The Moscow metro will extend to Tula – Kommersant FM

The Moscow ground metro will reach Tula and Kaluga, Vladimir Putin announced this during the launch of train traffic on MCD-4. According to the president, the authorities will extend the diameters of the capital’s surface metro not only to Kaluga and Tula, but also to other large cities in the regions surrounding the metropolis.

The infrastructure for this is unlikely to be built from scratch, believes Mikhail Burmistrov, head of the Infoline-Analytics company. In his opinion, the project will have a long-term economic effect:

“When it comes to transport projects, in fact those that are being implemented in Moscow are very complex and comprehensive, in particular, the metro, the MCC and so on.

In fact, the issue here is effective integration. I don’t think that any separate infrastructure will be fully built to these cities. Rather, we are talking about integrating a new transport system with an existing one, which will simply increase the level of seamlessness of this process. So, actually, it’s a logical story.

The Moscow agglomeration is a powerful center of gravity in terms of labor and other factors. And now, in conditions when there is a shortage of personnel in the economy, it makes sense to increase the level of mobility in order to give the opportunity to come to Moscow to work for those who live a little further away, and to do this more comfortably.

After all, everything that has been done over the past 2-2.5 years has simply radically improved the quality of life of those people who live in a number of cities near Moscow in terms of their time spent traveling to the capital and back.

It is clear that this project will be implemented at the expense of the federal budget, perhaps it will be joint work with Russian Railways.

Moscow is a key center of gravity. The capital was able to prove, on the one hand, sufficient ambition to plan complex transport projects, and, on the other, the ability to effectively implement them in integration, including with Russian Railways.

At the same time, the key limitation now in terms of investment in infrastructure is, unfortunately, the shortage of labor. So the use of the resources of the Moscow construction complex is very important here.”

Meanwhile, extending the diameters of the capital’s surface metro to large cities in the future may lead to congestion of the transport system in the capital, noted the chairman of the interregional public organization “Union of Passengers” Kirill Yankov:

“There is the concept of “induced demand,” when the service improves and, for example, trains start running more often, then more people want to use this method of transportation.

But induced demand, nevertheless, is not completely empty; it means that more people, for example, will find work in Moscow. Is it good or bad? This is a difficult question, but in any case, such an expansion of the labor market is more likely to be good than bad.

If we talk about transport, then, of course, in the capital there are certain limits on the density of workers given the current situation. If their number increases, this means that new infrastructure projects will need to be implemented in the metropolis.

In principle, in the general plan of Moscow there are reserves for building and improving something else somewhere else.”

Another important project, according to Vladimir Putin, will be the construction of high-speed railways. First between Moscow, Tver, Veliky Novgorod and St. Petersburg, and then between the capital and other cities.

In addition, the President of the country and Mayor Sergei Sobyanin took part in the opening ceremony of the northern backup of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The toll highway runs from the Moscow City business center to the Moscow Ring Road and the northern bypass of Odintsovo.

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Andrey Zagorsky