Rally against the "killer road"

Today, December 9, in the east of the capital, residents of the district held a rally against the expansion of Shchelkovskoye Highway. About 300 people gathered. Mostly older people.

In addition to citizens and representatives of citizen initiative groups, the event was attended by municipal deputies, activists of environmental movements and representatives of the parties of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, RPR-Parnas, and Yabloko.

A resident of Northern Izmailovo, Irina Moiseeva, called the reconstruction project a “killer road,” explaining this as a violation of the environment and the fact that the exit from the houses will be “directly onto the roadway.” The highway is planned to be increased to 14 lanes, and although the project has not been approved - the competition for the government contract is open until December 5, 2012 - more than two thousand trees have already been cut down. She voiced her proposal to solve the problem - to spend the allocated money on the construction of roads, parks, stadiums and shopping centers in villages where there is none of this. And then the residents of these villages and hamlets “perhaps will not go to Moscow for work, for entertainment. They will remain to live in their cities. And then Moscow will not need to be expanded.” The city dweller urged not to turn the capital into “a continuous parking lot and a highway.”

Mikhail Parshutin, a member of the initiative group of Northern Izmailovo, called “the height of madness” the “construction of an overpass in a residential area above five-story buildings.” According to the plan of the existing project, the interchange will be at a height of seven meters .

“Spending the bulk of the money on the reconstruction of old Moscow highways is ineffective. Just like organizing traffic there without traffic lights, there cannot be a high-speed highway with houses on the side of the road,” the head of the Yabloko party, Sergei Mitrokhin, quoted the words of the scientific director of the Research Institute of Transport and Road Management Mikhail Blinkin. You can expand these highways if they run into dead ends on both sides.” “Will there be less traffic jams if there are two narrow bottlenecks on both sides of this highway.” Mitrokhin called for demanding public hearings from the district prefecture, which the latter must hold in accordance with Article 68 of the Urban Planning Code. “The hearing procedure makes it possible to stop such projects,” Yabloko noted.

“We are for the reconstruction of the city, we are for the reconstruction of the Shchelkovskoye highway, but not at the cost of the lives of our children,” said Alexey Romanov, a member of the initiative group of Northern Izmailovo. And the co-chairman of the Housing Solidarity movement, Dmitry Kataev, said that “the red line is approaching” the houses on Shchelkovskoye Highway. And if, due to government needs, this line is shifted, and a plot of land is confiscated from an apartment building, then compensation is required by law. He believes that if residents put forward a “demand for monetary compensation,” then “the government will begin to look for other options.”

It is worth noting that similar projects are being developed along several metropolitan highways. And the authorities had to abandon the expansion of Komsomolsky Prospekt “ due to numerous objections from participants in the public hearings .”