Author: VK
For years, the government of Moscow standing in traffic jams is trying to make people abandon private cars and use public transport. According to Maxim Liksutov, head of the Department of Transport and Road Infrastructure, 466 km of transmission lines will exist in the Moscow metro in 2020, of which there will be 161 km of new lines, and this is a 53% increase in the existing infrastructure. 263 stations will exist in the year 2020; these are 78 new stations and 42% of the total. There is about 1.1 trillion rubles associated with the investment in the infrastructure of the Moscow metro. There will be an additional 70% of new subway cars - about 3500 new luxury cars for the Moscow metro. By 2020 93% of the residents of Moscow will be provided with the city subway system within walking distance.
As for commuter trains, we will build 226 km of additional tracks, and in the main areas, the
most congested during rush hour, commuter rail trains will run at intervals of from one to three minutes. Accordingly, the passenger traffic should increase by about 30%, that is by about 900 million passengers, starting somewhere from 2015-2016. “There will also be a huge amount of investment, 261 billion will be invested in this infrastructure, of which 111 million is investment by the carriers in new rolling stock and improvements related to passenger services, and Moscow's budget invests in this federal infrastructure 47.5 billion rubles”, Liksutov says.
There also will be some changes concerning ground transport: in fact since 2012 the city carrier "Mosgortrans" has 60% more new buses. 67 new trams will be bought this year for the co-financing program with the federal government. There was a contest for new 120 low-floor trams of the new generation. The winner of this contest is a subsidiary of "Uralvagonzavod", which will supply trams already in 2014.
But the main improvement will be a new ticket menu. “In total, about 40 thousand inhabitants of Moscow and the Moscow region, including guests, were interviewed”, Liksutov says. “The survey was conducted in 50 locations in the metro, public transport, trains, on platforms and on the streets, where representatives of completely different social and age groups were interviewed. And yet we have chosen to test the new tariff menu on a focus group, about 6 thousand people; we have shown this tariff menu to them. The survey was quite deep, it lasted about 45 minutes, So, 57% of respondents felt extremely positive about this tariff menu, and 34% reacted neutrally. The new menu will remove a number of historical bottlenecks hampering the development of public transport. These are delays in the schedule, the checkout line at the gate, and the risk of an accident”.
Tickets for more than 5 trips will be cheaper.
Validity of tickets for five or more trips will be increased from 45 days to 90 days.
Neither tellers nor drivers will work any longer with coins: the basic price of the tickets will be a multiple of 10.
The time for passenger service will be reduced, ground transport will be of higher quality, the drivers of public transport, particularly of land transport, will be more focused on their main task - driving safely on the roads, and, of course, the cost of tickets for using multiple modes of transport will be lower.
People entitled to discounts will not be affected by any changes. They will continue to use public transport free of charge, within the framework which is already familiar to them. This is the social card issued by the Government of Moscow or of the Moscow region.
Starting from April 2013 a new ticket is going to be introduced - it is for 90 minutes, which includes one ride on the subway, and an unlimited number of trips within 90 minutes from the time of validation of the ticket on any other type of public ground transport. The price of the 90-minute ticket will be 44 rubles. The brand-new ticket is the so-called e-wallet, the most modern medium that has already been introduced in many European and American cities, which will become the prototype of a single ticket for all types of transport, in the long term even for the railway and the aeroexpress train. It will be possible to pay parking with its help, as well as for other transportation services in Moscow.
“We call it an e-wallet, "One solution - lots of opportunities." It allows you to save any types of tickets on this wallet, it is easy to recover the money and it never expires. It means that if you put a hundred rubles on it, the money will never expire, they do not have an expiry date. By the end of 2013, as I was saying, it will become possible to top up your balance on this ticket at a cashier's desk, at an ATM, with the help of a text message and via the internet. All payments related to the e-wallet will be free of charge. We believe that by the end of 2013 we will create 25,000 points for topping up the balance. At the same time, the cost of a single trip in the electronic medium will remain the same for a metro ticket, 28 rubles. A single trip of the trolley, bus or tram, the so-called TBT system, 26 rubles, will also remain the same and will function in the way that has been adopted, at least throughout this year and next year”, Liksutov says.
