Election, election

The number of people I know who still haven’t texted me things like "So, are you going to make me deputy mayor?" "Ready to become a virtual Ryabinin" "I offer you my hand and heart. E. Baturina" is rapidly approaching zero. If anyone still doesn’t know, the newspaper Kommersant, Kommersant FM radio, and Gazeta.ru have launched a project called "Virtual Elections for the Mayor of Moscow." First, experts and non-experts nominated candidates. Then, from that list, they selected the 10 who had received the most support. And then the voting began. As of Sunday, about 42,000 people had taken part in the vote. The preliminary results (the voting ends on October 7) are as follows:

To be honest, I didn’t want to write anything or share links to this poll before it was over. I was very curious to see the results without campaigning from “top bloggers.” But that didn’t work out. First, it was naive to expect that bloggers of varying degrees of “topness” don’t read Kommersant. They do read it, and they quickly jumped into campaigning, including on my behalf. The campaign rapidly turned my first place with 18% into first place with 40%. Second, once the poll link was posted by the chief atomic top blogger tema (Artemy Lebedev), staying silent became completely pointless. More than that, silence started to look rather silly and even disrespectful. People there are tearing their throats out for me, while I sit quietly blushing with pleasure, reading the comments and pretending I know nothing. I know everything, so I would like to 1) say: I’m very grateful to everyone who is voting for me, and even more so to those campaigning for me. It doesn’t matter that the election is virtual. To me, this is a positive assessment of my work, and I value it. Thank you. 2) answer the most frequently asked question: - Would you run in a real election? Yes, I would. In fact, I once ran for the Moscow City Duma, and for many years I worked on Moscow’s problems through YABLOKO, the Committee for the Protection of Muscovites, and so on. The work was less political in nature and more about housing and utilities, construction, and transport. I know the city’s problems well and understand how to solve them. 3) briefly outline my views on Moscow’s development. People quite rightly write to me: we’re voting for you on a website, but what kind of pig in a poke are you? What’s your evidence? What’s your platform? Those who take even virtual voting seriously can read below and compare my ideas about Moscow with their own. Here is what needs to be done “here and now.” That is, not in some abstract ideal situation, but taking current political and economic realities into account. 1. The main thing. The city’s development paradigm must be changed. The radial-ring model of development has exhausted itself. In the morning everyone goes to the center, in the evening everyone leaves the center. No number of ring roads will save us now. A city is a living organism. Moscow locked within the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road) is like a fast-growing child living under a table. The administrative borders of federal subjects are just lines on a map. The nearest districts of the Moscow region, which in practice have long since become districts of Moscow, should be incorporated into the city: Khimki, Dolgoprudny, Mytishchi, Reutov, Zheleznodorozhny, Lyubertsy. A well-known concept, the “Ladovsky Parabola,” should be taken as the basis for development. Or, if the ring model is to be retained after all, then Sergei Shestakov’s “Greater Moscow” concept. I’m closer to Ladovsky’s ideas, but this is not a matter of taste; it requires professional calculations.

From here; there are also detailed explanations there. All administrative and office construction should be moved beyond the MKAD, into the “new territories,” in order to at least somewhat separate the city’s daily traffic flows. Construction density and building height should be reduced very substantially: whatever else Russia may lack, land is not one of those things. Obviously, current legislation does not allow the borders of federal subjects to be changed in two weeks. However, this is still a technical issue, not a substantive one. Sooner or later it will have to be done. We need to start now so that in two or three years the process is fully completed. 2. Transport. An urgent task. Alas. I understand that I’ll find fewer supporters here than opponents, but this is one area where an unpopular measure is unavoidable. Car owners must bear a greater share of the costs associated with their impact on the transport environment than they do now. A situation in which people can park for free in the city center in several rows, narrowing the roadway to a single lane, is abnormal. Without introducing paid parking on the busiest streets (the alternative being a congestion charge for entering the city center), no amount of underground parking construction or other measures will solve the problem. Driving into the city center in a private car must inevitably impose certain costs on the driver, and those costs should be set at a level that allows the optimal number of cars on the streets to be regulated by a natural market mechanism. 3. More transport. Development of public transport, above all the metro. Moscow is a rich city, and if people didn’t steal as much as they do from construction projects, it could afford new metro stations, air-conditioned trains, and cleanliness and order in the metro. 4. Transport again. Very active encouragement of sensible alternatives to using a private car for one-off trips around the city. Taxis first and foremost. Replacing “shahid taxis” (unsafe unlicensed cabs) with proper taxis like in every normal city. 5. A model, honest privatization (the kind that makes it into textbooks) of assets unrelated to city services. Within a reasonable timeframe, the city’s stakes in enterprises operating in a market environment should be sold through competitive tenders—Bank of Moscow, Vnukovo Airport, Atlant-Soyuz airline, and others. The city should also get rid of assets and real estate in other regions, including places such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Crimea. 6. “New transparency” in city spending. To improve transparency in the functioning of the city economy, all contracts and accounting documentation across all structures of the Moscow government, both in primary form and in aggregated form, must be made public and published online. 7. The “We Will Neither Forget Nor Forgive” program and the introduction of disqualifications. Have you seen the Evropeisky shopping center at Kiyevsky railway station on a Saturday? Have you seen what goes on around it? Hellish traffic madness. The same thing will happen at Paveletsky. And in Moscow City (the business district), it will be three hundred times worse. At the project stage it was obvious that all of this was a crime against the city. But at every level, dozens of people took bribes and approved things, forged documents, manipulated regulations, and so on. All officials involved in the design, approval, and construction of projects that are obvious and harmful urban-planning mistakes must be disqualified and fired with a black mark on their record. They should be banned from working in their profession in Moscow. 8. Creating a significant institutional rental housing market. At present, there are virtually no companies in Moscow investing in housing for the purpose of renting it out later. At the same time, around the world institutional rental housing (not apartments owned by private individuals) is an important segment of the housing market, allowing consumers to obtain a standardized long-term rental product and make a balanced decision about whether to buy or rent housing. There are significant tax complications here. Legal entities pay a much higher property tax rate than private individuals. But those difficulties must be overcome; rental housing is developing in cities everywhere, this is not rocket science. So that’s the short version. If there are real elections, my colleagues and I will write a real platform covering everything, including a section on “folk festivals, mass executions, and other entertainments.” One last thing. Very important. You may not believe me, but there are people who are completely serious in thinking that Moscow’s mayor will actually be chosen based on the results of the Kommersant vote. Or that the results of this vote will form the basis for deciding on the candidate for mayor of Moscow. These people write to me. I receive up to ten letters a day asking for one kind of help or another once I move into 13 Tverskaya Street (Moscow City Hall). It’s the absolute classic of the genre: pleas, threats, denunciations, informant letters, and one confession of a secret pregnancy. Citizens! Do not give in to provocations. Keep taking part in the vote, but remember that my only prize will be an extra helping of internet articles saying that I drink blood and wash it down with stacks of dollar bills. For now, those are the rules of the game.