It was already clear that the Sobyanin-Liksutov lie that traffic jams in Moscow had decreased would be disproved by reality. And now there is objective data on the subject as well.
All this nonsense about paid parking being a cure for traffic congestion remains nonsense.
Parking restrictions are of course necessary, but they are only one of many measures. And they will not work without the others. You can raise parking fees to as much as 1,000 rubles an hour, but if you keep issuing permits for huge shopping malls inside the Third Ring Road and keep increasing density with so-called “elite real estate,” that will do nothing to reduce congestion.
Sobyanin and Liksutov’s efforts have led only to a redistribution of traffic jams. The city center used to be more gridlocked; now it is the area between the Third Ring Road and the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road) that is more congested.
A sure sign: if someone talks about traffic getting better, they live in the center. Possibly in the western part of the city. Meanwhile, millions of “perfectly ordinary Muscovites” living in the “non-elite zone” — the East, Southeast, and South — continue to spend weeks and months of their lives stuck in traffic.
As old man Trump would say: a mess and a disaster — that’s what the Moscow mayor’s office is, with its annual budget of 2 trillion rubles.