GOT TRAFFIC CONGESTION...GET IN LINE

GOT TRAFFIC CONGESTION? GET IN LINE

see Keith Gessen’s article “Stuck” in the August 2nd issue of The New Yorker

If you think traffic in Miami, New York, Paris, Mexico, and L.A. is bad, you haven’t tried to drive in Moscow, where the number of cars increased six-fold between 1991 and 2009. The city’s driving conditions bring to mind two pieces of 20^th century literature (a time before things got really bad): “Highway of the South, “ a 1964 story by Julio Cortazar that describes how people returning to Paris from a long weekend accommodate themselves to a massive traffic jam by eventually forgetting that they were ever going anywhere. A Brezhnev-era novella by Vladiir Sorokin called “The Queue” has people waiting to buy something (not even they know what any longer) in a line so long and complex, that they begin to live in it.

“No city has ever constructed itself out of congestion. It’s impossible,” says transportation expert Cukan Vuchic of the University of Pennsylvania. In Moscow, post-Soviet development exploded as the population swelled with refugees from rural Russia, the Central Asian states, and Ukraine escaping poverty and from the Caucasus escaping the war. All of them wanted cars. The city fathers, believing that “planning was for Socialists” embraced a no-planning posture and figured, under capitalism, the market would take care of everything. At first, “Moscow filled up with kiosks and flimsy freestanding grocery stores, and little old ladies selling socks. Eventually, these were replaced by office buildings and megastores and even luxury condominiums; the spaces once reserved for new roads or metro stations were given over to construction…. The first great post-Soviet fortune, after all, was made not from oil or gas or nickel. That came later. It was made when Boris Beresovsky, a mathematician and game theorist, started selling cars.”

In the August 2^nd issue of The New Yorker, writer Keith Gessen’s article “Stuck” describes the socio/political and economic forces that have brought Moscow to the brink of transportational collapse. He quotes Mikhail Blinkin, a traffic expert and classic dissident (the Saharov of traffic) who spent nearly twenty years at two Soviet research institutes devoted to “urban planning” and in 1990 started a private think tank on traffic: “Eventually, Moscow will simply cease to function as a city…. Some people will live in one neighborhood, and others will live in a different neighborhood, and that will be fine, except they won’t be able to get from one neighborhood to the other.” Blinkin sees Moscow’s traffic and parking troubles as, “a symbol of the city’s general lack of legal and planning culture.”

There are three main factors that determine a city’s traffic, explains Yukio Hatoyama, a traffic engineer who teaches at Moscow State University (and the son of the former prime minister of Japan): 1) Driver behavior – Do drivers care if they enter an intersection before a light turns red and there’s a chance they’ll get stuck and create gridlock? 2) The organization of the roads – radial or gridded – and how well that organization is maintained; 3) The social system, as it is reflected on the roads—are there different rules for different drivers (i.e. do the elite get a free pass to put on sirens and charge through)? Hatoyama remarks that the other place that functions in Moscow’s feudal way is China.

In gridded cities, like New York, there are two tiers: a street tier, on which pedestrians are primary and cars secondary; and a freeway tier, where cars rule and there are no pedestrians at all, Moscow has a radial system that, unlike Washington DC’s, for example, simply doesn’t work. Moscow’s (three) rings are interrupted by drivers pulling on and off from side roads to outlet malls, making the beltways into wider thoroughfares-cum-parking lots (there are some streets in the city center as wide as five lanes in each direction and still perpetually clogged).

Parking in Moscow is no less problematic than traffic. Cars are parked everywhere – from roads to sidewalks, the parking authority is corrupt, and enforcement of existing laws is lax. “Try parking on the sidewalk in Munich or Boston.” says Cukan Vuchic. He recalls how, years ago, “You would go to Salzburg to look a the Mozart statue, but you couldn’t see it, because Salzburg was a big parking lot. The Austrians have since take care of the problem with zoning, signage, and enforcement.”

Over the last few years, Moscow drivers have become one of the city’s most active social groups, Keith Gessen tells us. They have organizied to eliminate the corrupt meter maids and are lobbying for more roads. “Car owner” is the one social category that has actually been created in Russia in the past twenty years, as opposed to all the social categories that have been destroyed. “Perhaps this is the emergence, finally, of a propertied, stockholding – and frustrated, selfish, neurotic – middle class.”