MOSCOW TRAFFIC
Never has a place with so many bad drivers become filled so quickly with so many cars. The number of cars in Moscow jumped from 850,000 (79 per 1,000 people) in 1990 to 2.7 million (224 per 1,000 people) in 2001, with about 300,000 new ones added every year. Roads that were built for horsedrawn carriages have not been widened and are full of cars. A drive from the New Arbat Area to the Kremlin a few hundred meters away can take can more than an hour.
When the traffic is not gridlocked, cars speed by at break-neck speeds, drunk pedestrians stumble into traffic and freelance taxis and motorcycle gangs take up entire lanes. Traffic signals are relatively infrequent and they are often not synchronized and are ignored anyway. Left turns are banned and people often park on the sidewalks. To avoid making left turns motorist often have to take circuitous routes that involve negotiating mazes of one-way back streets and making U-turns.
According to ASIRT: “Traffic jams are common on work days. Drivers frequently disobey the speed limit and lane markings and run red lights. Drivers may drive while under the influence of alcohol or drive in the wrong lane, against oncoming traffic. More than 12 percent of road crashes occur in Moscow. High-speed chases by police are common. Proceed only when traffic lights are green. Right and left turns can only be made on arrows. The system of fines for violating traffic regulations is inadequate and does not serve as a deterrent. Using non-official cabs (privately owned vehicles) is not recommended for security reasons. [Source: Association for Safe International Road Travel, 2008 asirt.org |=|]
Moscow Traffic Jams
Traffic jams are called “probka” (Russian for "cork"). Buses have been known to drive through fields and forts in parks to avoid multiple-hour traffic jams and driver have been seen driving on handicapped ramps to get around buses swallowed by giant pot holes.
The traffic jams around Moscow can be horrible. The New York Times interviewed one man who set off for a friends house, 20 miles away, at 7:00pm on Friday night, using the Ring Road. He didn't arrive until 11:00am the next day. At 9:00pm, after traveling seven miles he got stuck in a gridlock traffic jam and moved about 50 meters in two hours. Throughout the night things didn't improve much. At one stage 100 drivers organized themselves in an attempt to drive backwards. They made it only about a 100 meters before being stopped only to have their spaces in front of them taken by other drivers.
By 2:00am relatives alerted by cell phone appeared in lanes going the other direction and offered food, gasoline and clothes to the unfortunates stuck in traffic. At around 3:00am entrepreneurs began showing with sandwiches to sell to the hungry motorist. Some motorist even turned their children over to strangers and asked the strangers to drive the children home.
Keith Gessen wrote in The New Yorker: “Moscow’s terrible traffic has been infamous for a while now, but in the past year it has come to feel like an existential threat. The first snowfall of last winter, in early December, paralyzed the city. Andrey Kolesnikov, the Kremlin correspondent for Kommersant and probably the best-known print journalist in the country, was unable to reach the airport in time to leave with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for Nizhny Tagil. Instead of detailing Putin’s manly adventures in the metallurgical capital of the Urals, Kolesnikov’s column the next day described his own epic, failed journey to the airport. The traffic-analysis center at Yandex, the country’s leading online search engine, reported a record-breaking worst-possible rating of 10 for six straight hours. That night, a popular anti-Kremlin blogger, making his way along the river in the center of town, encountered an ambulance driver standing outside his vehicle throwing snowballs lazily off the embankment; he’d been in traffic so long, he explained, that his patient was now dead. [Source: Keith Gessen, The New Yorker , August 2, 2010 ]
“Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who takes everything that happens in the city very personally, perhaps because over the years he and his wife have come personally to own a good chunk of the city, reacted decisively: he blamed the meteorologists. They had underestimated the snowfall. If they didn’t start forecasting better, there would be trouble. In the following months, though, snow wreaked havoc on the city whenever it fell.
“I first noticed the extent of the Moscow traffic problem in the spring of 2007, while drinking a coffee at the Coffee Bean, on Sretenka, just up the street from the Lubyanka. looking out the window, when suddenly my sister appeared in front of the coffee shop and stopped, trapped in traffic. Farther ahead, Sretenka intersected the giant Garden Ring Road, which runs around the Kremlin at a radius of about a mile and a half and marks the border of the historic city center. For much of its length, it is twelve lanes wide; at certain points, it’s eighteen. Still, it is often clogged. At the Sretenka-Garden Ring intersection, a police officer hand-operates the light to try to ease traffic, to no avail. So there was my sister, just twenty feet away from me, sitting down as I was, almost as if she were at another table. The moment extended in time; I sipped my coffee. When, eventually, the light changed and my sister moved forward a few car lengths, it was as if she had merely moved to another table. If the coffee were cheaper, I would have brought her one.”
Reasons Why Moscow Traffic Is So Bad
Kiichiro Hatoyama, a traffic expert from Japan, told The New Yorker: “There are three main factors that determine a city’s traffic,” he said. Finger 1: “Driver behavior.” Do drivers care that if they enter an intersection before a light turns red there’s a chance they’ll get stuck and create gridlock? Russian drivers do not. Impatient, angry, they will seize whatever inch of road is offered them. Russian drivers are jerks. Hatoyama put this differently. “Russian drivers lack foresight,” he said. [Source: Keith Gessen, The New Yorker , August 2, 2010 ]
Finger 2: The traffic system itself, that is to say the organization of the roads. Moscow’s radial character puts it at a slight disadvantage compared with cities laid out on a grid, like New York, but the disadvantage need not be decisive: Tokyo is also a radial city. Hatoyama’s main criticism of Moscow is the lack of left-turn possibilities.
Finger 3: The social system, which is always reflected on the roads. One night last summer, I was out late and took a cab home. The streets at that hour were empty. As the cabdriver and I made our way past Pushkin Square, we noticed a policeman sprinting ahead of us and then mounting a traffic booth at the corner. The light turned red. He emerged from the booth and sprinted to a booth at the next corner. “Someone’s coming,” my driver announced. We sat before the red light for several minutes. Everything was quiet. Then a motorcade of black Mercedeses and S.U.V.s appeared from the direction of the Kremlin, whizzed past us, and disappeared into the night. Ten seconds passed, and the light turned green. “It is a feudal structure,” Hatoyama said of the privileges accorded Russia’s élite in the traffic system. “It causes many problems.” He had put down his three fingers and returned to his sandwich. “Is there any other place that has that?” I asked. “Different rules for different drivers?” Hatoyama chewed his sandwich slowly. When he answered, finally, with a single word, there was a certain satisfaction in his tone. “China,” he said.
Efforts to Improve the Moscow Traffic Situation
Planners in Moscow have tried banning trucks from the city center, rerouting traffic, and making streets one way but thus far none of these measures seems to have made much difference. Planners estimated in the early 2000s that Moscow needed another 300 kilometers of streets just to handle the vehicles at that time. Now there are twice as many cars on the road and few plans have made it of the drawing board.
Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow from 1992 to 2010, made the traffic problem a top priority. The government built new highways and bridges but was unable to keep pace with the explosion of new cars. Moscow Ring Automobile Road (known as the MKAD) is Moscow's widest, busiest and most costly road. Conceived under Khrushchev and completed in 1998, it circles the outer reaches of Moscow and is 10 lanes wide and 69 miles long and cost more than $1 billion to build. The MKAD is the outermost of three rings roads. It is sometimes called "Death Road" because of the number of driving fatalities that have occurred there.
Keith Gessen wrote in The New Yorker in 2010: “Last spring, Mayor Luzhkov fired the head of the city’s transportation department. Weeks earlier, the deposed chief had, like the three men who preceded him over the previous seven years, been harshly criticized for his failure to solve the traffic crisis. There are many problems that Luzhkov pretends not to know about, but traffic is not among them. In fact, it sometimes seems as if the Mayor thinks of nothing else. Whenever he goes abroad, he returns with a magical fix for the problem; whenever he has money to spare, he builds roads and digs tunnels. He has waged a relentless war against traffic lights—“He has a childlike notion that if he could just get rid of all the traffic lights everything would be fine,” Blinkin says—and on one central stretch running from the Kremlin almost all the way, but not quite, to Sheremetyevo Airport, outside town, he has just about eliminated them. He has turned numerous two-way streets into one-way streets and even proposed that the monstrous Garden Ring become one-way. Nothing helps. Muscovites continue to buy (and steal, and salvage, and order on eBay in North America, and ship to Finland) more cars than Luzhkov can build roads to drive them on. [Source: Keith Gessen, The New Yorker , August 2, 2010 ]
“The wise move would have been to invest in public transportation, to build up the city’s justly famous but sparse metro network and bring back the trams that killed the literary editor at the start of “The Master and Margarita”; instead, Luzhkov has been cool toward the metro and actively hostile to the trams. Public transportation is for losers. Instead, he spent billions to widen the Moscow Ring Road (a beltway around the city) and complete the construction of the fabled Third Ring Road, a freeway between the Garden Ring and the Moscow Ring, of which Muscovites had been talking since the nineteen-sixties. According to the traffic-analysis center at Yandex, the Third Ring is now the most clogged artery in the city. Luzhkov is unbowed: he has begun work on a Fourth Ring!
“No city has ever constructed itself out of congestion,” the transportation expert Vukan Vuchic, of the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s impossible.” Vuchic visited Moscow in October and was depressed by what he saw, though also in a way impressed. “There are streets in the center that are four, five lanes wide in each direction,” he said. “You’d think it’d be impossible for them to be congested, but they are congested.”
Mikhail Blinkin and the Pathogenesis of Moscow Traffic
Keith Gessen wrote in The New Yorker: For Mikhail Blinkin, a traffic expert and the author of a legendary paper titled “The Etiology and Pathogenesis of Moscow Traffic,” “there are profound social and structural issues preventing Moscow cars from moving. The broad avenues, for example, are good only for military parades. In New York, by contrast, there is an elegant two-tiered road system: street tier, on which pedestrians are primary and cars secondary, and freeway tier (the F.D.R. Drive, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), where cars rule and there are no pedestrians at all. According to Blinkin, there isn’t a single proper freeway in Moscow. Even the outermost ring, which should serve as a beltway for cars trying to bypass the city entirely, has, since its expansion a decade ago, sprouted dozens of shopping centers, each with several exits and entrances onto the highway. The proposed Fourth Ring is not going to solve any of this. “You can’t just keep sending people in circles!” Blinkin exclaims. “They need to get off eventually, and then what?” The deeper problem—or, rather, the only way that the many deep problems can begin to be solved—is political: Luzhkov, who has been the ruler of Moscow for nearly twenty years now, needs to go. [Source: Keith Gessen, The New Yorker , August 2, 2010 ]
“Blinkin is a slim, energetic man in his early sixties with a bristly gray mustache. He was trained in the prestigious math department of Moscow State University, but then, after underperforming on the final exam on the history of the Communist Party, could find work only at a research institute on traffic. “At first, I was disappointed,” he told me. “But then I read some more and realized, Some very smart, respectable people have worked on this stuff.” He spent nearly twenty years at two Soviet research institutes devoted to “urban planning,” and in 1990 started a private think tank on traffic. Blinkin loves driving, and, when we first got in touch, owned a silver 1999 E-series Mercedes. But I could never get him to take me for a drive in it. “I’m taking the metro today,” he’d say when I called. “You’d have to be an idiot to drive in these conditions.”
“In the past few years, as he has spoken out more and more, Blinkin has come to resemble a classic dissident—the Sakharov of traffic. Yet in a country where opposition figures are systematically shut out of the media, Blinkin has more exposure than he can handle. “During the past week, I’ve been on TV four times,” he told me when we first met, “and I’ve lost count of how many print interviews.” In the current political climate, traffic is a problem everyone is willing to discuss: the Kremlin-controlled media because it makes Luzhkov look bad; Luzhkov because he’s obsessed with it. Vuchic, who was born in Belgrade, was amused to note that he’d been interviewed by the old Party mouthpiece Izvestia. “Never in my life did I think I’d be printed in Izvestia!” he said.”
Traffic Police in Moscow
Keith Gessen wrote in The New Yorker: “Like other major cities, Moscow has a traffic center, with banks of large monitors showing many of the city’s intersections. Several dozen traffic officers keep an eye on the situation, calling their men in the traffic booths to let them know what they should do. I got a short tour of the facility earlier this year, and it was impressive. The huge monitors; the policemen in uniform before them; the traffic moving, or sitting still, as the policemen watched—it gave a measure of the megalopolis, made it seem a manageable thing. But this was in some sense an illusion: although the police can watch, they are helpless. My guide pointed out the monitor banks for the poorer southern and eastern areas of the city, which are said to have the heaviest traffic. “Are those the worst parts?” I asked him. He considered this, not wanting, perhaps, to offend the southern and eastern routes. “It’s all the worst part,” he said at last. [Source: Keith Gessen, The New Yorker , August 2, 2010 ]
“The police’s main competitor in the realm of traffic information is Yandex, which began monitoring traffic on its Web site in 2006 and in 2008 set up a separate “analytical center,” Yandex Probki (probka means traffic jam). Yandex Probki issues periodic white papers on the state of traffic, and maintains a blog with interesting traffic highlights, but its main task is to keep perpetually updated a now iconic three-color street map of the city, showing real-time traffic flow on a number of routes. Above the map is a rating of the over-all traffic at that moment, from 1 (“The streets are clear”) to 9 (“The city has stopped”) and 10 (“You’re better off on the metro”). Probki now has around half a million daily visitors in Moscow, putting it neck and neck with News and Images, with Weather just around the bend.
When I visited this past winter, Yandex occupied a low-slung modern office building behind the Kursk train station. Though in the center of town, it was too far to walk from the metro, and a white Yandex shuttle took me there. The tri-color Yandex Probki map played on a large plasma screen above the receptionist. Upstairs, one small room was given over to three men who represented the old guard of traffic-watching: as if in a miniature version of the traffic police center, they sat before computer monitors and kept track of nearly a hundred camera feeds from the streets of the city, swivelling the cameras where necessary to keep up with events, and checked what they saw against the big map. But the center has more sophisticated tools at its disposal. As Maria Laufer, the head of Yandex Maps, explained, setting up cameras all over the megalopolis would be prohibitively expensive. Other cities use sensors embedded in the pavement to measure traffic flow; in Moscow these have a hard time surviving both the weather and the road repairs the weather necessitates. So Yandex, Laufer said, came up with “something like Communism—in the good sense of the word.” Her colleague Leonid Mednikov updated the formulation: “It’s a Wiki.” At first, drivers had sent information by phone or by text. As more and more drivers started using G.P.S.-enabled smartphones, Yandex asked them to download Yandex software onto their devices, so that information about their movements could be sent automatically to the Yandex servers. As the program grows, it is able to give an increasingly accurate and encompassing picture of the traffic situation at any given moment. While I was touring the office, it began to snow. Some time later, Mednikov entered the conference room, carrying his laptop before him like a lantern. “It’s at 10!” he announced of the traffic index. “It went from 5 to 10 in an hour and a half!” And so it was that the Yandex shuttle, making its way back to the metro with me as its only passenger, got stuck in traffic as it approached the Garden Ring.”
Anger Over Arrogant Black Mercedes Drivers
Keith Gessen wrote in The New Yorker: “During rush hour on an overcast, slippery day in late February, the luxury Mercedes of a vice-president of Lukoil, the country’s largest oil company, collided at high speed with a small Citroën. The occupants of the Mercedes escaped with superficial injuries; the Citroën crumpled like a paper bag, and the driver and her daughter-in-law—both doctors—were killed. [Source: Keith Gessen, The New Yorker , August 2, 2010 ]
The accident exploded into scandal. The police claimed that the Citroën was at fault, but automobile activists quickly found witnesses who said that the Mercedes had crossed over into the central emergency lane reserved for ambulances and police cars, and then into oncoming traffic. Especially infuriating was the Mercedes itself, a black S-500 with a siren: for years, these besirened black Mercedeses had been running red lights, using the emergency lane, and otherwise tyrannizing other drivers. Some of them technically had the right to do all this, since they belonged to one of the federal security agencies in Moscow, or to Duma deputies, or to Putin; but a large number simply belonged to wealthy and well-connected individuals. Now they were killing people.
“Within days of the accident, the young rapper Noize MC recorded a furious song, “Mercedes S-666,” in which he ventriloquized the innocuous-looking Lukoil vice-president as Satan: “All those satanic costumes, that’s just tomfoolery. / Dressing up like that they’ll never look like me. . . . I’m working here on a whole other level. / I’ve got a suitcase full of cash to get me out of trouble.” The song’s chorus expressed the class conflict at the heart of the matter: “Get out of my way, filthy peasants. / There’s a patrician on the road.”
“Over the past few years, Moscow drivers have become one of the city’s most active social groups, organizing to eliminate the corrupt meter maids and lobbying for more roads. After the death of the two doctors in the collision with the Lukoil Mercedes, a group of drivers began attaching blue sandbox buckets to the roofs of their cars, in imitation of sirens, as a protest against the abuse of the siren by the city’s bankers and oil executives. It’s been one of the most successful civic actions in years. And it makes sense: “car owner” is the one social category that has actually been created in the past twenty years, as opposed to all the social categories that have been destroyed. Perhaps this is the emergence, finally, of a propertied, stakeholding—and frustrated, selfish, neurotic—middle class.”
Violence and Moscow Traffic
Keith Gessen wrote in The New Yorker: “In three separate instances, drivers of snow-clearing vehicles were shot at when they collided with other vehicles; one of the drivers, shot by an off-duty police officer, died....The papers were reporting that the sons of two Moscow bureaucrats had been involved in an altercation. The son of a city prefect was stuck in traffic in his Lexus; the son of a municipal notary officer was riding his bicycle, weaving through the traffic, when he accidentally nicked the Lexus. The son of the prefect got out of his car and pushed the notary’s son (a poli-sci student) to the ground. Humiliated, the notary’s son went off and found a baseball bat somewhere—whether at home or at a sporting-goods store, the reports hadn’t yet determined—and returned to find the prefect’s son still stuck in traffic. He began smashing the windows of the Lexus with the baseball bat. When the prefect’s son got out of the car again, the notary’s son hit him, too, breaking his hand. Moscow’s leading tabloid, LifeNews, posted a photograph of the prefect’s son sporting a cast. A nice-looking young man, he was wearing a pink T-shirt that said “Dolce & Gabbana.” [Source: Keith Gessen, The New Yorker , August 2, 2010 ]
“On a Monday morning a month later, two young women from the Caucasus set off bombs during rush hour in the center of the city. The first blew herself up at Lubyanka, the metro station just beneath the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, and the other did so at a nearby stop, forty minutes later. Emergency services reacted rapidly, and since there could be no question of ambulances making it through traffic from the site of the bombings to the hospital, the badly wounded were helicoptered out. Given the forty-minute gap between the explosions, however, the press began to wonder why the metro hadn’t been evacuated directly after the first bomb. The response from a metro spokesman was immediate. “You have no idea what would have happened if we’d closed down an entire branch of the system,” he said. The city was so crowded, its functioning so tenuous, that it was better to risk another explosion than closing off an artery. “The city is on the brink of transportational collapse,”Mikhail Blinkin, a traffic expert, told me. “Moscow will simply cease to function as a city. You and I will be living in different cities. Some people will live in one neighborhood, and others will live in a different neighborhood, and that will be fine, except they won’t be able to get from one neighborhood to the other.”
On the morning of the subway bombings in Moscow, the city was thrown into disarray; only the emergency services managed to get anywhere. Photographs of the subway platform taken just minutes after the explosion showed medics among the debris, crouching over the wounded. When Blinkin, writing on an anti-Kremlin Web site, praised the emergency response, the commenters turned on him. “I was also impressed by the speed,” one said, raising the old oppositionist dogma about a Kremlin conspiracy. “It seems they knew in advance what was going to happen, and where.”
“I asked my friends at Yandex what the traffic was like that day. They answered in a detailed e-mail. “After the first explosion, at Lubyanka (7:56), traffic jams began to form gradually at the adjacent streets,” they wrote. “After the second explosion (8:36), congestion continued to increase and remained at a high level until 11 o’clock. By contrast, on a regular weekday congestion reaches its peak at 9 A.M. and then begins to drain off.” The next two days were more congested than usual, as many people who usually took the metro decided to drive to work instead. But Moscow could not function this way forever. “By Thursday,” the Yandex analysts concluded, “the city had returned to normal.”
Image Sources:
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, U.S. government, Compton’s Encyclopedia, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, and various books, websites and other publications.
Last updated May 2016