I got a letter. Letters like this don’t come very often, but they always make me happy. Let me share that happiness. There’s a guy living in the town of Krasnogorsk named Fyodor Yezeev. Near his house there’s a road, and on that road there are a couple of huge potholes. Nothing unusual, really — all of us have some road nearby full of potholes. So anyway, these potholes drove Fyodor absolutely crazy. Which is nothing new either. All of us are annoyed by potholes on the road near our homes. But unlike the rest of us, Fyodor didn’t get lazy and didn’t tell himself, “I’m too busy for this.” He decided to kick the system. As he himself wrote in his letter: I’d read enough of your LiveJournal and decided to get myself a stick with a nail too, so I could poke the Krasnogorsk city administration with it. Fyodor simply googled the “Road GOST” (Russian state standard), found out that the pothole in front of his house did not comply with the standard (which was obvious, but you need something to cite), and wrote a letter to the local traffic police. After a while, he got a reply:
And, most interestingly, the administration patched the biggest hole in the road. Fyodor wrote again and asked them to provide the documents produced as a result of the pothole inspection. The reply was very interesting:
And the nicest part is that the road next to Fyodor’s house was repaired. You can read his account here. Why is this individual case so important? And why is what Fyodor did not just one of those “small good deeds,” but rather a “major victory over crooks”? Let’s look at road construction. I know this subject a little, and I’m prepared to say that NOT A SINGLE road in Russia is built without kickbacks and bribes. Not one auction has been honest. And where an auction (tender, competition) was honest, the winner was still forced to pay for the acceptance certificate. You can browse the government procurement websites and see for yourself. Where a contract was signed with the sole participant in the auction, the organizers were paid 15% upfront; where there was competition, they got 7–10% later.
If you describe it in simple terms, it looks something like this: State or municipal officials (the auction organizers) take 15% of the contract value from the winner. The winner hires some Armenians as subcontractors, covers for them, and handles state acceptance of the work. For that, he takes 20%. The Armenians work on the road (sometimes conscientiously, sometimes not). They’re not idiots, and in a business this risky they won’t work for less than a 30% margin. So out of 100 rubles allocated for road construction, only 47 rubles and 60 kopecks actually go to building the road. In a normal situation, those same hypothetical Armenians could have come onto the project directly and, with a 15% margin, put 85 rubles into the actual construction. Sure, sure, a road is a complex engineering structure, with all sorts of entanglements among clients, general contractors, and subcontractors, but at the most basic level this is exactly how it works. And this scheme is absolutely axiomatic for so-called “patch” repairs somewhere like Krasnogorsk.
So what did Fyodor do? He ate into somebody’s margin. The system never expected that some random Fyodor would show up and start demanding his rights. It had to spend real money on a real repair. Where will the money come from to repair Fyodor’s road? In theory, the local official calls those hypothetical Armenians and says: guys, there’s that road we paid you for two years ago. The warranty period hasn’t expired, and now there’s a pothole in it. Fix it at your own expense. In practice, the local official already got his cash, so he turned a blind eye when the Armenians just dumped asphalt onto the ground and didn’t do any drainage. He knew the road would fall apart after a season, but he kept quiet. Because the less real work gets done, the bigger the actual kickback.
So in our case, Fyodor’s road will be repaired at the expense of not repairing the road next to Ivan, Kolya, and Petya. But what happens if Vanya, Kolya, Petya, and that loudmouth Leonid from the second entrance also file complaints? Exactly. That’s our task. To shrink the space in which crooks can extract bribes. If they know road money can simply be written off on paper without actually fixing anything, they’ll steal 80%. If they know people will raise hell, they’ll steal 10%. Which is already not bad. Really, it would make sense to launch a small but useful little project. Raise your hand if there’s a huge pothole in the road near your home. I see a forest of hands, thank you. Make a website: read the GOST, photograph and measure the pothole, upload it all to the site, and file a complaint with the traffic police. Then post the reply, and so on. We’ll create a whole database of proceedings about “a hole in the asphalt.” We could put serious pressure on the crooks.
Of course, if you live in some backwater village where money for road repairs was last allocated in 1913, things are more complicated. But let me remind you that even poor regions have federal highways, subsidies, and so on. And if we see that a road was repaired and by the following spring it’s full of potholes again, then this is definitely our case. The website could be very simple. A list of addresses — you click one and land on the page for a specific pothole, moderated by the person fighting that pothole. The GOST and the rest of it aren’t very complicated. Here’s what Google immediately turned up: According to GOST 50597–93 currently in force in Russia, potholes must not exceed 15 cm (5.9 in) in length, 80 cm (31.5 in) in width, and 5 cm (2 in) in depth. Any section of road exceeding even one of these parameters must be marked with road signs, and in conditions of poor visibility, with barriers and signal lights ////
If this goes well, the effort could be expanded — we could investigate the condition of recently built roads that cost enormous amounts of money. For example, here’s yet another 4 trillion-ruble plan. I’m sure there’s a lot of interesting stuff to be found. The idea is also interesting from a political point of view. The other day Comrade Kudrin said that over the next 10 years, all roads in the Russian Federation will meet European standards. The money will come from the newly created Road Fund, which you and I will be filling — through the gasoline excise tax. Wouldn’t it be nice to poke the Road Fund and the plump little bodies of Kudrin and Levitin with a stick with a sharp nail on the end? Of course it would! Just imagine how amusingly they’d squeal. Anyway, if there are volunteers — step forward. I’ll help in every way I can. You can write by email or in the comments.
Update. In Kirovo-Chepetsk, people are implementing this idea quite successfully Update 2. Sample complaint forms. It turns out there are some serious fighters who’ve made real progress on this issue. Update 3. A similar project in Perm