I’m so glad someone finally did this. It was impossible to keep listening to every Moscow official saying in interview after interview: thanks to the wise policies of Sobyanin and Liksutov, traffic jams in Moscow have fallen by 12%.
And that 12% kept migrating from one article to the next. Sobyanin’s entire clientelist circle keeps endlessly waving that 12% in our faces. It is supposed to justify the utterly thoughtless paid parking system and its enormous cost. It is supposed to excuse all the stupidity and corruption involved in building inefficient interchanges. Because of that 12%, we are apparently expected to forgive Liksutov all his shady tricks. None of it matters — after all, they reduced traffic by 12%!
And yet no one actually feels any reduction in congestion: yes, there has been a redistribution in space and time — for example, traffic in Moscow on Saturdays is now as bad as on a weekday. In some places cars spend less time standing still, but in others they spend more. The “hotspots” of congestion simply migrate around Moscow, while the overall situation remains just as awful as before. But try saying that out loud, and Liksutov’s paid bloggers will immediately come running, shouting that they have data!
So Kira Yarmysh carried out a meticulous study for our Leviathan: she tried to obtain and verify this data on reduced congestion in Moscow — from the Traffic Management Center (TsODD) to Yandex Traffic and the foreign company TomTom.
For a month and a half, she sent out requests and gathered information, and now she can say with confidence that she has gotten to the bottom of all the real data on traffic reduction in Moscow.
The Magic of Numbers: How Maxim Liksutov Defeated Traffic Jams in Moscow.
Why is this so important, and why should every Muscovite know about Kira’s investigation? Because these made-up 12% are being used as the basis for new decisions. New mistaken decisions. Compare these two versions:
1. We organized paid parking in the city center so well that traffic fell by 12%, so now paid parking will be expanded all the way to the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road).
2. Unfortunately, introducing paid parking in the city center had almost no effect on congestion, so before expanding it to the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road), we will run new calculations and think about what we did wrong.
And this applies not only to paid parking, but to any strategic transport decision.
The first version is based on lies, exists to enable wildly misleading interviews, and leads to a multiplication of urban planning mistakes.
The second version makes officials’ interviews less triumphalist, but it is exactly what we need for the city to develop properly.