Glass on the hood

70 percent of the "road" money in Russia ends up in the pockets of corrupt officials and construction company leaders close to them. Corruption in the road sector is monstrous. Its scheme is always the same. A formal tender is announced, lured firms participate in it, they get a contract at inflated prices, and then unfasten 30-50% of the contract amount to those who organized the tender. To understand where this money is going, you need to go to Courchevel, and also ask realtors who owns elite real estate in the Moscow region - there will be a lot of road officials and road builders. The Road Fund is the largest-scale shadow redistribution of public money: we are talking about more than $10 billion a year. Such a redistribution is possible thanks to the established system: tenders are held behind closed doors, competitors who do not have connections in the road fund cannot win, the press is suspended, there has not been a single serious corruption case ... Corruption literally corrodes the road industry from the inside, because it reduces competition . And competition always improves the quality and reduces the price. It is enough to look at our market products - food or alcoholic beverages: they are created in a competitive environment and cannot be compared with what was under the "scoop". The absence of competition is, as a rule, a monopoly and inflated prices. Therefore, a decrease in the level of corruption is guaranteed to increase not only the quality, but also the pace of building the road network. Meanwhile, the sphere of road construction can be made transparent. During the six years (1991-1997) that I headed the Nizhny Novgorod region, about 2 thousand km of roads and more than 100 bridges were built there. At the same time, the roads are mostly 4-lane, serious. 1 km cost an average of $300,000, an order of magnitude less than now. Yes, and then the road builders stole, but we countered this theft with publicity: newspapers wrote about violations, spoke on local TV, criminal cases were initiated, in the end ... In addition, for the first time in Russia, a decision was made to hold open tenders. They were open to the press, and the tender committee included representatives of all participating companies: they had an advisory vote and could participate in the discussion of each application, thus revealing the tricks and reticences of their competitors. This is very important: when competitors sort things out with each other in the presence of officials and have the right to an advisory vote, collusion is impossible. Such a scheme could well be extended to the whole of Russia. Because there are no arguments against this model, neither financial nor infrastructural: you get high-quality roads and save money. At the same time, we included the following clause in the tender conditions: if the road is well built and does not require any major or patching repairs, then the regional administration pays the company that built it, from 5% to 10% of the estimate. It worked fantastically efficiently: companies were motivated to perform well, roads functioned well, and the local budget was not wasted on endless repairs. As an example, I can cite a section of the road from Nizhny Novgorod to Gorokhovets: it stood without patching for 7 years. I think this is a Russian record. And I took the roads that are still called “Germans” like this: I put a Khokhloma wooden glass on the hood, poured vodka into it, got behind the wheel and drove at speeds up to 60 km per hour. If the vodka did not spill, the road was accepted, and we, together with the driver and traffic cops, drank this glass.