Roads of our town

As we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions... But let's not be pessimists. According to responsible officials of the city administration, there are more and more good roads in St. Petersburg, and soon there will be no more of them...

This is roughly the picture painted by the city’s chief road worker, Chairman of the Committee for Improvement and Road Maintenance, Vladimir Dedyukhin. The volume of capital investments in road works is growing from year to year. This year they will amount to an astronomical figure for our city - 8.4 billion rubles, which is 13.5% more than last year and exactly twice (!) more than the year before. This unprecedented growth can be explained simply by targeted funding from the federal budget as part of preparation programs for the city’s tercentenary.
Targeted programs are aimed primarily at the construction of approaches to the Ring Road. For this purpose, interchanges will be built in the area of ​​Shushary station, on Stachek and Engels avenues. It is planned to use the same federal funds to repair Slava Avenue and Ivanovskaya Street, reconstruct the road to Petrodvorets, and repair the Trinity Bridge (which will probably be opened to traffic in November of this year).
The main enemies of road workers this year, as before, remain lack of finance, transport and climate.
Well, finances, of course, there are never enough of them. Cars... if not for them, then there would be no traffic jams, no problems with the construction of junctions and parking lots... There are already one million four hundred thousand cars in our city, and two hundred million cars, that’s 250 cars per thousand inhabitants, almost like in Spain.
By the way, the city administration is preparing a surprise for St. Petersburg motorists. They are developing a bill on toll roads, which has yet to be agreed upon with all interested parties, and sometime in June they want to submit it for approval to deputies of the Legislative Assembly. However, car enthusiasts need not worry too much for now. It is unlikely that any of the deputies will come up with the idea of ​​committing political hara-kiri and passing a clearly non-populist law on the eve of the next elections...
The eternal Russian problems have long been known: bad roads and - no, no, not at all what you thought - bad climate. The scheme of interaction between roads and nature, according to the chairman of the Committee for Improvement and Road Maintenance, Vladimir Dedyukhin, is something like this. Groundwater rises to the asphalt, then goes away and carries away sand and crushed stone - the substrate of the roadway. Observant residents, like the city administration, also noticed this phenomenon and simply say: “The snow has melted... along with the roads.”
“So we are constantly fighting to improve the quality of work,” says Vladimir Dedyukhin, “and this is not cheap: modern materials, equipment, technology.
No doubt, it's not cheap. But for some reason, a very simple question from Novaya Gazeta about exactly how much it costs here and how it compares with our southern neighbors - the Muscovites and northern ones - the Finns, unexpectedly caused Vladimir Anatolyevich to have an attack of shyness. Reluctantly, he named a single figure: laying one square meter of asphalt-concrete pavement in St. Petersburg costs one thousand two hundred rubles... Well, let's find out the rest of the numbers ourselves, and at the same time try to analyze whether this is a lot or a little and why. But more on this in our next publications on the road topic.

Nikolay DONSKOV
Photo by Alexander GUTORKIN