traffic. Especially infuriating was the LETTER FROM MOSCOW Mercedes itself, a black S-500 with a siren: for years, these besirened black Mercedeses had been running red lights, STUCK using the emergency lane, and otherwise tyrannizing other drivers. Some ofthem The meaning ofthe city's trciffic nightmare. technically had the right to do all this, since they belonged to one ofthe federal BY K.EITH GE5SEN security agencies in Moscow, or to Duma deputies, or to Putin; but a large number oscows terrible traffic has been in­ ally to own a good chunk of the city, re­ simply belonged to wealthy and well­ M famous for a while now, but in the acted decisively: he blamed the meteorol­ connected individuals. Now they were .past year it has come to feel like an exis­ ogists. They had underestimated the killing people. Within days of the acci­ tential threat. The first snowfall of last snowfall. If they didn't start forecasting dent, the young rapper Noize MC re­ winter, in early December, paralyzed the better, there would be trouble. In the fol­ corded a furious song, "Mercedes S-666," i city. Andrey Kolesnikov, the Kremlin lowing months, though, snow wreaked . in which he ventriloquized the innocu­ ! correspondent for Kommersant and prob­ havoc on the city whenever it fell. In ous-looking Lukoil vice-president as ably the best-known print journalist in three separate instances, drivers ofsnow­ Satan: "All those satanic costumes, that's /. the country, was unable to reach the air- clearing vehicles were shot at when they just tomfoolery. / Dressing up like that

The cars that wait in endless lines on crowdedMoscow streets recall thepeople who used to wait in endless lines outside Moscow stores.

port in time to leave with Prime Min­ collided with other vehicles; one of the they'll never look like me .... I'm work­ ister Vladimir Putin for Nizhny Tagil. drivers, shot by an off-duty police officer, ing here on a whole other level. / I've got Instead of detailing Putin's manly ad­ died. Even without snow, the movement a suitcase full of cash to get me out of ventures in the metallurgical capital of ofcars through the circular maze ofMos­ trouble." The songs chorus expressed the the Urals, Kolesnikov's column the cow was incredibly frustrating. DUring class conflict at the heart of the matter: next day described his own epic, failed rush hour on an overcast, slippery day in "Get out of my way, filthy peasants. / journey to the airport. The traffic­ late February, the luxury Mercedes of a There's a patrician on the road." analysis center at Yandex, the country's vice-president of Lukoil, the country's On a Monday morning a month later, I leading online search engine, reported a largest oil company, collided at high two young women from the Caucasus set record-breaking worst-possible rating of speed with a small Citroen. The occu­ offbombs during rush hour in the center 10 for six straight hours. That night, a pants of the Mercedes escaped with of the city. The first blew herself up at popular anti-Kremlin blogger, making superficial injuries; the Citroen crumpled Lubyanka, the metro station just beneath his way along the river in the center of like a paper bag, and the driver and her the headquarters ofthe Federal Security town, encountered an ambulance driver daughter-in-law-both doctors-were Service, and the other did so at a nearby standing outside his vehicle throwing killed. stop, forty minutes later. Emergency snowballs lazily off the embankment; The accident exploded into scandal. services reacted rapidly, and since there he'd been in traffic so long, he explained, The police claimed that the Citroen was could be no question of ambulances that his patient was now dead. at fault, but automobile activists quickly making it through traffic from the site of o . Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who takes ev­ found witnesses who said that the Mer­ the bombings to the hospital, the badly ~ erything that happens in the city very cedes had crossed over into the central wounded were helicoptered out. Given ~ personally, perhaps because over the emergency lane reserved for ambulances the forty-minute gap between the explo- ~ years he and his wife have come person­ and police cars, and then into oncoming sions, however, the press began to won- ~

24 THE NEW' YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2010 der why the metro hadn't been evacuated turies, had brought the city to this point. given over to construction. Blinkin recalls directly after the first bomb. The re- Its early rulers built Moscow as a concen- a commission that he received from the sponse from a metro spokesman was im- tric series ofwalled forts, with the Krem- Soviet government, only months before mediate. "You have no idea what would lin at the center. After the government its collapse, to project the rate ofautomo­ have happened if we'd closed down an abandoned Moscow in favor of St. Pe- bile growth over the next twenty-five entire branch ofthe system," he said. The tersburg, in the early eighteenth century, years. 'We knew the trajectory of auto- city was so crowded, its functioning so the old capital developed haphazardly, mobilization in many countries of the tenuous, that it was better to risk another like an enormous bazaar. In the post- world, and so we predicted exactly what explosion than closing offan artery. 'The revolutionary age, when the Bolsheviks happened," he says. \\'hat happened was city is on the brink of transportational moved the government back. to Moscow that the number ofcars in Moscow went collapse," Mikhail Blinkin, a traffic ex- to get farther away from the Germans, from sixty per thousand residents in 1991 pert, told me. "Moscow will simply cease various fantasies emerged to reverse all to three hundred and fifty in 2009. "And to function as a city. You and I will be liv- this: avant-gardists imagined a socialist we were very proud ofourselves fOJ; being ing in different cities. Some people will Moscow ofclean right angles; others pro- so smart. Then, a while later, I met some live in one neighborhood, and others will posed simply abandoning the city. Many guys who sold foreign cars, who'd done a I live in a different neighborhood, and that believed that the Kremlin, a church-laden marketing prognosis, and without any of , I will be fine, except they won't be able to symbol of medieval tyranny at the heart our international analogues or models get from one neighborhood to the other. " of the city, should be deemphasized, or they just thought, Well, restrictions are worse. By the time the Soviets were ready down, you can buy foreign cars as well as [I I first noticed the extent of the Mos- to do anything about it,Joseph Stalin was Russian ones, and they predicted the cow traffic problem in the spring of in charge, and under him the medieval same rate ofgrowth as we had! These car I 2007, while drinking a coffee at the character ofMoscow was not fundameri- dealers predicted it." Blinkin was dismis- I Coffee Bean, on Sretenka, just up the tally altered. Instead, the Stalinists built sive of the car dealers, but in the early street from the Lubyanka and around the gigantic avenues that ran in all directions nineteen-nineties they included some of corner from the Lukoil headquarters. It from the Kremlin like rays from the sun. the most brilliant minds in the country. used to be that you couldn't get a coffee There were few cars around to fill these The first great post-Soviet fortune, after II in Moscow for love or money, so I didn't avenues, but they provided a fine, broad all, was made not from oil or gas or ! mind that it wasn't good coffee and that line ofsight for Soviet leaders during rnil- nickel: that came later. It was made when I ; it cost four dollars. That is to say, I itary parades. Boris Berezovsky, a mathematician and • II rriinded, but what could I do? So there I Then came capitalism. The registra- game theorist, st~ed selling cars. sat, sipping my four-dollar coffee and tion laws that had made it almost impos­ f looking out the window, when suddenly sible to move to Moscow during Soviet Lastspring, Mayor Luzhkov fired the my sister appeared in front of the coffee times ceased to be enforced, and mean- head ofthe city's transportation de- shop and stopped, trapped in traffic. She while chaos, de-industrialization, and partment. Weeks earlier, the deposed had recendy bought a navy-blue Honda ethnic violence roamed the peripheries of chief had, like the three men who pre- Element, which looks like a motorized the empire. Very soon it became clear ceded him over the previous seven years, version ofFred Flintstone's car, with the that what Moscow had lost in political been harshly criticized for his failure to driver sitting curiously upright. Farther authority it had gained, and then some, solve the traffic crisis. There are many ahead, Sretenka intersected the giant in economic authority. By the end ofthe problems that Luzhkov pretends not to Garden Ring Road, which runs around nineteen-nineties, there were more peo- know about, but traffic is not among I the Kremlin at a radius of about a mile pIe in Moscow from all over the former them. In fact, it sometimes seems as and a half and marks the border of the Soviet Union than there had been when if the Mayor thinks of nothing else. historic city center. For much of its the Soviet Union was a single state. Peo- Whenever he goes abroad, he returns length, it is twelve lanes wide; at certain pIe from rural Russia, the Central Asian with a magical fix for the problem; points, it's eighteen. Still, it is often states, and Ukraine came to escape pov- whenever he has money to spare, he clogged. At the Sretenka-Garden Ring erty; people from the Caucasus came to builds roads and digs tunnels. He has intersection, a police officer hand-operates escape the War. waged a relentless war against traffic the light to try to ease traffic, to no avail. All of them wanted cars. The city's lights-"He has a childlike notion that So there was my sister, just twenty feet plan with regard to this was not to have a if he could just get rid of all the traffic away from me, sitting down as I was, al- plan at all. Planning was for socialists; lights everything would be fine:' Blinkin most as ifshe were at another table. The under capitalism, the market would says--and on one central stretch running moment extended in time; I sipped my figure things out. In the post-Soviet from the Kremlin almost all the way, but coffee. When, eventually, the light years, Moscow filled up, first with kiosks, not quite, to Sheremetyevo Airport, out- changed and my sister moved forward and flimsy freestanding grocery stores, side town, he has just about eliminated a few car lengths, it was as if she had and little old ladies selling socks. Eventu- them. He has turned numerous two-way merely moved to another table. If the ally, these were replaced by office build- streets into one-way streets and even coffee were cheaper, I would have ings and megastores and even luxury proposed that the monstrous Garden brought her one. condominiums; the spaces once reserved Ring become one-way. Nothing helps. Several generations, even several cen- for new roads or metro stations were Muscovites continue to buy (and steal,

THE NEW YOI\I\:EI\, AUGUST 2, 2010 25 and salvage, and order on eBay in North offered them. Russian drivers are jerks. Cars park in crosswalks, on traffic is- America, and ship to Finland) more cars Hatoyama put this differently. "Russian lands, in many of the quiet courtyards than Luzhkov can build roads to drive drivers lack foresight," he said. of the city center, in historic squares. them on. Hnger 2: The traffic system itself, that Vuchic, of the University of Pennsyl- The wise move would have been to is to say the organization of the roads. vania, compares it to Austria in the nine- invest in public transportation, to build Moscow's radial character puts it at a teen-seventies. "You would go to Salz­ up the city's justly famous but sparse slight disadvantage compared with cities burg to look at the Mozart statue:' he metro network and bring back the trams laid out on a grid, like New York, but the said. "But you couldn't see it, because that killed the literary editor at the start disadvantage need not be decisive: Tokyo Salzburg was a big parking lot." The of'The Master and Margarita"; instead, is also a radial city. Hatoyama's main crit- Austrians have since taken care of the Luzhkov has been cool toward the metro icism ofMoscow is the lack of left-turn problem, with wning, signage, enforce- and actively hostile to the trams. Public possibilities. ment. In Moscow, things are getting transportation is for losers. Instead, he Finger 3: The social system, which is worse. Throughout the ci ty are signs in- spent billions to widen the Moscow Ring always reflected on the roads. One night dicating no-parking wnes, but the rules I i Road (a beltway around the city) and last summer, I was out late and took a cab are only occasionally enforced, and the I home. The streets at that hour were iI I complete the construction of the fabled fines are paltry. As a result, the Moscow 1 Third Ring Road, a freeway between the empty. As the cabdriver and I made our pedestrian spends a lot of time scram­ ' I I Garden Ring and the Moscow Ring, of way past Pushkin Square, we noticed a bling over cars, or around them, some­ ", which Muscovites had been talking since policeman sprinting ahead ofus and then times being forced out into the street, the nineteen-sixties. According to the mounting a traffic booth at the comer. even, because the cars have climbed onto traffic-analysis center at Yandex, the The light turned red. He emerged from the sidewalk. I: Third Ring is now the most clogged ar­ the booth and sprinted to a booth at the I tery in the city. Luzhkov is unbowed: he ' next corner. "Someone's coming," my Blinkin sees the parking troubles as a has begun work on a Fourth Ring! driver announced. We sat before the red symbol ofthe city's general lack of a "No city has ever constructed itself light for several minutes ~ Everything was legal and planning culture. "Try that in out of congestion," the transportation quiet. Then a motorcade of black Mer- Munich or Boston!" he says of parking expert Vukan Vuchic, of the University cedeses and S.U.V.s appeared from the on the sidewalk. For Blinkin, the author ofPennsylvania, told me. "It's impossi­ direction of the Kremlin, whizzed past ofa legendary paper titled 'The Etiology .­ ble." Vuchic visited Moscow in October us, and disappeared into the night. Ten and Pathogenesis of Moscow Traffic," and was depressed by what he saw, seconds passed, and the light turned there are profound social and structural though also in a way impressed. 'There green. '1t is a feudal structure," Hatoyama issues preventing Moscow cars from are streets in the center that are four, said of the privileges accorded Russia's moving. The broad avenues, for exam­ ., five lanes wide in each direction," he elite in the traffic system. "It causes many pie, are good only for military parades. In i j '1 said. "You'd think it'd be impossible problems." He had put down his three New York, by contrast, there is an ele­ for them to be congested, but they are fingers and returned to his sandwich. gant two-tiered road system: streettier, '1 congested." "Is there any other place that has on which pedestrians are primary and In the past few years, visitors have that?" I asked. "Different rules for cars secondary, and freeway tier (the often come to Russia to try to help. Last different drivers?" F.D.R. Drive, the Brooklyn-Qyeens fall, I had lunch with Kiichiro Hatoyama, Hatoyama chewed his sandwich Expressway), where cars rule and there a traffic expert from Japan. As I learned slowly. When he answered, finally, with are no pedestrians at all. According to t later, Hatoyama is the son of Y ukio Ha- a single word, there was a certain satisfac- Blinkin, there isn't a single proper free­ toyama, until recently the Prime Min­ tion in his tone. "China," he said. way in Moscow. Even the outermost ister ofJapan, but he was in Moscow in ring, which should serve as a beltway his capacity as a traffic engineer, to teach A few years ago, Moscow tried to for cars trying to bypass the city entirely, 'I at Moscow State University. We ate at institute paid parking in the city has, since its expansion a decade ago, the Starlite Diner, a nineteen-nineties center. It was odd, after all, that one of sprouted dozens of shopping centers, I pro-American relic tucked into a small the most expensive cities in the world each with several exits and entrances ,1 park, just off the Garden Ring. I wanted should let you park for free. The author- onto the highway. The proposed Fourth to know how a city with such vast ave­ ities deployed men in orange vests to ac- Ring is not going to solve any of this. nues could have such awful traffic. Ha­ cept payment for parking on the street. "You can't just keep sending people in toyama raised three fingers. Very quickly, fake parking men ap­ circles!" Blinkin exclaims. "They need to "There are three main factors that de­ peared, also in orange vests, and then get off eventually, and then what?" The termine a city's traffic," he said. the press reported that the real parking deeper problem-or, rather, the only Hnger 1: "Driver behavior." Do driv­ men were delivering only a portion of way that the many deep problems can ers care that ifthey enter an intersection the parking revenues to the city. In the begin to be solved-is political: Luzh­ before a light turns red there's a chance end, Mayor Luzhkov gave in to public kov, who has been the ruler ofMoscow / / they] get stuck and create gridlock? Rus­ pressure and cancelled paid parking on for nearly twenty years now, needs to go. sian drivers do not. Impatient, angry, the city's streets. Blinkin is a slim, energetic man in his they will seize whatever inch of road is Moscow is now a riot of parking. early sixties with a bristly gray mustache. Ii I I 26 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2. 2010 He was trained in the prestigious math department ofMoscow State University, but then, after underperforming on the final exam on the history ofthe Conunu­ nist Party, could find work only at a re­ search institute on traffic. "At first, I was disappointed," he told me. "But then I read some more and realized, Some very smart, respectable people have worked on this stuff" He spent nearly twenty years at two Soviet research institutes de­ voted to "urban planning," and in 1990 started a private think tank on traffic. Blinkin loves driving, and, when we first got in touch, owned a silver 1999 E-series Mercedes. But I could never get him to take me for a drive in it. "I'm tak­ ing the metro today," he'd say when I called. "You'd have to be an icLot to drive in these concLtions." In the past few years, as he has spo­ ken out more and more, Blinkin has come to resemble a classic dissident­ the Sakharov of traffic. Yet in acountry I I where opposition figures are systemati­

cally shut out of the media, Blinkin has "Asfar as your bill is concerned, I'vefinally learned to say no. )J f I more exposure than he can handle. "During the past week, I've been on TV • • I . four times," he told me when we first I I met, "and I've lost count of how many print interviews." In the current political the city, which are said to have the heavi­ When I visited this past winter, Yan­ 1 climate, traffic is a problem everyone is est traffic. "Are those the worst parts?" I dex occupied a low-slung modem office i• I I willing to discuss: the Kremlin-con­ asked him. builcLng behind the Kursk train station. trolled mecLa because it makes Luzhkov He considered this, not wanting, per­ Though in the center oftowo, it was too look bad; Luzhkov because he's obsessed haps, to offend the southern and eastern far to walk from the metro, and a white with it. Vuchic, who was born in Bel­ routes. "It's all the worst part," he said at Yandex shuttle took me there. The tri­ grade, was amused to note that he'd been last. color Yandex Probki map played on a interviewed by the old Party mouthpiece The police's main competitor in the large plasma screen above the reception- . Izvestia. "Never in my life did I think I'd realm of traffic information is Yandex, ist. Upstairs, one small room was given be printed in Izvestia/" he said. which began monitoring traffic on its over to three men who represented the Web site in 2006 and in 2008 set up old guard of traffic-watching: as if in ike other major cities, Moscow has a separate "analytical center," Yandex a miniature version of the traffic police L a traffic center, with banks oflarge Probki (probka means traffic jam). Yan­ center, they sat before computer moni­ monitors showing many of the city's dex Probki issues periodic white papers tors and kept track of nearly a hundred intersections. Several dozen traffic offi­ on the state of traffic, and maintains a camera feeds from the streets of the cers keep an eye on the situation, call­ blog with interesting traffic highlights, city, swivelling the cameras where nec­ ing their men in the traffic booths to let but its main task is to keep perpetu­ essary to keep up with events, and them know what they should do. I got a ally updated a now iconic three-color checked what they saw against the big short tour of the facility earlier this year, street map of the city, showing real­ map. But the center has more sophisti­ and it was impressive. The huge moni­ time traffic flow on a number ofroutes. cated tools at its disposal. As Maria tors; the policemen in uniform before Above the map is a rating ofthe over-all Laufer, the head ofYandex Maps, ex­ them; the traffic moving, or sitting still, traffic at that moment, from 1 ("The plained, setting up cameras all over the as the policemen watched-it gave a streets are clear") to 9 ("The city has megalopolis would be prohibitively ex­ measure of the megalopolis, made it stopped") and 10 ("You're better off on pensive. Other cities use sensors em­ seem a manageable thing. But this was the metro"). Probki now has around bedded in the pavement to measure in some sense an illusion: although the half a million daily visitors in Moscow, traffic flow; in Moscow these have a hard police can watch, they are helpless. My putting it neck and neck with News time surviving both the weather and the guide pointed out the monitor banks for and Images, with Weather just around road repairs the weather necessitates. the poorer southern and eastern areas of the bend. So Yandex, Laufer said, came up with

THE NEW YOI\KEI\, AUGUST 2, 2010 27 "something like Communism-in the was stopped by the police and accused of tographs of the subway platform taken good sense of the word." Her colleague drunk driving, even though he hadn't just minutes after the explosion showed Leonid Mednikov updated the formula­ had a drop of alcohol in fifteen years, medics among the debris, crouching over tion: "It's a Wiki." At first, drivers had Another time, Lyonya found his car the wounded. When Blinkin, writing on sent information by phone or by text. As trapped in a courtyard where he'd parked, an anti-Kremlin Web site, praised the more and more drivers started using because its residents had put up a gate emergency response, the commenters G .P.S.-enabled smartphones, Yandex while he was gone; unable to find anyone turned on him. "I was also impressed asked them to download Yandex soft­ to ask about it, Lyonya finally dismantled by the speed," one said, raising the old r ware onto their devices, so that infor­ the gate with some tools he always keeps oppositionist dogma about a Kremlin I mation about their movements could be in his car. conspiracy. "It seems they knew in ad­ I sent automatically to the Yandex servers. Yet he continues to drive, and, driv­ vance what was going to happen, and As the program grows, it is able to give ing with him in his long black Mer­ where." an increasingly accurate and encompass­ cedes CL ("Comfort Leicht"), you can I asked my mends at Yandex what the ing picture of the traffic situation at any see why, The car is so intelligent, so so­ traffic was like that day, They answered given moment. While I was touring the licitous, that it will not let you slam the in a detailed e-mail. "After the first ex­ office, it began to snow. Some time later, doors entirely closed, for fear that you1l plosion, at Lubyanka (7:56), traffic jams Mednikov entered the conference room, hurt your fingers, It waits a little, letting began to form gradually at the adjacent carrying his laptop before him like a lan­ you get to safety, and only then does it streets," they wrote. "After the second ex­ tern. "It's at 10!" he announced of the shut the door. You get a different per­ plosion (8:36), congestion continued to traffic index. "It went from 5 to 10 in an spective on things from Lyonya's Mer­ increase and remained at a high level hour and a half!" And so it was that the cedes. Outside, the city is filthy, muddy, until 11 o'clock. By contrast, on a regular Yandex shuttle, making its way back to filled with exhaust; the Mercedes rides weekday congestion reaches its peak at , the metro with me as its only passenger, smoothly, swaddling you in leather. 9 A.M. and then begins to drain off." got stuck in traffic as it approached the The city is violent and chaotic and anti­ The next two days were more con­ Garden Ring. democratic; in the Mercedes, you can lis­ gested than usual, as many people who ten to the liberals arguing, subtly, intelli­ usually took the metro decided to drive n more poetic moments, Blinkin will gently, on the last redoubt ofindependent to work instead, But Moscow could not I I invoke Julio Cortazar's "Highway of Russian mass media, Ekho Moskvy. In function this way forever. "By Thursday," the South," a 1964 story about people Moscow, there are far worse places to be the Yandex analysts concluded, "the city , stuck in a massive traffic jam on their trapped. had returned to normal." way back into Paris after the weekend, Over the past few years, Moscow It was true. Before long, the papers I stuck in it for so long that they begin to drivers have become one of the city's were reporting that the sons oftwo Mos­ 1 live in it. ("At first the girl in the Dau­ most active social groups, organizing to cow bureaucrats had been involved in an phine had insisted on keeping track of eliminate the corrupt meter maids and altercation. The son ofa city prefect was J :I time," the story begins, "though for the lobbying for more roads. After the death stuck in traffic in his Lexus; the son ofa engineer in the Peugeot 404 it no longer of the two doctors in the collision with municipal notary officer was riding his held any importance.") Hearing this, I the Lukoil Mercedes, a group of drivers bicycle, weaving through the traffic, recalled Vladimir Sorokin's began attaching blue sand­ when he accidentally nicked the Lexus, novella "The Qyeue," from box buckets to the roofs of The son of the prefect got out ofhis car the era ofthe Brezhnev stag­ their cars, in imitation of si­ and pushed the notary's son (a poli-sci I nation, which is also about a rens, as a protest against the student) to the ground, Humiliated, the !­ line--a line of people wait­ abuse of the siren by the notary's son went off and found a base­ ing to buy something (it's city's bankers and oil execu­ ball bat somewhere--whether at home never clear what, and they tives . It's been one of the or at a sporting-goods store, the reports themselves do not know), most successful civic actions hadn't yet determined--and returned to the line so long, so complex, in years. And it makes sense: find the prefect's son still stuck in trciffic. that they, too, begin to live "car owner" is the one social He began smashing the windows of the in it. category that has actually Lexus with the baseball bat. When the We've been here before. been created in the past prefect's son got out ofthe car again, the The cars standing in endless lines on the twenty years, as opposed to all the social notary's son hit him, too, breaking his crowded Moscow streets: they resemble categories that have been destroyed. Per­ hand. Moscow's leading tabloid, Life­ nothing so much as the people who used haps this is the emergence, finally, of a Ne-UJs, posted a photograph of the pre­ to wait in endless lines outside the Mos­ propertied, stakeholding-and frus­ fect's son sporting a cast. A nice-looking cow stores for Polish coats, Czech shoes, trated, selfish, neurotic-middle class. young man, he was wearing a pink and, famously, toilet paper. Now, more T -shirt that said "Dolce & Gabbana," + comfortably, they wait for the light. n the morning of the subway They are willing to endure all manner of O bombings in Moscow, the city was humiliation to keep driving. Recently, thrown into disarray; only the emergency NEWYORKER.COM/VIDEO my friend Lyonya, a corporate lawyer, services managed to get anywhere, Pho­ A look at Moscow's traffic problem.

28 THE NEW YORKER , AUGUST 2, 2010

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