Cargo transfer

City Hall seeks control over the carrier market

The “herds” of private “Gazelles” that have filled the streets of Moscow seem to be keeping the capital’s officials from sleeping peacefully . Yesterday at a meeting of the city government, subordinates actively convinced Mayor Yuri Luzhkov that the trucking market today is too liberal and in the interests of citizens and the budget it is necessary to resort to administrative intervention . “Road transport services have ceased to be a problem, but at the same time the freight transportation market has gotten out of control,” said Leonid Lipsits, head of the Moscow Department of Transport and Communications, who believes that market mechanisms alone are not capable of solving the issues of transition from quantitative growth to qualitative growth. As a result, despite the growth of the truck fleet over 15 years from 80 thousand to 245 thousand units, it is not possible to achieve a proportional increase in the income of the city treasury.

According to the head of the transport department, the share of shadow business in the road transportation market is too large. “It is difficult to say exactly what share of the market is in the shadow, as well as to calculate the losses of the city budget,” Mr. Lipsits told Vremya Novostey. - And this is also an indicator that control in the industry is not enough. According to my estimates, the share of illegal transportation is comparable to legal ones. At one time, the city supported all its medical services using tax revenues from this revenue, but now we cannot afford this.” The Moscow Transport Union, which estimates the share of large enterprises in this market sector at only about 3%, seems ready to play along with the officials. While private owners, who use most of their cars with small cargo capacity, make up 75% on the roads of the capital. It is clear that most owners of Gazelles and Bychkov working alone do not pay any taxes.

The draft city target program for the implementation of transport policy in the field of road freight transportation, presented by Leonid Lipsits, relies on the consolidation of players. The Department of Transport intends to achieve this through amendments to tax and licensing legislation. “An extremely liberal scenario in the field of market transformations of freight transport,” which, in particular, “does not involve licensing transportation by small-capacity vehicles,” is detrimental to the industry, the project developers are convinced. It seems that officials consider the uncontrolled movement of trucks from the Moscow region and other regions around the city to be no less destructive. According to the head of the department for support and development of small businesses, Mikhail Vyshegorodtsev, out-of-town transport workers are “dumping responsible carriers.” And although Mr. Lipsitz assured that “the government does not intend to divide carriers on a territorial basis,” he emphasized that “only those who comply with the capital’s high requirements will be allowed to remain on the market.”

“High requirements”, apparently, will be quite stringent and will cover literally all aspects of the activities of transport companies. The Transport Department proposes to develop a number of criteria for assessing drivers, the cars they use, and the automobile enterprises themselves as business entities. “Transportation of goods cannot be a cheap service,” Leonid Lipsits warned businessmen in advance, expressing the hope that in three years the implementation of his program will bring 16.7 billion rubles to the city treasury.

Mr. Lipsitz's proposals should be consolidated by the law “On the fundamentals of motor transport activities in the city of Moscow,” the draft of which officials were going to develop by the beginning of 2008. However, deputies of the Moscow City Duma who were present at the meeting in the mayor's office, seeing “fair demands” in these undertakings, said that the adoption of such a law could be met by the 3rd quarter of 2007. “Muscovites rightly criticize the city authorities for the spontaneity of freight transportation,” noted Stepan Orlov, chairman of the commission on urban management and housing policy of the Moscow City Duma. “Therefore, nine months will be enough to give birth to the bill the city needs.”

The mayor of the capital, Yuri Luzhkov, proposed to approve the “good” program for transport workers, but what scared him was only the “lack of serious comments on it.” “It often happens that unanimously supported programs turn out to be dummies,” the mayor noted. “But I hope that this does not apply to the proposed transport policy strategy.” The mayor only asked his subordinates not to confuse “coordination of traffic flows with restrictions.”

Yulia KHOMCHENKO