I honestly don’t understand how this is even possible. Over three years, Moscow created 50,000 paid parking spaces. In all that time, those spaces brought in 5.8 billion rubles in fees from car owners. And over that same period, the paid parking project cost... 16 billion rubles from the city budget.
Here is Vedomosti’s detailed investigation into the issue (I’m very glad that Vedomosti is returning to this kind of format, which it has always done exceptionally well).
So they collected three times less than they spent. To me, that figure looks even more shocking, because I know perfectly well that in a huge number of cases, so-called “parking improvements” are simply a direct theft of city money by Liksutov and Co. Funds were constantly allocated to “improve” parking lots that already existed; here is plenty of hard evidence.
What’s more, *Vedomosti* found that money from paid parking has not been going toward neighborhood improvements for more than a year now (even though this was the mayor’s office’s main propaganda point when pushing the expansion of paid parking zones):
The “truly important programs” the official was talking about turned out to be those idiotic curbs. A pointless Sobyanin project, for the sake of which half of Moscow was torn up.
Or rather, pointless for the city—but very purposeful for the officials, who handed the contracts to their relatives.
The zealous supporters of paid parking will say: it doesn’t matter what was stolen or where the money went; the main thing is that paid parking is being introduced. Motorists should pay for keeping their clunkers on public land.
And I would say the exact opposite: what is happening completely strips any serious discussion of paid parking in the city of all meaning. Any data on the project’s effectiveness is being concealed. There are no reliable public statistics (and *Vedomosti* shows this). The corrupt motive behind expanding paid parking zones is becoming more and more obvious. The lies about what the money collected from motorists is supposedly for discredit the very idea itself.
It is impossible to assess the effectiveness of these measures or compare them with other cities or with other districts within Moscow. Everything is replaced with lies. Everything—including the unverifiable claims about reduced traffic congestion in the city that both Sobyanin and Liksutov keep making.
Near my home (this is Maryino, not the city center), they recently banned parking along the road—tow trucks started patrolling, and paid parking was introduced by the metro station. If there were any objective, verifiable data showing what this would achieve, fine, we could discuss it.
But as things stand, what do we have? Residents’ cars are being towed away to force them into a parking lot where, for every ruble a resident spends, another three rubles will be taken out of his pocket through the budget so that Liksutov can profit? And even that one ruble he paid himself will be redistributed in favor of the relatives of Deputy Mayor Biryukov.
Places