russian roulette took place somewhere in secluded areas. Go to Salt Lakes, or rent a driving range in Dmitrov and play for your health! The trouble, however, is that these games take place on a public road network; with all the ensuing consequences for others.

Truly, in Russia there is an extremely simple-minded and purely marginal “elite”, lagging behind in development from their foreign colleagues, apparently forever.

ATTENTION!

The following speakers spoke in the series “Public Lectures” Polit.ru”:

Boris Dubin. Cultures of modern Russia
Andrey Illarionov. Deviation in social development

From the editor. In solving the transport problem that determines the appearance of modern cities, Russia is following its own path. Meanwhile, developed countries have accumulated a wealth of experience, which we largely neglect. Mikhail Yakovlevich Blinkin, professor at the Higher School of Urbanism and director of the Institute of Transport Economics and Transport Policy at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, tells how the global approach to transport planning was formed and evolved, what are the current trends and what path Russia has to go.

HBR- Russia: What place does transport planning occupy in urban planning?

Blinkin: Urbanism includes three giant directions. The first is urban design: how the city is structured from the point of view of the architect, for whom the image of the city, the axes along which it develops, its high-rise configuration are important, that is, the city as a static object. This tradition comes from the ancient world. The second direction is related to the city’s economy: what it “sells for the fortress wall” (architectural, cultural and historical merits, industrial, intellectual products, or something else), what it feeds itself, why it exists. And the third direction is urban planning, an exact science with mathematical formulas, and its section, which began to develop with the advent of the automobile, urban transportation planning. The transport system has always dictated the structure of the city, but in the days of horse traction and the first trams, this dictation was not so imperative and tough. At most, it was necessary to regulate the parking regime: in the law of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (7th century BC), for example, it was said: whoever parks his chariot in such a way that it makes it difficult to move along the royal road (that is, along the main city street) will have to cut off head and put it on a pike in front of this scoundrel's house.

Everything changed with the advent of the mass car. This is a very specific milestone - in 1908, the production of the Ford Model T began in America, and the number of vehicles per thousand residents increased from several units to several hundred. Previously, only a very rich city dweller could have his own horse ride, and the car quickly became an affordable means of transport.

How did this affect the appearance of the city?

The first response to the mass transport self-sufficiency of households is American cities in the spirit of Robert Moses, who actually created New York. This man is equal to Ford in the history of cities and cars; he owns the famous phrase: if you want to drive cars, pay, I will do it. And he did - he set the standard for the construction of megacities, which can be seen today in Canada, the USA, and Australia. By this standard, a third of the city is devoted to streets and roads; in the most pathological case (for example, in Los Angeles), another third is used for parking. That is, the city is being built for cars. The public, including architects, cultural experts, and historians, has come to terms with the fact that the city is intertwined with complex transport structures: in Japan, for example, electric transport can go on the fourth floor level, and cars can go on the sixth floor level.

Are streets and roads different concepts in this concept?

These are elements of a double-circuit network, and Moses clearly separated them. There are houses and shops on the street, people walk along the sidewalks; There are traffic lights and cars drive slowly. And the second circuit is roads, what the Americans call “freeways”, the British call “motorways”. They are far from the urban area; there are no houses or pedestrians there. This is how large cities in most countries of the world are structured. We had the opportunity to build a dual-circuit network in the early 1990s, when cities began to become saturated with cars, but we neglected it. This can no longer be done now. In Moscow, for example, half of the Third Transport Ring (from Gagarin Square to Moscow City) has the title of road. And when we reach Begovaya and Bashilovka, it is no longer a road, but something incomprehensible: wide, like a highway, but with houses, trolleybuses and pedestrians.

Do I understand correctly that in Europe they reacted differently to motorization?

In Europe, there were desperate debates about how the city should develop in the era of motorization. As a result, the concept of a balanced multimodal transport system, formulated by German scientists in the 1960s, began to dominate. The idea was this: Germany is getting richer, the auto industry is developing, citizens love cars, so the level of motorization should increase, but at the same time cities cannot be deformed according to the American type. This means we need to wean the population from traveling to the center by car. To achieve this, they increased the price of finding a car in the center and created a system of decent public transport that you can use without compromising your interests. If in the city of Moses public transport was a social service for the elderly, disabled and poor, then in the German concept it became truly public - that is, convenient for everyone, including car owners. All this formed a completely different image of the city.

Now these two models - American and European - exist in parallel? Or do they intersect and influence each other?

The debate between American and German transport and urbanists has been going on for many years, and it seems that the European model has won. In American and Canadian cities, strong public transport is appearing, pedestrian streets are appearing in the centers of megalopolises, streets with limited vehicular access, with smoothed traffic (cars can only drive slowly along them), “combined spaces” (this is an invention of the last 20 years - zones in which have a place for both pedestrians and cars, but at the same time the car there is an oppressed class).

The Europeanization of the American transport system is a very significant event. Previously, in a traditional or business center of the city, it was allowed to build a high-rise building, say an office with 60 floors, if the developer equipped it with as many parking spaces as possible - let's say, 500; now - if not more than a certain number, for example 100. Europeans came up with this in the 1980s, Americans and Canadians - not so long ago. A parking space even on the minus eighth floor is a bait, a reason to come by car. When this lure is absent, people begin to use public transport.

And what path did the Asian megacities, known for their success in the fight against traffic jams, take, for example, Singapore and Tokyo, which have a high population density and buildings?

They have taken very strict measures to keep the level of motorization at an acceptable level. In Singapore, this is 160 cars per 1000 inhabitants (for comparison: in Moscow now it is 360-380, and the American standard is 700-800). Singapore is a rich city, it has a very decent road network, built according to the American style, but it is so cramped that if there are more cars, everyone will be stuck in traffic jams.

What did Singapore do? Firstly, he organized auctions for the right to purchase a car. The last time a car voucher sold at these auctions was three times the price of the car itself. That is, people overpaid by four times. Secondly, he introduced an electronic system for administering per-kilometer payments: “Big Brother” tracks each kilometer of mileage and charges it depending on the time and location of the trip and the load on the road network. The highest tariff is for driving in heavy traffic. These are called “Vickrey tolls,” named after Nobel laureate economist William Vickrey, who explained in 1963 that fees for using a transport system should depend on how busy it is.

The Tokyo experience, from my point of view, is even harsher. There, in order to obtain a state registration number, you need to have a legally issued document confirming that the car will have a place to sleep - that is, you need to be the owner or tenant of a parking space.

The figures you cited seem to indicate that Moscow does not have the most critical level of motorization. And at the same time, there are no traffic jams comparable to ours in developed countries.

Here we need to look at other numbers. It is necessary to divide the entire asphalt of the city on which you can drive: streets, roads, alleys (minus courtyards and inter-house driveways) - by the number of cars. In American-style cities, which were made under the influence of Robert Moses, the amount of asphalt per car is approximately 200 square meters. This means that if all the cars in the city enter the streets and roads at the same time, they will be crowded, but a collapse will not happen.

In European cities, there is approximately 100 square meters per car. In Singapore - 80 square meters. Lee Kuan Yew realized that he could not make more asphalt in the city: there was simply no space, which meant that the denominator had to be reduced - the number of cars. And he achieved the European norm.

In Moscow today's figure is 28. We have no other way but the Asian one. Because imagine: even if we have a second Moscow Ring Road - 100 kilometers of a good road with 10 lanes - how much will the asphalt standard per car change? Per one square meter, since the denominator is four million. This is a very sad and unpleasant fact.

That is, the construction of additional roads, the expansion of existing ones, the construction of overpasses, interchanges - all that Russian megacities are doing today will not solve the problem?

English planners proved many years ago that a city street interchange is the most expensive way to move congestion from an old location to a new one. An interchange is an element of a freeway network: there cannot be an intersection at the same level. On the street, if you made a tunnel or overpass, cars will stop at the next intersection. We've all been through this: traffic-light-less Leningradka - chic, super expensive - one end ends at the Tverskaya Zastava, and the other ends at Khimki. The traffic light was a throttle valve there - it divided the flow into small parts and held it so that it did not gather at the next bottleneck. They removed the traffic lights and moved the traffic jams to another place. This is outright stupidity.

So we need to reduce the number of cars?

I will say this: our megacities, especially Moscow, are doomed to limit automobile mobility. We must realize that the current number of cars in the city simply cannot fit. To achieve this, you first need to increase the price of ownership (not the purchase price - no one cares about that) of a car in the city. The cost of ownership—overnight storage fees, daytime parking fees, environmental fees, etc.—drives our transportation behavior.

Is gasoline included in this list?

Formally, there is the price of a product, but there is a fiscal component in the price of a product. Gasoline, of course, is included, but it is the fiscal component in the price of gasoline that is important for the city. Typically, at both the city and national economic levels, there is a balance between how much a city (state, region, state) spends on travel infrastructure (streets, highways, parking lots, intelligent transportation systems, etc.) and how much how much targeted taxes do car owners pay? The American standard is one to one. In the European Union, the total fiscal burden on motorists is much greater: the money they pay is enough not only for highways and streets, but also to support public transport. Moscow figures are ridiculous. The total payments of the capital's car owners for three items: excise tax on the price of gasoline, transport tax and parking fees - cover 25 percent of the Moscow government's expenses for the construction and maintenance of the road network. Motorists are one of the two most subsidized categories of Moscow residents, along with pensioners. There is no such thing in any country. In other Russian cities, the situation is somewhat different: motorist payments are comparable to those in Moscow, and costs for the road network are much more modest.

The crude tax system (under which, say, when you buy gasoline, you pay a tax), which has been in effect throughout the world for more than 70 years, is now considered outdated, since it equalizes the use of a car in a metropolis and on the roads, relatively speaking, of the Vyatka region. Today the world is moving toward an electronic system for administering per-kilometer payments: a GPS tracker tracks the car’s route, and for a kilometer on the Boulevard Ring in Moscow the driver pays many times more than for a kilometer between Cherepovets and Vologda. This system is being actively tested in Holland, in several regions of Australia, and the USA. I don’t think we’ll get to this point anytime soon. So far, we have very gentle, I would say, homeopathic measures related to increasing the price of owning a car in the city - paid parking - and even this is causing violent indignation among the public.

How do you evaluate our experience in introducing paid parking and do you think that it should be universal - that is, not only in the center?

We haven't walked much along this path yet - our parking is very roughly differentiated by price. A much more complex tariff is needed, taking into account the location, day of the week, time of day and duration of the parking session. That is, for an hour of parking you need to pay, relatively speaking, one coin, and for eight hours - not eight coins, but 28. The city encourages people who come to a business meeting: they should live a business life. And to anyone who wants to leave the car for 10 hours, he says: don’t do this, it’s harmful for the city - or pay a lot of money.

As for the ubiquitous paid parking, everything is very simple. In our cities, land surveying has not yet been carried out. When (and if) it is carried out, within the boundaries allocated, for example, to a certain HOA, it will be possible to park the car anywhere - the city should not interfere with this. And outside the boundary, public space begins, and the city is obliged to regulate parking there - with money, prohibitions, permits. Residential placement of cars will also have to be regulated: in our country, places in our yards now go to those who arrive earlier. It shouldn't be like this! Clear conventions, written or unwritten, are needed. The presence of such conventions in cities around the world leads to the fact that for city dwellers living in dense multi-storey buildings (as opposed to suburban residents), a car is more of a burden than a basic necessity.

What else do motorists have to pay for? For example, how do you feel about the idea of establishing a fee for entering the city or at least the center?

I feel very good about the idea of “pay” in general. But you need to approach it wisely. From an engineering point of view, paid entry into the center is a much more complex adaptation of the city to a mass car than paid parking. Paid entry to London, Milan, Stockholm is a complex organizational and technical undertaking. But it is feasible, and we may well follow this path. However, everything needs to be done gradually: in London, for example, before the mayor introduced paid entry, paid parking had been in effect for 30 years - people have to get used to everything.

But I can’t imagine how to make a paid entrance to the city as a whole, say on the Moscow Ring Road. In my opinion, this is stupidity. No one in the world has experience in administering entry on a 110-kilometer perimeter - no one has done this. In addition, our urban development has expanded beyond the Moscow Ring Road. Does this mean that one part of the quarter will pay and the other will not? How to explain this to the public? If we want to increase fees, we need other algorithms. The issue is not about paid entry, but about paid driving around the city. All over the world, paid entry solves the transport problem of the city center (usually it is busier than the outskirts), but in our country the center often travels much faster than the periphery. So for Russia the most suitable option is Singaporean.

What methods, besides increasing the price of owning a car, can solve the transport problem in our megacities?

Moscow and all the cities of the post-Soviet space have a lot of things to learn. We must understand that dense multi-storey buildings on the periphery of the city create problems that cannot be solved by transport. The high-rise configuration of a metropolis that wants to maintain vitality should be bell-shaped: the center or city can be at least 60 floors, and the outskirts should be low-rise. If there are high-rise buildings on the periphery, then getting people out of there to work, study, etc. is a whole problem. It is solved by the transition from monocentricity to polycentricity: in European cities people travel from everywhere - everywhere, and not just to the central regions. If we fail to do the same, it will be very bad.

Another necessary measure - perhaps the most difficult to implement - is to increase residential mobility. Brodsky has wonderful lines: “in which nests they were born, in those nests they died” - this is an accurate picture of residential mobility in Russia. High mobility removes a huge share of the transport load from the metropolis: the child goes to school, the wife goes to work, the father’s office moves - and the family changes apartment within the city. In this way, she solves an important problem: she chooses a convenient place of residence in order to minimize transport costs. Increasing residential mobility is achieved through a consumer-friendly real estate market, in particular through mortgage formats that are not tied to a specific address. This should be a purely financial agreement that would allow, while maintaining the same relationship with the bank, to change at least five places of residence during a 25-year mortgage. In large American cities, for example, households move on average 15 times during their lifetime.

What needs to be done to transfer people to public transport, like in Europe?

We must change the concept of “transport for losers” to “transport for everyone.” To achieve this, public transport must be made convenient and comfortable. In the digital age, it is very important, for example, to provide people with up-to-date information. It is necessary that a person, having installed a special application on his smartphone, can see when his bus will arrive, plan his route, calculate travel time, etc. There should be online displays at stops (they appeared in Europe 25 years ago). In addition, a single ticket and tariff menu should be introduced - the passenger should not worry about whether he will have to pay extra when transferring. Naturally, rolling stock is very important.

A person will stand in any traffic jam, but will never get on a bus that looks like a bucket of nuts. Transportation conditions must be, as the International Union of Public Transport documents say, “non-humiliating”: there should be no bad odors on the bus, people must be sure that their feet will not be crushed or their clothes will not be crushed. We are already going down this path, but we are still very far from public transport like Munich, Hamburg or Amsterdam.

What types of public transport do you think will have a place in the future?

The only type of transport that does not meet modern requirements is the minibus, and we need to get rid of it. This is archaic. A city passenger is not required to know who is carrying him or how the city has organized its relations with the transportation business. A person has a ticket, but in a minibus it is not valid. He has (or will have) an application with a transport schedule - but the minibus does not appear there. Of course, this is not a question of ownership: in most cities in the world, public transport is owned by private companies. But all carriers - private, municipal, whatever - must work in a common format. So they must have a schedule. More than 350 years ago, Blaise Pascal developed a formula for public transport, proposing to introduce in Paris “regular movement of public passenger carriages along pre-announced routes and schedules.” According to Pascal's formula, a carriage must depart even if no passengers boarded it. Minibuses do not fit into this formula. A person should have the opportunity to plan his path - if he doesn’t have it, he will not take public transport, especially one that is not clear when it will come or whether it will come at all.

In addition, minibuses compete with each other and with regular public transport, fighting for passengers. In developed countries this is considered savagery. After all, what does this mean? The one who arrives first wins. But you have to travel according to a schedule. But competition for the route is the normal way. The one who won the tender works. If it does not work well (transport is controlled electronically), a new tender is held. So the minibus does not fit into the urban transportation format.

Are dedicated lanes for public transport justified?

Of course - if the simplest referendum rule is followed. It is known that a lane on a regular city street can carry a maximum of 900 cars per hour. Considering that on average 1.25 - 1.3 people sit in our car (this is the Moscow coefficient), a thousand citizens pass along the strip per hour. If there is a high-frequency bus route (say, once every three minutes), with large carriages carrying, say, 80 people, then public transport wins the imaginary referendum and needs a separate lane. But if three trolleybuses pass there per hour and each carries three people, then motorists win and the dedicated lane is a mistake. This is a simple engineering question. The traffic organizer is obliged to conduct a survey of passenger flows, clarify the transport schedule, etc. d. before making a decision. But, unfortunately, this is not always done.

Don’t you think that mentality is also preventing us from switching to public transport?

What makes us very different from America or Europe, which managed to put people on buses and trams, is our attitude towards the car and the time spent in it.

For Americans and Europeans, fifth- and sixth-generation motorists, a car is a useful household item along with a lawn mower and a refrigerator. For us, first-generation motorists, this is light in the window, status. In Germany, a person who has two BMWs calmly goes to work by tram and bicycle, and this does not seem shameful to him. And this is not prestigious for us.

The second aspect is the price of time. For a city dweller in a rich part of the world, transport time is wasted time. He saves it. And in Russia, for many, traveling by car is happiness. When we conducted surveys as part of a survey of household transportation behavior, we heard the following stories: “I have a bad rented apartment, a modest position, everyone shouts at me, but on the way from work I get into my car, taken on credit, and I feel good. I have pleasant smells there, an audio system, bluetooth, audio books. It's the best time of the day." This is our specificity.

This is difficult to deal with.

You can't fight anything - people will rebuild sooner or later. If a person’s life is structured in such a way that traveling by car, even if he sits in a traffic jam for two hours, is an outlet, nothing can be done about it. People talk on the phone, listen to music, audio books - live in traffic jams. The city must slowly adapt, provide residents with alternative opportunities, and then gradually everything will change.

Mikhail Blinkin, Ekaterina Reshetova

Road safety: history of the issue, international experience, basic institutions

In memory of Alexander Viktorovich Sarychev

The research was carried out with the support of the Program “Fund for the Development of Applied Research of the National Research University Higher School of Economics”

List of abbreviations and abbreviations

BJJ Road safety

WHO World Health Organization

traffic police State Road Safety Inspectorate

GOST State standard

DD Road traffic

Road accident Road traffic accident

KTS Integrated transport schemes

KSOD Integrated traffic management schemes

NTP Scientific and technical progress

ODD Traffic organization

UDF Road service facility

OECD Organization of economic

(OECD) cooperation and development (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)

MSW Municipal solid waste

TS Vehicle

UDS Street and road network

USAK Blood Alcohol Level

Federal Targeted Program Federal target program

AASHTO American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials

FHWA Federal Highway Administration (US Federal Highway Administration)

FIA Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (International Motor Sports Federation)

FIVA Federation Internationale des Vehicules Anciens (International Federation of Vintage Car Owners)

HCM Highway Capacity Manual

HOV High Occupancy Vehicle Lanes (priority lanes provided for multiple people traveling in one vehicle)

IRF International Road Federation (International Road Federation, uniting organizations of all types of industries related to road traffic, created in 1948)

IRTAD International Road Traffic and Accidental Database (A reputable international organization that maintains regular standardized records of indicators of the number, structure and use of the vehicle fleet, as well as accident rates by country of the world)

MRA Motorway Rest Areas (road service areas in the road right of way)

M.S.A. Motorway Service Areas (road service areas)

NCAP New Car Assessment Program (European car safety testing system, founded in 1996)

PIARC Permanent International Association of Road Congresses (World Road Association)

RRA Roadside Rest Areas

RS-10 Risky States-10 (Ten countries with the maximum mortality rate in road accidents)

SOV Single Occupancy Vehicle Lanes

SVL Statistical Value of Life (cost of an average life)

TIS Truck Inspection Stations (weight control points)

TPB Truck Parking Bays

TRB Transportation Research Board

VKT Vehicle Kilometers Traveled

VT Value of Time

WHO World Health Organization

Introduction

In the first half of August 2014, car owners around the world will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Traffic Light Day. The formal reason for this holiday is the appearance on August 9 (according to other sources - 14) of 1914 at one of the intersections of the city of Cleveland of a two-section traffic light, switched manually. However, this starting point is very arbitrary.

In the 1910–1920s, the United States rapidly (on the legendary Ford Model T!) moved towards mass motorization: if in 1911 there were 10 cars per 1000 Americans, then in 1928 there were already 180, i.e. the same number , how many in Russia in the early 2000s.

During this heroic era, one or another modification of the traffic light was invented in almost every American state. In total, more than fifty patents were issued. Most of the inventors remained, as usual, in obscurity. Perhaps the only one of them, Garrett Morgan (1877–1963), went down in the history of motorization for a long time.

Morgan was an exceptionally prolific and successful inventor: in addition to the 1922 patent for a three-section traffic light with automatic switching of signals, he also had a patent for the first gas mask adopted by the US Army. Morgan was prone to ideologizing his technical innovations. And there was a good reason for this: he was one of the first African Americans to own a car. As far as can be judged from biographical descriptions, the inventor was somewhat similar to Coalhouse Walker from the novel Ragtime. Garrett Morgan obviously did not get to the point of the “car tragedy” described in the aforementioned novel (otherwise he would not have lived to a ripe old age!), but almost every traffic policeman certainly infringed on his rights when driving through an intersection, giving priority white drivers.

Subsequent patent analysis showed that Morgan's automatic switching device did not have significant advantages over competing analogues. The difference was in the motivation. “The purpose of the product,” Morgan stated in his patent application, “is to make the order of passage through an intersection independent of the person of the motorist.” Reinterpreting a well-known saying associated with the name of an equally famous inventor, one could say: “God created motorists, and Garrett Morgan gave them equal rights.”

It is for this reason that Bill Clinton called Garrett Morgan "the father of all our transportation security programs" in his 1996 presidential address. In essence, this is how it is. These multi-page documents, produced by the transport and medical bureaucracies of developed countries, contain many generally useful (or, on the contrary, very controversial) measures designed to reduce road deaths. However, in this case, basic considerations in the spirit of the ideas of the inventor of the traffic light are always implied (and, due to the obviousness, are not even mentioned today!):

The road network is a public good, equally accessible to all road users;

Road users must adhere to generally accepted standards of responsible, competent and friendly transport behaviour; violation of these standards is considered an infringement on the personal rights and freedoms of other road users;

The main task of the traffic police is to protect the basic principle of equal access and, consequently, the personal rights and freedoms of citizens from any encroachment by substandard road users.

Without observing all these liberal rules, the coexistence of many people and many cars turns into a living hell with regular traffic jams and numerous serious and fatal accidents.

So, Traffic Light Day is a very useful holiday, reminiscent of the strict and unconditional equality of access to public goods, as well as the protection of the rights and freedoms of the motorist community.

About a month before this holiday, Russia celebrates the day of the creation of the State Traffic Inspectorate (GIBDD). Even the greatest well-wisher of this organization is unlikely to claim that it is at all concerned with ensuring equal access to public goods or protecting the personal rights and freedoms of the average person. Its obvious and unconditional priority is the maintenance and protection of a system of class-based, essentially standards of transport behavior (conditional division of car owners into groups whose members differ in their legal status), i.e. an institution strictly opposite to the ideas of Garrett Morgan.

Russian motorists, with the exception of a few stubborn activists from the Blue Buckets social movement, with stoic patience demolish the established order of things on the road network. It is not the class order itself that causes internal protest in us, but, perhaps, only our own belonging to the “wrong class.” Accordingly, quite reasonable technical requirements (such as having basic driving skills, sobriety behind the wheel, proper brakes, not driving through red lights or through double solid lines) are sometimes perceived by us as a personal insult. And, of course, we very often (due to inability, inattention or natural arrogance) cause harm and inconvenience to other car owners who are equal in their legal status.

Press conference

Mikhail Blinkin. Shot from the TV channel "Vesti 24"

Mikhail Blinkin, scientific director of the Research Institute of Transport and Road Facilities

How to improve the situation on Russian roads? After a major accident that occurred in Rostov-on-Don on July 24, 2009, Russian officials, including President Dmitry Medvedev, are looking for those responsible for the high accident rate and mortality on Russian roads, and are also coming up with measures to improve the situation. So far, the state of the roads, the organization of traffic, and drivers and commercial carriers who violate the rules are officially cited as “to blame.” At the same time, several “repressive” road laws are being prepared, tightening requirements for carriers and penalties for non-compliance with traffic rules. Will these measures help? Will good roads be built in Russia? Will the authorities cope with traffic jams? Or when the wave of interest in this topic subsides in the media, will everything be put on hold? The scientific director of the Research Institute of Transport and Road Facilities, Mikhail Yakovlevich Blinkin, answered questions from Lenta.Ru readers.

Dmitriy

Hello Mikhail Yakovlevich! Somewhere from the beginning of July, I am sure, many of our compatriots had a feeling that began to grow stronger: “fines will soon increase again.” “Fines will soon increase.” Fortunately, there are reasons, and there is a crisis, however..

In this regard, questions from a non-specialist to a specialist:

1. Is the situation with road deaths so critical in our country compared to other countries? Alas, it sounds somewhat cynical, but still..

2. I was recently surprised to learn that in the Russian Federation the annual number of suicides exceeds the number of deaths in car accidents. But very little is said about this - it is politically unprofitable... Statistics in general is a very tricky thing. In this regard, one more question: is the dynamics of car accidents available in the public domain by year and divided into causes - gross violation of traffic rules, alcohol, driver’s health condition, malfunction of technical equipment, road condition, weather conditions, pedestrian behavior, violations of third parties, and also in other contexts, for example: growth of the vehicle fleet in the country, comparative accident rates by type of transport (passenger cars, trucks, public transport), etc.?

I understand that for an online conference the 2nd question sounds too detailed, and somehow not entirely on topic, but perhaps you can answer briefly or indicate where such information can be obtained? And then, when you hear the figure of 40 thousand without any comparative analysis, the thought constantly knocks in your head: “Somewhere we are being fooled, someone needs this..”

Oleg Almatinsky

Living in New Zealand, where the death rate on the roads is the highest among the countries of the Western world, I noticed that TV news begins not with where the Prime Minister was, but with how many people died on the roads per day (with brief data on- family)..

Also, the Government sponsors videos that encourage people to think about the consequences of violating traffic rules; sometimes they are creepy.

I am sure that starting the news with the fact that, for example: “Today 150 people died on the roads, of which women... children... they were 5 years old, 10, 25, etc.)” - this will have a much sobering effect than being angry at Traffic Police President. And so on day after day.

Egor

We know the answers to most questions ourselves (they won’t build it, they won’t manage it, they will steal it, etc.). I propose the following measures: 1) introduce a system of valid examination acceptance in Russia, as in the West. In Canada, for example, there are two-stage exams. The driver receives a full license only after driving 2 thousand km or six months of driving. If you don't know how to drive according to the rules, no amount of money will help. In Germany, one of the emigrated driving instructors took the exam 9 times, after which he gave up and stopped driving. I know numerous “wives” who took exams 15-20 times, i.e. In your head you can add up $80 for each exam, and $40 for each lesson with an instructor. But such rigor bears fruit. 2) Train both inspectors and instructors differently. There must be a different road control system. In three years of driving in the West, no one has ever stopped me, except for routine alcohol tests! 3) I understand that this is unrealistic, but in Russia we need a central bump stop on all federal roads. This will save a lot of people at least from head-on collisions.

What is your opinion, Mikhail Yakovlevich?

Dear Sirs! Let me start with how the scale of this disaster is measured.

In world practice, there are two indicators. The first of them is social risks (the number of deaths on roads and streets per 100 thousand inhabitants). It is used to compare mortality in road accidents with other causes of population decline: disease, drug addiction, alcoholism, violent crime, suicide, and the like. This (I answer Dmitry) is a topic for a separate conversation.

The second indicator is transport risks (the number of deaths on roads and streets per 100 thousand cars). This indicator (also called the epidemiological danger of a car) allows you to objectively compare the degree of success of a country’s adaptation to life surrounded by a large number of “massive fast-moving metal objects.”

In the most developed countries, transport risk indicators, as a rule, do not exceed 15-18 units and have a clearly expressed downward trend.

In the “safest” countries, transport risks are strictly below 10 units. This honorary club has already included Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Germany, and Great Britain.

By the way, New Zealand, which Oleg mentions, has an indicator of 12.5 units. Contrary to eyewitness impressions, it is a country with lower road fatality rates than, for example, Australia (13.7), Austria (13.7), Spain (14.4) or the USA (18).

At the 2008 International Transport Forum of OECD member countries (ITF-2008), the declaration “Towards Zero” was adopted, which set an ambitious goal - to eliminate road deaths as such.

Far beyond the trend characteristic of developed countries are Nigeria, Iran, Venezuela, Pakistan and many other third world countries. Here transport risks lie in the range of 500-1500 or more units.

Russian indicators are approximately in the middle of this dismal ranking. If you look at official statistics, our transport risks are about 90 units, adjusted for the peculiarities of the national accounting system - somewhere around 110-120 units. Accordingly, our place is somewhere in the middle: we are 10 times worse than countries from the enlightened world, but the same 10 times better than many of our friends and allies.

An analysis of accident statistics accumulated over a hundred years of growing motorization in many countries of the world shows that the level of transport risks is determined, first of all, by the quality of national institutions. This refers to general civil institutions (equality of citizens before the law, an independent court, police with a high professional reputation, high self-organization of citizens, the possibility of filing civil claims for moral damages...), as well as specifically automobile ones.

All these “liberal rules” are not very important as long as the country’s car park amounts to only a few per 1,000 inhabitants. When the number of vehicles (per 1000 inhabitants) reaches hundreds, it is no longer possible to do without these records: otherwise we will have traffic jams in cities and crosses with flowers along the roads.

The key “automobile institution” is considered to be total equality of rights for road users. This means, in particular, that priorities on the road can be exclusively humanitarian (give way to a pedestrian, cyclist, emergency vehicle, bus) or situational (observe the order of travel, give way to someone on the main road...). This also means the complete absence of advantages provided for any other reasons, including status. An exception is usually made for motorcades of top officials of the state when making official trips. Other status privileges in traffic were abolished in Western Europe long before the invention of the car (for example, in Amsterdam - in the first quarter of the 17th century!); In the USA, Canada, and Australia they were not observed at all.

Inequality on the roads is a highly contagious disease. The essence of the matter is that if, for example, driving into the “oncoming lane” is allowed for some important people in Moscow, then “near Taganrog, among endless fields” it cannot be excluded from the daily practice of a simple fuel truck driver.

Other extremely useful “automotive institutions” include formal, legally enshrined procedures and rules, as well as purely informal civil conventions regarding how one should and should not behave on the road.

By now, many of our fellow citizens have managed to live in enlightened countries and travel along their roads. And, accordingly, evaluate the advantages of numerous practices and institutions developed in these countries.

Our automotive (I'm afraid not only automotive!) practices and institutions are many decades outdated and are strikingly different from their foreign counterparts.

For example, in Canada, which Egor mentions, the driving test is taken by a certified and completely civilian instructor, and not by a police officer. The car there does not need to be taken to the police department either for registration or for technical inspection. The registration number on a vehicle is an identification of the owner, not the vehicle. For each car owner, a file of his driving history is maintained. Even the toughest men from the former USSR were unable to “negotiate with the police” or “buy rights” there. Yes, they generally believe that “driving is not a right, but a privilege!” - that’s what it says in large print on the cover of the beginner’s guide. Well and all that stuff...

The main role is played by civilian, and not police control. For our Egor, in three years of driving in the West, no one stopped him. Meanwhile, in response to any outrage usual in Russian practice (such as turning left from the right lane to overtake a line), he would have run into civil suits from indignant citizens. And very expensively I would pay for this pleasure.

In the baggage of world experience there is also the famous maxim: “the road does not kill.” It is very strange from the standpoint of our traditional perception of the problem, but in fact it reflects a strict division between “flies and cutlets”:

– I (as a taxpayer) have every right and real opportunity to demand that road or utility services maintain proper road conditions. Or, at worst, timely installation of warning signs;

– I (as a road user) am obliged to choose driving modes that ensure the avoidance of an accident in any road conditions prevailing in a given place and at a given time.

Of course, the principle “the road doesn’t kill” does not mean that road conditions are unimportant for traffic safety. For example, median barriers are extremely useful.

Among the many useful institutions that exist in the safest countries is also special public attention to the facts of fatal road accidents. In addition to New Zealand, which Oleg writes about, such alarmist press reports regarding deaths on roads appear in Sweden, Norway, and the UK.

But in those third world countries where there are 1000 or more fatalities per 100 thousand cars, this information is of no interest to anyone at all.

Alarming reports in the press about major accidents with casualties, alas, do not have any special preventive value for road users in Russia either.

Sergey

Good afternoon. Don't you think that the key problem is not in the road surface, but in traffic rules and methods of organizing traffic and teaching driving, which have not changed since Soviet times, although the number of cars has increased sharply? Is anyone working on these problems? And do you think that organizational measures will generally improve the capacity and safety of roads without global investments in their reconstruction?

Oleg

On many roads, especially on Dmitrovskoe Highway, during traffic jams in Moscow, unscrupulous drivers avoid traffic jams on the side of the road. As a result, drivers who follow the rules waste time. Why doesn’t the traffic police do anything against this, because this is a serious violation?

Alexander

Dear Mikhail, do you think that an organization like the traffic police is fulfilling its function?

Alexei

1. It is clear that the construction of new roads is carried out with gross violations of technology. But for some reason, not a single official was fired, not a single road company paid a penalty for the “early” destruction of roads, why are there no people to blame?

2. This question may not be for you, but this is a cry from the heart. Why do they constantly increase fines, although it is clear to everyone that this does not work? There will be order on the roads only when the “valiant” inspectors deal with their immediate responsibilities, and not stand around corners and “milk” ordinary drivers. Example: The order of the Minister of Internal Affairs “stopping a vehicle without a reason is prohibited”; whoever is executing it, they wanted to sneeze.

Alexei

The entire road safety prevention system is based on the principles of the 20s of the last century. All targeted activities of the traffic police do not bring any effect. For example, any driver will answer a mobile phone call. Only a few have a hands-free system. Even bus drivers are increasingly combining driving with talking on their mobile phones. Tougher fines will not solve this problem. Do you think it might be worth thinking about new forms of punishment? For example, bright stickers with offensive text on the windows of violators. Stick and seal for three months. Again for a year. There are a lot of women driving now. It should have an effect on them.

Yuri

Good afternoon, Mikhail Yakovlevich.

In your opinion, isn’t the reason for such a high accident rate on Russian roads the level of traffic organization on them and their actual quality? Residents of Germany, even with the disparate size of the country's territory, travel at least kilometers.

Given the length of the route between settlements in our country, high-speed highways are needed. Thus, a part of the road was built between Novoibirsk and Barnaul, its characteristics clearly correspond to the highway, but the limit is still 90 km/h, which is a stable source of funding for the traffic police.

There is no single service or simply unification of traffic control systems in the country. That is why, to date, car navigators with European level of user characteristics have not been created.

All this means that, in my opinion, starting with reprisals against drivers is the wrong way. What about yours?

Dear gentlemen, motorists!

I completely agree with Sergei and Alexey: we have preserved archaic practices on all issues related to road traffic and the use of cars since Soviet times, and we pay a considerable price for this archaism. I have written many times on these topics, links are provided above.

As for the traffic police, this structure is a strange mixture of fragments of the USSR NKVD of the 1930s and a private security agency that entered into an open-ended barter deal with the state customer: you give us priority travel, we give you the right to collect money from other people traveling to the road.

The main task of the traffic police was and remains to maintain and protect the system of class standards of transport behavior. In Soviet-era service manuals, this task was formulated simply: “ensuring special passage for Protected Persons” (both words with a capital letter!).

In previous years, a considerable number of competent transport engineers in uniform worked in this strange department. These worthy officers filled (despite all departmental nonsense!) the empty niche in Russia for organizing and managing traffic. Today, alas, this cannot be said either.

Even the organization's greatest well-wisher would be hard-pressed to claim that it is at all concerned with equal access to public goods, smoothing traffic, or protecting the personal rights and freedoms of motorists. But all these functions are basic for the traffic police of any enlightened country.

We do not have civil control - a key element of self-organization of road users - at all. Firstly, any motorist has firmly learned the commandment “don’t call wolves to help dogs.” Secondly, any Russian court will perceive a civil lawsuit based on a brazen violation of your rights on the road as a reason to doubt the mental health of the plaintiff.

And I’ll also answer Yuri’s question about “repressions”.

For example, we have not yet introduced the generally accepted distinction in the world between careless (careless, sloppy, careless) and dangerous (dangerous) driving. The first of them should be classified as an administrative offense, the second should be recognized (regardless of the severity of the consequences!) as a criminal offense against society.

For example, a driver who at speed hit a pedestrian at a zebra crossing or drove into a bus stop filled with people obviously did not have intent to kill. However, his dangerous (aggressive!) driving was undoubtedly intentional. Accordingly, in many motorized countries of the world he would have been put on trial under a very serious criminal charge, of course, in addition to satisfying the civil claims of the injured party and insurance companies.

The prosecution will never say that he “lost control of the car” - this term can only be legitimately applied to the fact that his own molding was damaged when driving into the garage! No, he will be charged specifically with willful dangerous driving. There is no need to say that when sentencing, the official or property status of the defendant will not matter in the slightest.

Once we learn all these basic things, then it will be possible to argue about which sanctions should be strengthened and which ones should be weakened. Tightening sanctions without total unification of their application is generally unproductive...

Oleg

Mikhail Yakovlevich, good afternoon.

Please explain why, in a country where the maximum permissible speed on the roads is 110 km/h, cars are sold that can exceed this speed several times. Limiting a car's speed to 110 km/h is not technically difficult. This is equivalent to giving matches to a person entering an explosive production facility and warning him that he cannot use them because this may cause an explosion.

Good afternoon, Oleg! From a report by UN experts on the state of accidents in African countries, I learned about an interesting mechanism for regulating the transport behavior of aborigines: a metal blank is welded to the gas pedal of a car belonging to a careless or inexperienced owner. What do you think of this best practice?

I prefer the idea of Professor Kekelidze from the Serbsky Institute of Psychiatry, who recently proposed banning the use of any motifs related to aggressive driving in car advertising.

Borisov Vladimir Evgenievich

Let me remind you of an interesting fact - the speed limit on the Moscow Ring Road is 100 km/h in all lanes. How is this consistent with elementary logic - the entry/exit/stop lanes - the speed is the same as in the outer lane where there are no obstacles, who is stopping you from setting the speed in the lanes: 120/110/100/80/60 and at least controlling the trucks, which Wouldn't they stick out onto the 4th lane?

I’m afraid, Vladimir Evgenievich, that the active administration of such complex restrictions (120/110/100/80/60) will take away the last remnants of capacity from the Moscow Ring Road.

As for trucks in the left lane, the typical situation is this: a queue forms at the exit from the Moscow Ring Road (for example, on Mozhaiskoye Highway); first she gets out into the second lane, then into the third. As a result, after half an hour of the formation of this local traffic jam, the only moving lane remains the far left...

The trouble here is that the Moscow Ring Road simultaneously performs many functions that are incompatible with a normal road: a main bypass of the city of Moscow, a city street connecting neighboring peripheral areas of the city, a highway near Moscow connecting settlements in the region, and even an access road to shopping centers and cargo terminals.

Recently, we (together with my colleague Boris Aleksandrovich Tkachenko) conducted detailed comparisons of traffic modes on the Moscow Ring Road with foreign city highways. The work was carried out using extensive arrays of field data and the most modern mathematical models. The results turned out to be extremely interesting for me as an analyst and completely depressing for an ordinary Moscow motorist...

Andrey

Hello Mikhail Yakovlevich!

Of all the many reasonable events, I don’t remember that the topic of abolishing unreasonable restrictions was discussed.

The unnecessaryness of these restrictions contributes to their optionality and, accordingly, violation, and this is the reason for the negligent attitude towards traffic rules.

For example:

Limit up to 40 km/h;

Belts in the city;

The traffic light regime should be shifted in time in favor of the vehicle;

Where is the reverse movement?

In an unfamiliar area, you can’t immediately find your way by the signs, i.e. installation of signs, etc.

Your opinion.

Andrey, everything is not so simple and unambiguous.

The 50 km/h limit on all roads and streets within residential areas is a time-tested classic. In enlightened countries, people drive fast (that is, within 120 or even 160 km/h) only on highways that are completely separated from residential areas and on which there are no pedestrians.

Belts in the city, where average network speeds often do not exceed 20-25 km/h, are, in fact, of little relevance. But unification is important here, it’s impossible to write in the traffic rules: when you’re stuck in a traffic jam, you don’t have to wear your seat belt, but when you’re driving, you have to wear your seat belt.

There are almost no pedestrian traffic lights in our cities, and where they exist, the green phase is enough to cross the street with an energetic step. In all other cases, the traffic organizer solves the problem of a compromise between conflicting traffic flows, using long-proven methods and formulas. It is unlikely that they can be improved organoleptically.

Reversing is an excellent, time-tested tool for organizing traffic, used in many cities around the world. Unfortunately, it works successfully only in conditions of universal unconditional compliance with traffic rules. We have thousands of privileged road users who violate traffic rules on a legal basis, and tens of thousands more - out of natural impudence. Under these conditions, reversing is, unfortunately, the most reliable way to increase the frequency of head-on collisions.

Nikolay Sh.

In some countries, it is allowed to turn right from the far right lane even at a red light if there is no obstacle on the left and no prohibiting sign.

Is this acceptable in Russia?

Nikolay, this measure is widespread and very effective; it greatly increases the throughput of the intersection. Unfortunately, it is safe only in conditions of universal and unconditional compliance with the standards of competent, responsible and friendly transport behavior. Otherwise, it sharply increases the accident rate.

It is important to note that poor domestic standards of transport behavior greatly impede the implementation of many useful measures that increase throughput.

Vladimir Evgenievich Borisov

Hello Mikhail Yakovlevich,

Many incidents on the roads occur due to the inconsistency of freight transport with its intended purpose - the transportation of goods.

I consider it necessary to introduce the concept of useful engine power and introduce a check of this parameter into mandatory maintenance for trucks, accordingly reducing the transported weight when engine power drops due to wear.

Dear Vladimir Evgenievich, incidents with trucks that (after increasing the sides) travel with two or three times the rated load capacity have much more serious consequences. Can you imagine what happens when the brakes of such a vehicle fail on a descent?

All such things cannot be solved by means of police control. In enlightened countries, compliance with such standards is ensured by self-regulatory organizations of professional carriers.

Semyon Semyonich

Maybe we're just mediocre drivers?

After all, in Formula 1, the World Rally Championship, MotoGP, NASCAR - there is not a single Russian, Tatar or Georgian.

You, Semyon Semyonich, touched on my favorite topic.

National characteristics of driving skills and abilities are completely impossible to assess from a sample of professional racing drivers. In the same way, it is impossible to assess the general literacy of the population by the presence of Nobel laureates in literature in a particular ethnic group. These samples are too small!

Correct analysis involves comparing accident rates across large ethnic groups or across individual countries.

At the same time, it turns out that the differences across countries are indeed extremely large. For example, in Pakistan the level of transport risks is two orders of magnitude (!) higher than in Canada. Based on these figures, it seems that we can conclude that Pakistanis are mediocre and very dangerous drivers.

However, accident statistics by ethnic groups of drivers in Canada show that Pakistanis, many of whom work here as taxi and bus drivers, after gaining minimal driving experience in a new environment, begin to behave on the road as competently, responsibly and friendly as and all other local road users.

So the question is not at all about the ethnic origin of the driver (by the way, not yet about his gender!), but about the legal (institutional, cultural...) environment from which the person driving the car came.

Michael

I'm a motorist. At the same time, I am an engineer. My question will seem trivial at first. I would like to know if there is world experience in technically solving the problem of road construction.

I know that in Germany roads are laid and then not repaired for decades (!). At the same time, even highways built a year ago are subject to “pothole” repairs. My question is, in your opinion, is this a consequence of the climate or do we lack the technology to build durable roads, or is it still beneficial for road builders? What is the reason that even our new road needs repairs almost every season?

Nail

Good afternoon, Mikhail Yakovlevich!

As a resident of Russia and a patriot, of course, I am also concerned about the quality of roads. In principle, it’s not boring to drive a car, dashing around potholes, trying to maneuver your car through a puddle without falling through, and cackling when you see what you just went around at high speed! But still, I would like to fight boredom differently.

The questions are:

1. Is the motivation of road builders really to avoid being out of work? After all, the technology for laying roads is immediately obvious: work is often carried out in the rain, during rush hours, when traffic is most active. As an example, we had good asphalt laid in our yard: relatively thick and smooth. But it rained and huge puddles accumulated that did not go away for weeks. Is this good for asphalt? As a result, it needs to be remodeled in 2-3 years to be clean.

2. What are the main reasons for the poor quality of roads? How does management deal with this? What real changes have occurred?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

Yuri

Recently I was driving along the federal highway from Krasnoyarsk to Ulan-Ude, in some places there was practically no road (the junction of the Krasnoyarsk Territory and the Irkutsk Region), but in some places I saw how asphalt was laid immediately after the grader was working, without compacting the road surface. After all, in a year everything will fall apart again. Who controls the work and condition of federal highways? When will there be order?

Czech

The trouble with Russia is fools and roads! Why is it not controlled in what weather conditions and how the asphalt is laid??? sometimes IN THE RAIN, a person walks thirty meters in front of the workers and dries the holes, and the rain fills them again, and then the asphalt is thrown into a puddle... what will be the result??? this is the first. Second, what can or should ordinary motorists do in order to at least somehow influence the improvement of the quality of roads in their city? By the way, our Samara ranks one of the first places in terms of the worst quality of city roads. And one last thing. Will they still install barriers between oncoming and passing lanes?

Sergey, Verkhnyaya Salda, Sverdlovsk region.

In our city, there are several plots

roads with asphalt pavement

every spring the road swells

falls into disrepair. Repair

They do it every year, but the result is zero. To all questions, the road workers have one answer - the site is swampy. And

How do European countries solve such problems, or do they have swamps there?

missing?

Marysja

Dear Mikhail Yakovlevich!

Architect's question about the quality of road construction:

For some reason, the foundations of buildings and structures are built to the depth of soil freezing, depending on the climatic region in different ways, this is the key to the stability of the subsequent structure. And the depth of excavation for foundation construction during road construction rarely exceeds 1 m. In our conditions, the soil “plays” and the canvas “breaks”. My husband, having served in Germany for 5 years, saw that sometimes the asphalt-concrete mixture was laid in a layer of about 50 cm. Do we feel sorry? If buildings were built this way, there would be significant demand. Maybe it's a matter of regulations?

Thank you, dear gentlemen motorists, for your questions!

The condition of roads and, accordingly, the need for repairs, depends on many factors, including purely objective ones, in particular, on the characteristics of the local climate and soil geology. The most obvious indicator is, perhaps, the annual number of transitions of the temperature of the roadbed through the zero mark.

For example, on the Alpine roads of Germany or Austria, cars of road workers, equipped with a large number of small road repair equipment, continuously ply. One of the main tasks of these "track linemen" is to detect and carefully repair any microcracks that have formed in the road surface. They have a lot of work to do, despite the fact that the quality of road construction in these countries can be considered exemplary. What can you do, the climate...

However, in general, the influence of purely institutional factors dominates in the road business:

– how open and competitive the road construction market is;

– how the interaction between the customer and the contractor is organized, in particular, how transparent and effective the pricing and competitive bidding system is;

– how successfully innovations in road construction materials and technologies are being mastered;

– what incentives force road workers (from the owner of a construction business to the operator of a road machine) to clearly comply with the requirements of norms and standards for all elements of the technological process, and so on.

All these institutions are continuously developing and improving. Thus, in recent years, the practice of so-called life cycle contracts has become widespread in the global road industry. Within its framework, the contractor enters into a contract not only for construction as such, but also for 30-40 years of operation of the road with a guarantee of maintaining its design characteristics (evenness, adhesion, engineering facilities, drainage, condition of roadsides...). If he initially “saving” on the thoroughness of rolling the roadbed or on the quality of crushed stone (asphalt concrete, metal structures...), it’s worse for him: he will have to spend money (at his own expense!) on expensive ongoing repairs.

And one more circumstance: a section of road (unlike a car or a television) cannot be imported “whole and in packaging.”

You can, of course, use imported equipment and technologies, or invite a foreign contractor. But we will still bring crushed stone and sand from local quarries, we will purchase road-grade bitumen from a domestic refinery, and we will recruit workers from the Russian labor market.

And most importantly, we certainly will not be able to import the institution of competent customers of road work who are not inclined to organize “taking into account their own interests.”

So, we will achieve the German (Swedish, Japanese...) quality of road construction and repair no sooner than in the national production of any other services and goods for public needs.

Alexy

As you know, to maintain the quality of roads, every motorist pays a “road tax”. On the other hand, a new state corporation Avtodor has appeared, which plans to build toll roads. Do you think this is the right decision? What is the point of this kind of “double taxation”?

Egor

I really want the government to think about the justification of the “transport tax”, because this is an equalization... A pensioner (who goes to the dacha on weekends in the summer) or a shuttle worker (who lives behind the wheel) pay the same, is this reasonable?

The tax should be tied into the current expenses of the car; if you drive, you pay, if you park in the garage, you save.

I see the way to tie this up is to include this tax in the cost of fuel, but please understand correctly, there is no need to raise the cost of an already expensive product! (but the price is another matter.)

That is, let’s say my transport tax today is 1100 rubles. Let's imagine how it could be: I drive 20,000 km per year, with an average consumption of 8 liters per 100 km we get 1600 liters per year, spread out the cost of tax per liter we get approximately +3.5 kopecks per liter of gasoline.

At the same time, those who travel a lot pay well (the shuttle will no longer bring 1,100 rubles in tax, but, say, 11,000 rubles), while summer residents save. The issue of differences in capacity and technical condition is immediately resolved...

But the main thing, of course, is that this money is spent for its intended purpose!

What do you think about this?

Dmitriy

What percentage of the transport tax goes directly to road maintenance?

Will steps be taken to redistribute tax funds in favor of road workers after the tragedy of July 24?

Dear gentlemen, taxpayers!

As car owners, you and I regularly pay transport tax, which in fact does not depend in any way on who and how many kilometers have driven in a year.

In addition, in those 20 rubles that we pay for a liter of gasoline, about 12-13 rubles again account for taxes (MET, excise tax and others).

Unfortunately, all this money is not directly related to financing the country's road infrastructure.

According to Russian legislation (see Article 35 of the Budget Code of the Russian Federation), we do not have targeted (colored) taxes, that is, tax sources tied to one or another target area of budget expenditures. We have a “kettle” principle - all taxes go into one piggy bank, all payments come from the same piggy bank. Thus, the road sector is reduced to the position of an ordinary budget recipient, far from being the highest priority. Thus, according to the latest (prepared in August) federal budget projections for 2010-2012, the cost of maintaining highways will decrease by approximately 2.3 times.

From my point of view, the domestic model of road financing is wrong. I have written and spoken about this many times, including at parliamentary hearings.

In many countries around the world, a simple and reliable scheme similar to the one offered by Egor has been in operation for decades.

It is based on targeted road taxes (Road Money) built into the price of gasoline and diesel fuel: the more people drive on the roads, the more fuel they buy and, accordingly, the more tax money goes into road funds for the construction, repair and maintenance of roads.

As a rule, this money, that is, road funds, is managed by national (regional, local) road administrations. Their work is under well-established public control from car owner associations, professional carriers, professional participants in the road construction market, and the like.

Any motorist from the USA (Australia, New Zealand, Western European countries...) can at any time go to the website of their road administration and see how much money has been received into road funds and what they have spent on.

During the period of fiscal prosperity, we, unfortunately, missed the time for the same transition.

As for the fundamental side of the matter, regardless of the presence or absence of targeted road taxes in the country, the road network is ultimately maintained with taxpayer money.

Now about the new state company Avtodor. I am a consistent opponent of the entire structure that is provided for by the relevant federal law.

The initiators of this law rightly noted that financing road construction from the federal department within the framework of our budget legislation and public procurement legislation is extremely clumsy. Even in fiscally prosperous years, financing for many projects began at the end of the construction season, or even just before the Christmas tree. Unfortunately, instead of bringing the old legislative framework into a reasonable form, they decided to come up with new ones.

There are no analogues of a state-owned company like our new Avtodor either in developed or developing countries.

Our new road law is based on the erroneous hypothesis that toll roads are considered to be perhaps the main means of solving Russia's traffic problems.

Toll roads actually exist in many countries around the world. In developed countries, they make up less than 1 percent (!) of the total length of the national road network and are considered as a kind of business class in the road sector.

This business class exists against the backdrop of a dense and quite decent network of free roads that make up, so to speak, economy class.

For example, in France the total length of roads is more than 1 million kilometers, of which 8.5 thousand kilometers are toll roads, that is, 0.85 percent. In the USA, out of 6.7 million kilometers of the national road network, only 7.4 thousand kilometers (that is, 0.11 percent) are operated in a toll mode.

The tariff on toll roads (in Europe it is about 8 euro cents per 1 kilometer) is considered as a kind of surcharge for business class. At the same time, quite solid income streams are formed.

For example, in France, each linear kilometer of a toll road serves 30 thousand cars per day and generates more than 900 thousand euros in annual income. This money is enough for the exemplary ongoing maintenance of a multi-lane toll highway with many complex bridges and tunnels, for the operation of a sophisticated toll collection system, for the payment of interest on loans and, of course, for the legal remuneration of the private company operating the road. But no one has ever managed to solve the country’s basic road problems for this money - it’s not enough, and according to economic logic, ends meet.

Of the developing countries, China has experimented the most with toll roads, where by the end of 2008 hundreds of thousands of kilometers of roads were operated under toll mode. “Kiosks”, in which road taxes of several types were collected, stood every 15-20 kilometers on all more or less passable roads.

For experts, not only the advantages, but also the obvious defects of “payment in Chinese” were no secret. The dispersal of cache streams across tens of thousands of accumulation points created ideal conditions for local tyranny and large-scale corruption. Thus, according to the Xinhua agency, regulatory authorities identified in 2008 several thousand illegally installed toll collection points, from which over $3 billion in revenue was embezzled.

As the vehicle fleet and traffic volume grew, many of these points became congestion sites. In addition, the adopted system meant the blatant practice of double taxation of all car owners and drivers: firstly, in the price of gasoline, and secondly, directly on the road.

Chinese motorists endured all this. Without much of a stretch, we can say that just 20 years ago there were no roads or cars outside of big cities in China. About three-quarters of all Chinese drivers started driving in recent years, so most of them have never driven on roads other than new and toll roads. Of course, few of them knew about “Western values” such as avoiding double taxation and protecting consumer rights.

In recent years, the situation has begun to change. In a number of provinces, there were strikes and public demonstrations by taxi drivers and professional carriers who protested against this very double taxation.

Chinese experts have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to switch to a Western tax scheme for road financing. A window of opportunity for such a transition has opened due to the fall in world oil prices. And the Chinese immediately took advantage of it. Since January 1, 2009, the Chinese authorities have carried out a systematic radical reform in the field of pricing in the fuel market and road taxation. The government has abolished fees and charges that were collected from drivers directly on the roads. At the same time, taxes on retail sales of gasoline and diesel fuel were sharply increased (5-8 times). In addition, taking advantage of the decline in world oil prices, the Chinese government significantly (by 12-20 percent) reduced regulated wholesale prices for petroleum products, which avoided a shock increase in retail fuel prices.

All this means that China, whose experience is so fond of being cited by supporters of the idea of toll roads, preferred the road financing model generally accepted in developed countries.

By the way, there was no state-owned company like our new Avtodor in China either before or after this reform.

The next question is related to this topic.

Sergey

Our federal highways are not without complaints, but if you take the local ones, it’s scary. What funds are allocated for regional and district roads? And who is responsible for their repairs?

The answer to your question, Sergey, is completely sad!

The “fiscal pyramid” in Russia, alas, is turned upside down: the further away from the federal center, the less budgetary provision. The road infrastructure of most constituent entities of the Russian Federation lives on subsidies from the federal budget; there are no or almost no own sources. The road infrastructure of municipalities, with rare exceptions, is completely in poverty or, to put it in bureaucratic language, remains an “unfunded mandate of local governments.”

Several years ago, our institute conducted an analysis of the costs of road infrastructure in Russian cities. It turned out that the budgetary resources of some small towns are only sufficient to purchase cleaning cloths for the spring cleaning of road signs.

In the years of fiscal prosperity, we, according to common sense, would have to turn this pyramid over. Unfortunately, it didn't work out...

Akopyan A.M.

What is the actual construction cost of 1 km of road approximately at the level of the planned high-speed section of the Moscow - St. Petersburg highway, the Central Ring Road, the Ointsovsky bypass of Minki or the ChTK. Including (preferably broken down) the design, approvals, the actual construction of the canvas and storm drainage system, infrastructure (lighting, noise protection, etc.). Do you agree that, at least before the crisis, the estimates for some projects were unjustifiably and significantly inflated?

Dear Mr. Hakobyan!

There is no short answer to your question. The standard method for comparing the construction costs of certain road objects involves, first of all, determining their length in single-lane terms, including by type of passage (how much is on flat sections, how much is on overpasses or tunnels) and in terms of elements (the main route, approaches, exits , entrances). Without this, comparing two objects is simply pointless: amateur attempts to divide the contract price of a particular site by its nominal length do not make any physical (economic, common...) sense.

With a high degree of convention, we can say that in world practice the price of one kilometer of one highway lane, depending on the nature of the passage and many other factors, lies in the range from 1 to 10 million dollars. For urban highways, the price is closer to the upper end of the range.

For unique road and bridge objects these figures are even higher.

For example, one kilometer of one lane cost: for the bridge le Viaduc de Millau in Southern France, 26 million dollars, for the grandiose Boston project BIG DIG, which includes unique bridges and tunnels, and altogether 57 million dollars. On the other hand, for roads laid on flat terrain, outside urban areas, and even on good rocky soils, the same kilometer can cost significantly less than the lower limit we have indicated.

The price of a specific section of road is influenced by many factors: from mining, geological and climatic conditions to transport accessibility of stone materials. In some “lucky” countries and regions, granite crushed stone literally lies under your feet, and in others (for example, throughout the entire Russian Plain) there is none at all.

In Canada, in the northern states of the USA, in the Scandinavian countries (just like here in Russia), construction costs are noticeably influenced by the need to take into account high sub-zero temperatures and other weather troubles.

Road construction in cities, as a rule, is associated with significant associated costs for the relocation of numerous engineering communications, the relocation of railway and tram tracks, compensation payments and compensatory construction, the organization of temporary passages, and the like.

For all the above reasons, the costs of road construction cannot be compared, as they say, “at the tip of the pen,” with the immediate identification of the corruption component.

The only thing that enlightened countries have come to is the need for complete information transparency, as well as the launch of very sophisticated software that allows for element-by-element comparisons of costs with comparable analogues. Given a normal institutional environment for national business in general and the road construction business in particular, these measures work great.

Now about specific figures from domestic practice.

As a typical example, I will give the project cost structure for the construction of the famous (and record-breakingly expensive!) section of the Fourth Transport Ring (FTR) from Entuziastov Highway to Izmailovskoye Highway.

Here, the costs of road and bridge work carried out directly on the designed section of the ChTK amounted to 39 percent of the total price of the lot.

The remaining 61 percent of the costs fell on related work of various kinds: preparation of the territory and compensation measures in the construction zone, development of the engineering infrastructure of the adjacent territory and public transport systems, road and bridge work on adjacent sections of the district's road network.

The total length of the section under consideration in single-lane terms was 76.4 kilometers, more than half of which are overpasses. The construction cost of one kilometer of one lane was about 9.8 million dollars, that is, an amount comparable to similar indicators for urban highways in US metropolitan areas.

A cost analysis for this project carried out at our institute showed:

– the planned related works are quite reasonable for the city, in most cases – simply inevitable;

– in the situation in the capital’s market for road and bridge works that developed in 2006-2008, the totality of work on this object costs approximately the money that the designers calculated; no “multiple overestimation” is visible here.

Beyond this analysis, questions of a more general nature remain.

How satisfied can we (voters and taxpayers) be with the situation that has developed in the capital's construction market in recent years? It is hardly time to argue about this today: the crisis has changed the situation radically and it is not yet clear what the consequences of this process will be.

Another question is how necessary the city is to build the ChTK as such?! I am not at all a supporter of the next Moscow ring. But this is no longer a question of pricing, but of the quality of urban transport planning.

Andrey

Hello Mikhail Yakovlevich!

The leaders of Rosavtodor and the Ministry of Transport planned to develop indicators of the efficiency of capital investments in the implementation of road activities, but so far a decrease in the construction rate remains the main indicator for financing the project. Ruble savings of one-time costs during construction require an increase in costs over the estimated 20-year period of operation of the road. Maybe it is worth limiting the minimization of the thickness of base layers, underlying and additional layers of road pavements when calculating shear and elastic deflection?

When examining design documentation, resource costs for construction should be compared not with an “analogue”, but with a standard developed for regions or road-climatic zones. The road fund should be formed according to the principle “you drive more, you pay more.”

Dear colleague, you and I are undeniably like-minded people!

Valery

I live in Western Siberia, we have huge distances between cities, all federal highways have one lane in each direction, even new highways are built the same way. Has anyone analyzed how much roads with two lanes in each direction, or at least one more lane between oncoming lanes, will reduce the accident rate. According to my observations (I have been driving cars for more than 25 years), the causes of most accidents on country roads lie precisely in the narrowness of the roads.

KAA

Dear Mikhail Yakovlevich!

Could you answer 2 questions:

1) Why don’t we put asphalt in a thin layer on concrete slabs (like in the USA)? After all, concrete is much more reliable than embankments made of gravel and crushed stone (under which the asphalt sags and creates ruts).

2) How do you feel about autobahns and will we see at least one autobahn in Russia in our lifetime? (autobahn: right lane no less than 140, left lane - no limit, as in Germany)

Thank you in advance!

Lenta.ru Reader

Good afternoon

Are there any plans to widen all federal roads to 4 lanes with a median?

After all, it has long been known that the majority of fatal accidents occur due to driving into the oncoming lane while overtaking on intercity highways, most of which are 2-lane!

Dear readers! All countries with a vast national territory sooner or later connected their regions and main cities with a network of high-speed multi-lane roads. Precisely a grid (from south to north and from west to east), and not an asterisk (all to the capital, all from the capital)! For example, the United States has been solving this problem since 1956, China - since the mid-1990s.

The need for this is dictated not only by economics or the need to ensure road safety. Such a network is considered the most important condition for national unity, the formation of economic, social, and humanitarian ties along the “region-region” line, and not just “periphery-center”. Such a network is also a key material prerequisite for every citizen to be confident: I live in my own country, and am not locked up in my own corner.

To my deep regret, we have not built such a network and, judging by the published plans for 2030, we still do not intend to build it.

Vasek

Entrances and exits from roads, the layout of interchanges compared to China, Europe, the USA, the quality of construction work in Russia is at a disastrous level. The organization of the movement in the country is at the level of Afghanistan. What do you think - maybe Russia should simply adopt the same legislative framework as in Europe or the most successful countries in Europe and simply completely import the entire traffic control system, traffic police, etc., etc.?

Thank you, Vasek, for a good question!

Just 20-25 years ago in China there were no roads at all (in the modern sense of the word!). During 1996-2008, the Chinese built 55 thousand kilometers of multi-lane expressways alone, and hundreds of thousands of kilometers of quite decent local roads. At the same time, they acted strictly according to your recommendations:

- the roads were built according to the best world standards, simply put - according to American norms and rules (Highway Design Manual);

– from January 1, 2009, China also switched to a standard (simply put, American) model of road financing, based on targeted road taxes included in the price of gasoline and diesel fuel.

So far, the average motorization of the Chinese population is very low - about 35 cars per 1000 inhabitants, that is, at the level of the United States in 1918. However, the car fleet is growing there at a rapid pace, and there is no doubt that as they reach a serious level of motorization, the Chinese will most carefully adopt the procedures and mechanisms adopted in developed countries in terms of organizing and managing traffic, registering cars, admitting citizens and vehicles to participate in traffic and so on.

We, as you know, are following our own sovereign path. For example, they recently created the state company Avtodor...

But as far as Afghanistan is concerned, you are wrong. In the global accident rate rating, we, as I have already said, are somewhere in the middle of the list, and Afghanistan is at the end.

Victor

Hello, Mikhail Yakovlevich!

It is already obvious that it is impossible to solve the problem of traffic jams in large Russian cities by developing infrastructure, and the only way out is administrative measures aimed at reducing vehicles on city roads. Where do you think municipal authorities in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other megacities should start? Organizing dedicated lanes for public transport and cycling? Paid entry into the center according to the “London” type? A complete lack of free parking in the center? It is clear that the measures must be comprehensive, but what should be the first step in the general case?

Onion

or may raise taxes on transport and restrict transport in other ways. while improving the quality of public transport?

Thank you, gentlemen, for your questions on a topic that was studied in great detail at our research institute.

From the experience of developed countries, it is known that at a certain stage of urban development, further continuation of road construction, based on the need to master forecast traffic, becomes useless and even harmful. The city must move towards active demand management and, in particular, limit the use of private cars through tax and regulatory tools, reallocating road space in favor of public transport.

Foreign megacities began this work many years ago by differentiating parking tariffs: cheaper in the periphery, very expensive in the very center. A natural development of this process was the organization of paid entry into urban centers (London, Milan, Stockholm and others).

It should be noted that the slogan “stop building new roads, it’s time to curb demand” became relevant when cities in developed countries acquired a fairly decent network of local and main roads and streets.

By the end of the 1990s, the share of road networks in urban areas reached 30-35 percent in the cities of the USA, Australia, and Canada; in the cities of Western Europe, where there are smaller places, it stopped at 20-25 percent. Even overpopulated Asian cities (Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul...) keep this proportion at 10-12 percent.

For modern Moscow, this figure is only 8.4 percent; in many Russian cities it is even lower. The network deficit is such that there is often simply nothing to separate for public transport.

But the issue of improving the quality of public transport is urgent for us.

Alexei

Dear Mikhail Yakovlevich!

Who should bear responsibility for the decline in the number of paved roads in recent years?

How to force the Moscow authorities to build normal interchanges?

When will railway travel become safe?

Will interchanges be built on a concrete ring like Selyatinskaya?

Who is responsible for the construction of roads (for example the Moscow Ring Road) that have to be continuously repaired?

How necessary is it to replace curbstones every year?

Dear citizens, we can hold someone accountable or force the authorities to take certain actions in the only way - thoughtful voting in elections.

In Moscow, elections are coming in October, in Izhevsk - in the spring of 2010.

Borisovich

When, instead of senselessly tightening traffic rules, will safe and durable roads be initially designed and built, taking into account the future development of the regions? What, in your opinion, hinders the development (more precisely, maintenance) of transport infrastructure in Russia?

Can toll roads save the situation, or is this another way of taking money from the population and reducing the number of personal vehicles on the roads?

Dear reader! I spoke in detail about my attitude towards toll roads above.

The development of a high-quality road network in Russia is hampered primarily by the lack of real public demand for this essential benefit.

For example, Moscow is in severe traffic jams, and the majority of Muscovites unanimously vote for deputies who fully approve of the transport and urban planning (and any other!) policies of the city authorities.

In many regions we have a permanent lack of roads, and residents behave in exactly the same way during elections.

Sergey

Has anything been developed and put into practical use by the Research Institute of Transport and Road Facilities in the period, for example, from 2005 to the present? If “yes,” then “what is where” and what was the effect? If "no" - then why?...

Nicole

Hello Mikhail Yakovlevich.

As I understand it, your research institute is the organization that develops technologies for the construction and operation of roads. I have no doubt that the research institute copes with its tasks superbly, while ensuring a project cost lower than the European one.

However, in the field of road management, we have what we have.

Question: at what stage does a deviation from technology occur, which organization supervises the technology of construction, operation and repair of roads, and who, finally, is responsible for non-compliance with technical standards and requirements?

Dear Sirs! The products of our non-profit partnership "NII TDH" are not projects or technologies, but analytical materials, examinations, proposals for the development of the regulatory framework.

With such a profile of work, it makes no sense to talk about “experimental and industrial implementation”. As for the effects, the main one is educational.

I have already answered the question about compliance with technological norms and regulations.

Becker M.M.

Please tell me which department or organization uses the recommendations of the research institute in the construction of roads, underground passages, mega-centers in the center of Moscow, as well as multi-storey buildings and offices. Why are there pedestrian crossings (zebra crossings), traffic lights, left turns and numerous traffic police pickets on federal highways? Are you invited to discuss this topic in the State Duma, the State Traffic Safety Inspectorate, the Public Chamber, and the Moscow City Hall? Thank you very much!

Dear Mr. Becker! In recent months alone, I have had the opportunity to speak at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, at the Novosibirsk urban planning forum "City of Tomorrow", at hearings in the State Duma, at a meeting of the Public Chamber commissions, as well as at many other high-level public events. Some of our positions sooner or later make their way into practice, others, alas, do not.

Ruslan

Hello. Why can’t we invent devices built into the car that allow the car to warn the driver about an impending possible danger, by recognizing the car’s surroundings and the algorithm of a possible combination of circumstances. Well, and other devices, for example, that prevent drunk drivers from getting behind the wheel.

I am sure that today a car needs its own intelligence.

Do you think this is possible in Russia in the near future?

All these gadgets have been invented a long time ago. Their usefulness can be debated...

Oleg

1. One of the reasons for traffic jams is improper layout of the territory. To save money, roads are built not to bypass populated areas, but through them. When new microdistricts of large cities are designed, one gets the impression that they are built up in such a way that no roads can simply be built later. For example, in the village of Severny on Dmitrovskoe Highway, instead of building multi-level interchanges (now U-turns and left turns in the direction from Moscow are very spoiled), they quickly built everything up.

2. About a dedicated lane for public transport. Why can’t it be planned in advance when developing new microdistricts? Why not build some new roads with an additional lane in the center of the road for special vehicles, following the example of Kutuzovsky Prospekt?

Moscow transport and planning problems are a topic for a separate discussion. I have spoken out on this issue more than once, including most recently: ““Chiefs” don’t live in Vykhino,” “A city where people like to live.”

Catherine

Hello, Mikhail Yakovlevich!

Before asking a question, I would like to express my deepest sympathy to you. My husband and I (avid motorists) memorized your lecture “Etiology and Pathogenesis of Moscow Traffic Jams” literally by heart, re-read it so many times, and are ready to sign every word. It’s just a pity that our authorities don’t think so...

And a question. Every year our roads are either repaired or widened in the summer. This summer on Novaya Kashirka the situation is generally akin to the “Southern Highway”; summer residents are stuck in traffic jams all day long due to the widening of the road. Moreover, there is no hope that next summer there will be a wide open highway and you just have to be patient, because the road workers will start patching holes in the new asphalt and will block everything again. Tell me, please, aren’t there any technologies for laying asphalt and other road work so that this can be done not at the height of the summer season, but at least in the fall or spring?

Thank you very much, Ekaterina, for your kind words addressed to me! Judging by them, I am inevitably moving from the category of transport experts to the category of popular writers. God knows, maybe it's time...

As for the substance of your questions, I spoke on similar issues a little higher.

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