Moscow's Traffic Problem

[Melancholy orchestral strings music]

[Keith Gessen] My name is Keith Gessen.

I wrote an article for this weeks' New Yorker

about Moscow's traffic problems that won't go away.

One of the problems with Moscow is that there

aren't enough roads and there aren't a lot of

different ways to get from Point A to Point B.

It's not like New York,

where you can just take a different side street.

One of the paradoxes of being in Moscow and

seeing how bad the traffic jams are,

is that the roads are so wide.

A lot of them were built by Stalin in the 1930s.

You would think that,

with these gigantic roads,

you couldn't have traffic but,

in fact, if enough cars are getting on and off them

at regular intervals,

those streets will not be moving very quickly at all.

Yury Luzhkov has been mayor since 1992.

He's been called the most powerful mayor in the world.

It would seem like he could do whatever he wants,

but the traffic just keeps getting worse.

He's become like the Ahab of traffic.

He goes abroad and he comes back and he says,

Oh, Muscovites should ride their bikes.

That's the solution to this problem.

And everyone laughs at him because there are hardly

any bike lanes in Moscow,

and also it's winter about half the year.

He has proposed catamarans on the Moscow River,

flying blimps for police.

He has this idea that if he just

gets rid of the traffic lights,

traffic will move faster,

which is, of course, crazy,

because no one will be able to turn.

The Yandex,

which is the biggest search engine in Russia,

started doing a traffic watching,

or traffic flow on their map of Moscow,

that's perpetually updated and they have a

scale of one to ten,

one being the streets are clear,

and ten being, you're better off on the Metro.

[Russian balalaika-type music]

One of the things that occurred to me

while thinking about this,

was that Russians are used to standing in line.

This is what they used to do, famously,

during the Soviet era.

In fact, when you drive around in a nice Mercedes,

and there is a shocking number of Mercedes

on the streets of Moscow.

It's much nicer than it is to walk to the Metro,

which is extremely crowded.

I think the answer is for now,

people feel like it's bad,

it's really bad,

to sit in traffic.

It gets worse and worse,

and yet it's still better than it used to be.

[Russian balalaika-type music]