Extension of the M12 highway to Vladivostok will require 600 billion rubles

The program for the development of the M12 Vostok high-speed highway project through Kazan to Yekaterinburg and Tyumen and further across the country to Vladivostok is designed until 2030 and will require about 600 billion rubles. budget funds. This was told on December 29 at a briefing, answering a question from Vedomosti, the relevant Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin. Most of the projects under this program are included in the five-year road construction plan, he specified.

“We determined a new route, called it “Russia”, and reported to the president. The section from Moscow to Tyumen was named “Vostok”. Now we are considering this entire route in a comprehensive manner, including the M11 Neva and the Central Ring Road,” Khusnullin said. According to him, it is planned to reach the road axis from west to east across the whole country with regional roads that go from large cities and capitals of subjects. For example, roads from Perm, Izhevsk and Kirov to this highway will be expanded.

After completion of work on the section from Yekaterinburg to Tyumen, bypasses of Omsk and Novosibirsk will be completed, Khusnullin continued. “Practically everywhere around large cities we are building bypasses – either half rings or full rings to remove transit traffic. Reaching Ulan-Ude and Chita, we design exits to the borders with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China with the reconstruction of border crossings. In the end, we have a large comprehensive program that ends in Vladivostok,” the Deputy Prime Minister concluded.

Khusnullin proposed to the government in September that the M12 Moscow-Kazan expressway under construction be extended to Yekaterinburg. Later, in mid-December, the Deputy Prime Minister announced that the M12, with an extension to Yekaterinburg, would be built to Tyumen in the same time frame – by the end of 2024.

In 2021, President Vladimir Putin instructed to extend the high-speed highway, which was originally planned to be built to Kazan, to Yekaterinburg, while maintaining the same deadlines for commissioning the facility until the end of 2024. The 810 km highway to Kazan alone was estimated at 623 billion rubles, but in the end will be more expensive by about 200 billion rubles. for a number of reasons, Khusnullin said in an interview with Vedomosti at the end of 2021. The government allocated another 260 billion rubles for the construction of a new section from the city of Dyurtyuli in Bashkiria to Achita in the Sverdlovsk region to extend the road to Yekaterinburg.

The current situation, when the federal highway can pass directly through the streets of large cities, is unacceptable, says Mikhail Blinkin, director of the Institute for Transport Economics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. It is very bad to live in such places, and the road network with its traffic lights and ground crossings greatly reduces the speed of trucks, he notes. The task of getting rid of this by building city bypasses is very correct and professional on the part of the government, he believes. According to the expert, the cost indicators of the program should be taken only as a rough guide due to the long period of its implementation.