Highways indicated a new track

The Ministry of Transport has rewritten a bill that tightens the rules for transferring regional roads to the balance sheet of Rosavtodor for their repair at federal expense. Routes to tourist sites and to checkpoints at the border can now become federal, follows from the new version of the document. The Ministry of Transport refused from the earlier promulgated idea of ​​a ban on transferring highways passing through populated areas to federal ownership. This was done under pressure from regional authorities seeking to shift part of the financial burden onto the federal center, experts say. The authorities of the constituent entities supported the new version of the bill.

On Friday, the Ministry of Transport published on regulation.gov.ru a draft amendment to the law on highways with criteria for transferring regional highways to federal jurisdiction. This is the second version of the document, the first was published in September. Regional roads are being transferred to federal status and now – as a rule, these are strategically important highways that the subject of the federation is not able to repair on its own. In June 2022, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov complained that the road handover process had become essentially out of control. Of the 50,000 km of federal highways, he said, about 10,000 km “has grown over the past five years” at the expense of the regions. He called for the introduction of criteria for changing the status and returning part of the repaired roads back to the authorities of the regions, freeing up part of the federal money. The idea was supported by Vladimir Putin. The process of changing the status of highways is now suspended.

In the first version of the amendments, the Ministry of Transport proposed to fix, in particular, that the “federal” cannot be lower than the third category (with the exception of the regions of the Far North and the Far East).

According to the official classification, we recall that there are five categories of roads depending on the transport and operational qualities and consumer properties. The fourth and fifth categories are one-two-lane roads without a separator, with one-level intersections, a lane width of less than 3.25 m, a shoulder width of less than 2 m. The norm remained in the new edition. It was clarified that, for example, highways connecting the administrative centers of the Kaliningrad and Sakhalin regions with airports and the nearest seaports will be considered federal. This is, apparently, about maintaining the status of highways that are now federal: the Primorsky semi-circle (A-217) in the Kaliningrad region and the A-392 highway connecting Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk with Kholmsk, where the port is located.

Routes to checkpoints near the borders and roads leading to tourist and natural sites will remain part of the federal network (or can become if the White House decides to do so). In addition, if earlier the Ministry of Transport wanted to prohibit the transfer of roads passing through settlements to federal status, now this norm has been abandoned.

On Friday, the Ministry of Transport did not answer Kommersant’s questions.

Minister of Infrastructure Development of the Kaliningrad Region Evgenia Kukushkina supported the new version of the amendments. “It is important that the roads leading to strategically important facilities – airports and ports, be in perfect condition, which can only be provided with federal funding,” she told Kommersant. “Money freed from road maintenance, which will become federal, can be directed for the content of the regional. The fact that it is planned to allow roads passing through settlements to be given into federal ownership will give a serious impetus to their cultural and economic development.”

If the revised bill is adopted, part of the regional roads of the Kursk region (337.4 km) will be transferred to federal ownership, regional governor Roman Starovoit told Kommersant. We are talking, in particular, about routes to checkpoints on the border with Ukraine (Dyakonovo-Sudzha-border, Kursk-Lgov-border and others). Mr. Starovoit hopes that the freed up funds from the regional road fund will make it possible to build new roads and take part of the municipal roads to the regional level.

The exception to the rule that a “federal train” cannot pass through a populated area is a “serious concession” on the part of the Ministry of Transport, says Mikhail Blinkin, scientific director of the Institute of Transport Economics at the Higher School of Economics. “It turns out that Rosavtodor, which takes this highway on its balance sheet, will have to include in the plans the construction of a bypass of the settlement,” he explains. , a lot of different encumbrances. There are a lot of sections when the “federal road” passes through the settlement, Mr. Blinkin says: the first version of the bill would allow Rosavtodor, at least, not to take on the balance of new sections, but, the expert states, “the regional lobby turned out to be stronger.”

In 2022, the total amount of funds allocated to Rosavtodor for all events exceeded a record 1 trillion rubles, the agency said the day before. And in 2023-2027, it is planned to put into operation more than 1.63 thousand km of built and reconstructed federal roads: more than 1.1 trillion rubles have been allocated for this.

Ivan Buranov