The economic growth of the past ten years lies at the root of Kyiv’s congestion woes. Existing traffic flow plans for the Ukrainian capital were first drawn up during the Soviet era, when cars were few and far between and jams almost unheard of. Under Communist rule, cars remained the domain of the privileged among the Party faithful, and the idea of massive traffic jams was simply never considered. Instead, sleepy images in Soviet-era city guide books depict wide open boulevards devoid of traffic, with the odd trolley bus and pair of Volga cars sharing acres of spotless socialist road space.
New money, new car
The explosion in disposable income since the dark days of the immediate post-Soviet years has seen a huge rise in the number of vehicles clogging the city streets. In a city offering a limited variety of housing options which would allow the newly wealthy to demonstrate their affluence, cars quickly became the number one status symbol of the independence years, with some would-be junior oligarchs even prepared to sell off their homes in order to purchase a luxury jeep or designer sedan.
As the city’s wealth has trickled down to an ever wider cross section of modern Kyiv society, so the number of new cars on the roads continues to grow. This rise in the sheer volume of traffic has presented the capital with an infrastructure challenge that it has so far been totally unable to meet.
According to Kyiv’s City Statistics Administration, in 1990 the number of cars registered in the Ukrainian capital stood at 213,000. By the turn of the millennium this figure had already risen to 436,000, and by the end of 2006 had reached 669,000.
“In the past ten years the number of new vehicles registered in Kyiv has grown by 84% or 337,000 units,” states Oleksandr Kovalevskiy, a senior inspector from Kyiv’s State Motor Vehicle Inspectorate.
This leap in registered Kyiv cars is only half the problem. With tens of thousands of Ukrainians drawn to the capital city by its relative wealth and burgeoning employment opportunities, the real number of new vehicles clogging up Kyiv’s traffic arteries is actually much higher, and could be more than double the official number of registered Kyiv cars, making the Ukrainian capital one of Europe’s most congested cities.
The situation has been noticeably deteriorating since the turn of the millennium, with much needed repair works adding to the many natural bottlenecks that help create congestion, and has reached crisis point in the past two years. “Since the spring of 2005, the number of traffic jams in Kyiv has become incredible. Maybe there were a lot of jams before then, but we have really started to feel their impact on our work since 2005,” says Yuriy Oliynyk, the director of courier service Profil.
Addressing Kyiv’s parking problems
Infrastructure problems include the lack of parking facilities in the city centre, which has given rise to a culture of parking pretty much wherever possible. As well as posing a hazard to pedestrians caught unawares by vehicles hurtling down the pavement with apparent disregard for non-drivers, the parking shortage also encourages car users to leave their vehicles lining the sides of already narrow downtown roads, further restricting the flow of traffic and exasperating the already serious infrastructure problems.
Kyiv City Administration authorities hope to tackle this parking problem by establishing a number of underground car parks throughout the city centre and setting up automobile terminals and stations at major routes leading into the city, where people driving into town can leave their vehicles and take public transport into the downtown area.
Kyiv is also chronically short of bridges. The city can boast only 6 automobile bridges, all dating back to Soviet times, whereas there are nearly 40 bridges straddling the Seine in Paris. This bridge deficit has resulted in the division of Kyiv into two distinct halves, with many people wisely refusing to attempt a crossing during the peak hours of traffic flow, knowing from experience that they will be forced to sit through jams that can mean one or two hours spent crossing the Dnipro river alone.
Two new bridges are currently under construction, and it is hoped that they will serve to relieve the congestion that is clogging current Left Bank-Right Bank Kyiv traffic.
At the end of September, the city administration presented a programme optimistically entitled City Without Congestion which foresees investment in infrastructure improvements totaling some USD 3.6 billion to be carried out until 2011. The money will be used to complete the Podilsko-Voskresenskiy bridge [with a projected carrying capacity of 60,000 cars per day] and finance the construction of a number of raised bypasses and widened junctions as well as underground pedestrian subways.
Congestion causing crashes
Kyiv’s traffic chaos may well be a source of huge frustration for many, but it is also proving a deadly danger for drivers, and has contributed to the alarming rise in car crashes over the past few years.
While there were 36,000 accidents reported in the first nine months in 2006, this figure has risen to nearly 54,000 for the same period this year. The sheer volume of traffic and the widespread tradition of disregarding all traffic rules and regulations makes this kind of increase inevitable, and with more and more cars on the streets of the capital minor collisions can quickly lead to life-threatening pile-ups.
According to the Kyiv City Adminisration, the junction of Khreshchatyk Street with Instytutska Street, together with Moskovska Ploshcha (Square) and the crossing of Drayzer and Balzaka Streets on the way to Troyeshina region were the worst hit hot spots for traffic accidents in the past twelve months. Kyiv’s bridges are also regularly blocked by accidents.
Officials from Kyiv’s traffic police name Brovarskiy Prospekt, Kharkivske Shose and Prospekt Peremohy as other traffic jam hotspots in 2006.
Models for beating the traffic blues
Inner city traffic congestion is a feature of life throughout the booming economies of the post-Soviet world, but it is a global phenomenon that has been tackled to varying degrees of success in all sorts of manners. In many German cities only public transport vehicles and cars with special permits are allowed to drive in the downtown areas. London has received relief from major traffic jam woes in the past few years thanks to the introduction of a zonal fee system, which charges drivers for entering the city centre and encourages people to use public transport. Other cities like Amsterdam have done much to promote the use of alternative forms of transport such as bicycles, but given Kyiv’s hilly terrain this solution is unlikely to meet with local approval. Paris, meanwhile, has opted to try to improve traffic flows by building underground tunnels, while Tokyo has chosen overpasses to ease street level congestion.
“In Italy, if the smallest pothole appears in the road it is dealt with and taken away immediately,” offers Boris Skorobohatov, a veteran of Kyiv traffic flow debates and the head of the transport sector at the Dnipromost Institute who spent time studying attitudes to road infrastructure among Italian city council colleagues.
Skorobohatov emphasizes the importance of road quality in Kyiv as a factor in causing delays and jams. This problem, mirrored throughout Ukraine in cities like Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa, adds to the inevitable congestion caused by ever-rising numbers of vehicles. “The state of the road network can impact on up to 30% of its carrying capacity,” he adds.
Kyiv architect Yevheniy Babiychuk from the Proektrestavratsiya Institute argues that the money is available to repair Kyiv’s ailing infrastructure and ease the traffic burden, but that it is currently being channeled ineffectively. “There have been a large number of useful proposals to resolve Kyiv’s congestion problems, including building a tunnel under Poshtova Ploshcha, launch a new one-way system throughout the city centre and so on. All of these ideas could work but they need major financing. At present money is being spent repairing cracks in the road surfaces instead of being used more rationally,” he says.
One way of generating extra revenues to finance infrastructure reform would be the money that could be brought in from car parks. Eduard Shapovalov, head of the engineering and planning department from Dnipromist explains that many state-owned parking places in Kyiv currently stand empty while cars remain on the sidewalks, where they have free parking and easy access to the street.
Increase fear of fines
The bad behaviour of many Kyiv motorists inflames the already dire traffic situation, and causes a significant percentage of all jams, with drivers prone to stopping at their convenience without consideration for the blockages they will cause. Kyiv traffic police experts and other traffic flow professionals emphasize the need to deal with this problem by increasing the insignificant fines drivers in Ukraine currently face. While in neigbouring Russia and Belarus the average penalty is about USD 100, here it is often as low as USD 2. “Belarus has a very strict system of fines but it works,” Shapovalov admits.
Kovalevskiy agrees that today’s fines are too low to make people think twice before breaking the law. “A driver has to feel that he will be punished,” he states. However, Dnipromist experts add that these rules should be equal for everyone. “With modern equipment all violations should be recorded instead of traffic police choosing which drivers to stop and often causing traffic jams themselves,” Shapovalov comments.
The traffic jam industry
Mobile phone operators and radio stations have been at the fore of efforts to gain from the traffic chaos, offering popular updates on the latest jams to a captive audience. The majority of FM radio stations now carry regular bulletins on traffic jams, while life:), Kyiv Star and MTS offer the latest traffic jam news straight to your mobile phone.
The true professional must use every source at his or her disposal to beat the jams, and that includes local knowledge. “Using our knowledge of Kyiv and the way the city flows, we change our couriers’ routes as soon as we find out about a problem in any part of the city,” says Dmytro Nemtsov, the director of the courier service City Express Ukraine.
