Just look at this:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10201894258785521&set=p.10201894258785521&type=1
This table sums up the entire brand of “urbanism” pushed by Deputy Mayor Liksutov, Sobyanin, and Moscow City Hall as a whole. All their “calculations” and all their “new approaches.”
Conveniently, they left Asian metro systems out of the comparison table, and then divided the number of breakdowns by passenger traffic. Just like at school, when you solve a word problem and end up with “one and a half ditch diggers” (a Russian expression for an absurd result). Only here the conclusion is even better: the Moscow Metro is supposedly one of the safest.
Why didn’t they divide by the length of the lines? Why not by the number of railcars? Why not by the number of employees? Why not by the length of the platform at Mayakovskaya station? You could get a nice coefficient that way too.
What’s especially delightful are the little notes saying, “the London Underground was shut down because of a strike.” Well, if strikes count toward metro reliability indicators, then let’s also calculate how long the Moscow Metro was shut down because of terrorist attacks.
The worst part is that all this garbage is actually being presented as the “professional calculations of Liksutov-style specialists,” and then it will also be used to justify raising transit fares. - Ah, we haven’t raised fares in a long time, and look how reliable everything is. No, we won’t show you the cost structure; instead we’ll show you a very professional infographic table.
The Moscow Metro is excellent, and it should be made even better. But to do that, we need to look honestly at its problems, not “solve” them with manipulative indicators in the style of the Interior Ministry.
And as a gift to the owner of offshore accounts, companies, and a beaver-fur coat — and, incidentally, official M. Liksutov — I can suggest a much cooler indicator of metro reliability: in the numerator, take passenger traffic multiplied by the number of apartments owned by Sobyanin’s daughters, multiplied by the number of Liksutov’s undeclared offshore accounts. In the denominator, put the number of truthful statements made by M. Liksutov.
The important thing to remember here is that you can’t divide by zero, so it’s worth digging through his statements.