The end of the metropolis

Due to traffic jams, Novosibirsk de facto will cease to be one. When choosing a place of work, the main factor will be on the way to it. Office workers and mothers will remain at home. Firefighters will not have time to the scene.

Alexey Mazur

The week of snowfalls in Novosibirsk coincided, not quite by accident, with a week of 9-10 ballroom plugs, which, appearing on the first day of snowfall, then did not fall. It used to be not so.

In previous years, car owners, having got into the first 10-point traffic jams, adjusted their behavior-either refused unnecessary trips, or transferred to public transport. Urbanist Dmitry Lebedev believes that the transport collapse has already come, and now the size of traffic jams in Novosibirsk is determined not by the width of the roads and not the number of cars in the city, but to the degree of readiness of motorists in these traffic jams.

But the stubborn 10 points last week prompted me to the idea that collapse collapse is different. In the sense that the roads of Novosibirsk can no longer miss everyone, Dmitry Lebedev is right - the transport collapse has long come. But we are on the threshold of a much more terrible and critical of the economy and the life of the phenomenon, which I would call “full collapse”. He has not yet come, but we came close to him.

What is its essence?

Trips of any person can be divided into two types. Mandatory that cannot be canceled or transferred, and optional. Traveling to the store, to visit, the theater or to the cinema is optional. You can go to the store on the weekend (and we already have traffic jams on the weekend up to 7 points), you can not go to visit, but chat on social networks and Skype. Cinema can be downloaded on the Internet.

But you need to come to work. Children will have to be taken to school and kindergarten. In the clinic, you must come to the hospital at the time indicated in the coupon. The last innovations of the Ministry of Health with the Clinic association will lead to an increase in traffic.

Apparently, over the past week we came close to the moment when the Novosibirsk residents have already abandoned all the optional trips at the peak hour. And they go exclusively for urgent matters. And city roads (snowy snow and snow -porridge on the roadway) cannot even skip this transport stream. Precisely because people go only if necessary, traffic jams hold stubbornly and do not fall.

What will happen when a full transport collapse comes, and even mandatory trips will become impossible?

In general, we are now observing. Some people will begin to come to work earlier and leave later. Some office workers will work from home. It will become impossible to carry children to the school that is better, and the children will begin to walk to the school that is closer. Ambulance, firefighters and police will increasingly be late for the scene. Young women will be more and more retrained into housewives (it’s easier to sit with a child at home than to carry him to kindergarten), and households turn into “natural” ones.

When choosing a place of work, the main factor will be on the way to it. The Farm City will cease to be one, instead of a metropolis, we will get several divided “policies”.

This process is directly reverse what happened during the period of urbanization and the formation of a modern economy, when female labor was liberated, and the transportation of megacities allowed to develop and deepen the division of labor.

You can easily predict and what will not happen. Novosibirsk, even with ten -point traffic jams, will not be transferred to public transport, which is in the same traffic jams. Moreover-due to traffic jams, the cost of travel in public transport (is already growing) and the quality of transportation (buses and minibuses is already growing) will grow only in a cue ball).

The problem of transport has long become social and economic. Its solution is understandable - the organization of the work of public transport going outside the traffic jams. This is a metro, a separate tram and dedicated lines for public transport. You can organize such public transport for several billion rubles - this is much less than it is invested in very controversial and ineffective cyclopic projects like the next bridges connecting two traffic jams, or roads that go nowhere.

Over the past 2.5 years, nothing has been done in the reform of public transport by the Mary of Novosibirsk. More precisely, nothing really working.

Alexey Mazur