Supermarkets near the Moscow Ring Road are concerned about “junk cars” in their parking lots

Cars sit in parking lots for weeks, sometimes without license plates

A dozen hypermarkets located on the Moscow Ring Road suffer from “parking exploitation”: drivers, primarily nonresidents, park their cars in their parking lots and leave for the city. Among the parked cars there are both normal vehicles and outright junk cars, including those without license plates. Employees of one of these hypermarkets told an MK correspondent about this. The reason is simple: parking at hypermarkets remains free, unlike city streets.

“You can park at the store for free, there are no barriers or tickets, so people come here from outside the city, leave their car and take the bus to the metro,” a security officer at the parking lot of a food and construction supermarket in the Novorizhskoye Highway area told MK.

The bus takes approximately 20 minutes, which is quite a long time for a daily commute, considering that after that you still need to take the metro to your destination. But those who come to the capital for a shift (the standard duration is two weeks) happily take advantage of free parking at hypermarkets. If only because such parking is completely legal, free and at least guarded.

“Supermarkets are my favorite parking lot when I come to Moscow on business,” Yuri Nifontov, an employee of a housing and communal services company from the Lipetsk region, told MK. – I discovered this method about seven years ago, when there were a lot of paid parking lots in Moscow. I came to buy tools at the hypermarket, then I thought that it would be more convenient to travel further into the city by public transport. It turned out to be very convenient.

In the retail chain that has hypermarkets on the Moscow Ring Road, MK explained that several years ago they were considering the possibility of “tying” parking at stores to receipts for purchases or making it paid. They even installed barriers. But buyers, according to surveys, spoke out sharply against such an idea, even to the point of possibly refusing to shop in stores near the Moscow Ring Road. As a result, the barriers only work at night—you won’t be able to enter the parking lot during non-working hours. But from 7 to 23 o’clock – you are welcome.

“Sometimes cars that are clearly not working are brought to us on a rope or tow truck; they sit with us for several days, or even a month,” said a parking employee at one of these shopping centers. – True, they park in secluded corners of the parking lot and don’t really bother anyone. But they still take up space. When there was snow, the area around these cars turned into a snowdrift and it was impossible to clean it.

Some cars are “overstayed” at hypermarkets even without license plates. On the streets of Moscow, such cars usually do not “survive” for a long time: they are evacuated to a special parking lot for “lost” ones, as suspicious or abandoned. But, as employees of the hypermarket parking lot said, cars have to be evacuated from their territory at the expense of the shopping center – and the store administration does not do this as long as the car does not bother anyone.

“If paid parking is introduced around us, we will also “close” our parking lot, and the problem will go away,” hypermarket employees suggest. – But if parking is paid, the store may close altogether: no one will come here to buy groceries.

Thus, the “dying” format of hypermarkets for family weekly purchases with a huge parking lot has become a salvation for a significant number of cars being squeezed out of the city. Time will tell how this problem will be solved when such cars become a real nuisance in parking lots.