The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (16 page)

"I don't have one hundred kroner," I said, grinning.

"Eighty," she answered.

"Twenty?" I asked.

"Sixty"

"Thirty?"

The girl scratched her head, glanced at the boy. I gave her a pleading look and she said, "One hundred." I laughed and flipped her a twenty-kroner piece. She and the boy inspected it as I scaled the wall. When I got one leg over the top, they pelted me with two snowballs, square in the back.

FROM
The New Yorker

M
OSCOW'S TERRIBLE TRAFFIC
has been infamous for a while now, but in the past year it has come to feel like an existential threat. The first snowfall of last winter, in early December, paralyzed the city. Andrey Kolesnikov, the Kremlin correspondent for
Kommersant
and probably the best-known print journalist in the country, was unable to reach the airport in time to leave with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for Nizhny Tagil. Instead of detailing Putin's manly adventures in the metallurgical capital of the Urals, Kolesnikov's column the next day described his own epic, failed journey to the airport. The traffic analysis center at Yandex, the country's leading on-line search engine, reported a record-breaking worst-possible rating of 10 for six straight hours. That night, a popular anti-Kremlin blogger, making his way along the river in the center of town, encountered an ambulance driver standing outside his vehicle throwing snowballs lazily off the embankment; he'd been in traffic so long, he explained, that his patient was now dead.

Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who takes everything that happens in the city very personally, perhaps because over the years he and his wife have come personally to own a good chunk of the city, reacted decisively: he blamed the meteorologists. They had underestimated the snowfall. If they didn't start forecasting better, there would be trouble. In the following months, though, snow wreaked havoc on the city whenever it fell. In three separate instances, drivers of snow-clearing vehicles were shot at when they collided with other vehicles; one of the drivers, shot by an off-duty police officer, died. Even without snow, the movement of cars through the circular maze of Moscow was incredibly frustrating. During rush hour on an overcast, slippery day in late February, the luxury Mercedes of a vice president of Lukoil, the country's largest oil company, collided at high speed with a small Citroën. The occupants of the Mercedes escaped with superficial injuries; the Citroën crumpled like a paper bag, and the driver and her daughter-in-law—both doctors—were killed.

The accident exploded into scandal. The police claimed that the Citroën was at fault, but automobile activists quickly found witnesses who said that the Mercedes had crossed over into the central emergency lane reserved for ambulances and police cars, and then into oncoming traffic. Especially infuriating was the Mercedes itself, a black S500 with a siren: for years, these besirened black Mercedeses had been running red lights, using the emergency lane, and otherwise tyrannizing other drivers. Some of them technically had the right to do all this, since they belonged to one of the federal security agencies in Moscow, or to Duma deputies, or to Putin; but a large number simply belonged to wealthy and well-connected individuals. Now they were killing people. Within days of the accident, the young rapper Noize MC recorded a furious song, "Mercedes S666," in which he ventriloquized the innocuous-looking Lukoil vice president as Satan: "All those satanic costumes, that's just tomfoolery. / Dressing up like that they'll never look like me ... I'm working here on a whole other level. / I've got a suitcase full of cash to get me out of trouble." The song's chorus expressed the class conflict at the heart of the matter: "Get out of my way, filthy peasants. / There's a patrician on the road."

On a Monday morning a month later, two young women from the Caucasus set off bombs during rush hour in the center of the city. The first blew herself up at Lubyanka, the metro station just beneath the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, and the other did so at a nearby stop, forty minutes later. Emergency services reacted rapidly, and since there could be no question of ambulances making it through traffic from the site of the bombings to the hospital, the badly wounded were helicoptered out. Given the forty-minute gap between the explosions, however, the press began to wonder why the metro hadn't been evacuated directly after the first bomb. The response from a metro spokesman was immediate. "You have no idea what would have happened if we'd closed down an entire branch of the system," he said. The city was so crowded, its functioning so tenuous, that it was better to risk another explosion than close off an artery. "The city is on the brink of transportational collapse," Mikhail Blinkin, a traffic expert, told me. "Moscow will simply cease to function as a city. You and I will be living in different cities. Some people will live in one neighborhood, and others will live in a different neighborhood, and that will be fine, except they won't be able to get from one neighborhood to the other."

 

I first noticed the extent of the Moscow traffic problem in the spring of 2007, while drinking a coffee at the Coffee Bean, on Sretenka, just up the street from the Lubyanka and around the corner from the Lukoil headquarters. It used to be that you couldn't get a coffee in Moscow for love or money, so I didn't mind that it wasn't good coffee and that it cost four dollars. That is to say, I minded, but what could I do? So there I sat, sipping my four-dollar coffee and looking out the window, when suddenly my sister appeared in front of the coffee shop and stopped, trapped in traffic. She had recently bought a navy-blue Honda Element, which looks like a motorized version of Fred Flintstone's car, with the driver sitting curiously upright. Farther ahead, Sretenka intersected the giant Garden Ring Road, which runs around the Kremlin at a radius of about a mile and a half and marks the border of the historic city center. For much of its length, it is twelve lanes wide; at certain points, it's eighteen. Still, it is often clogged. At the Sretenka—Garden Ring intersection, a police officer hand-operates the light to try to ease traffic, to no avail. So there was my sister, just twenty feet away from me, sitting down as I was, almost as if she were at another table. The moment extended in time; I sipped my coffee. When, eventually, the light changed and my sister moved forward a few car lengths, it was as if she had merely moved to another table. If the coffee were cheaper, I would have brought her one.

Several generations, even several centuries, had brought the city to this point. Its early rulers built Moscow as a concentric series of walled forts, with the Kremlin at the center. After the government abandoned Moscow in favor of St. Petersburg, in the early eighteenth century, the old capital developed haphazardly, like an enormous bazaar. In the post-revolutionary age, when the Bolsheviks moved the government back to Moscow to get farther away from the Germans, various fantasies emerged to reverse all this: avantgardists imagined a socialist Moscow of clean right angles; others proposed simply abandoning the city. Many believed that the Kremlin, a church-laden symbol of medieval tyranny at the heart of the city, should be de-emphasized, or worse. By the time the Soviets were ready to do anything about it, Joseph Stalin was in charge, and under him the medieval character of Moscow was not fundamentally altered. Instead, the Stalinists built gigantic avenues that ran in all directions from the Kremlin like rays from the sun. There were few cars around to fill these avenues, but they provided a fine, broad line of sight for Soviet leaders during military parades.

Then came capitalism. The registration laws that had made it almost impossible to move to Moscow during Soviet times ceased to be enforced, and meanwhile chaos, deindustrialization, and ethnic violence roamed the peripheries of the empire. Very soon it became clear that what Moscow had lost in political authority it had gained, and then some, in economic authority. By the end of the 1990s, there were more people in Moscow from all over the former Soviet Union than there had been when the Soviet Union was a single state. People from rural Russia, the Central Asian states, and Ukraine came to escape poverty; people from the Caucasus came to escape the war.

All of them wanted cars. The city's plan with regard to this was not to have a plan at all. Planning was for socialists; under capitalism, the market would figure things out. In the post-Soviet years, Moscow filled up, first with kiosks, and flimsy freestanding grocery stores, and little old ladies selling socks. Eventually, these were replaced by office buildings and megastores and even luxury condominiums; the spaces once reserved for new roads or metro stations were given over to construction. Blinkin recalls a commission that he received from the Soviet government, only months before its collapse, to project the rate of automobile growth over the next twenty-five years. "We knew the trajectory of automobilization in many countries of the world, and so we predicted exactly what happened," he says. What happened was that the number of cars in Moscow went from 60 per thousand residents in 1991 to 350 in 2009. "And we were very proud of ourselves for being so smart. Then, a while later, I met some guys who sold foreign cars, who'd done a marketing prognosis, and without any of our international analogues or models they just thought, Well, restrictions are down, you can buy foreign cars as well as Russian ones, and they predicted the same rate of growth as we had! These car dealers predicted it." Blinkin was dismissive of the car dealers, but in the early 1990s they included some of the most brilliant minds in the country. The first great post-Soviet fortune, after all, was made not from oil or gas or nickel: that came later. It was made when Boris Berezovsky, a mathematician and game theorist, started selling cars.

 

Last spring, Mayor Luzhkov fired the head of the city's transportation department. Weeks earlier, the deposed chief had, like the three men who preceded him over the previous seven years, been harshly criticized for his failure to solve the traffic crisis. There are many problems that Luzhkov pretends not to know about, but traffic is not among them. In fact, it sometimes seems as if the mayor thinks of nothing else. Whenever he goes abroad, he returns with a magical fix for the problem; whenever he has money to spare, he builds roads and digs tunnels. He has waged a relentless war against traffic lights—"He has a childlike notion that if he could just get rid of all the traffic lights everything would be fine," Blinkin says—and on one central stretch running from the Kremlin almost all the way, but not quite, to Sheremetyevo Airport, outside town, he has just about eliminated them. He has turned numerous two-way streets into one-way streets and even proposed that the monstrous Garden Ring become one-way. Nothing helps. Muscovites continue to buy (and steal, and salvage, and order on eBay in North America, and ship to Finland) more cars than Luzhkov can build roads to drive them on.

The wise move would have been to invest in public transportation, to build up the city's justly famous but sparse metro network and bring back the trams that killed the literary editor at the start of "The Master and Margarita"; instead, Luzhkov has been cool toward the metro and actively hostile to the trams. Public transportation is for losers. Instead, he spent billions to widen the Moscow Ring Road (a beltway around the city) and complete the construction of the fabled Third Ring Road, a freeway between the Garden Ring and the Moscow Ring, of which Muscovites had been talking since the 1960s. According to the traffic analysis center at Yandex, the Third Ring is now the most clogged artery in the city. Luzhkov is unbowed: he has begun work on a Fourth Ring!

"No city has ever constructed itself out of congestion," the transportation expert Vukan Vuchic, of the University of Pennsylvania, told me. "It's impossible." Vuchic visited Moscow in October and was depressed by what he saw, though also in a way impressed. "There are streets in the center that are four, five lanes wide in each direction," he said. "You'd think it'd be impossible for them to be congested, but they are congested."

In the past few years, visitors have often come to Russia to try to help. Last fall, I had lunch with Kiichiro Hatoyama, a traffic expert from Japan. As I learned later, Hatoyama is the son of Yukio Hatoyama, until recently the prime minister of Japan, but he was in Moscow in his capacity as a traffic engineer, to teach at Moscow State University. We ate at the Starlite Diner, a 1990s pro-American relic tucked into a small park, just off the Garden Ring. I wanted to know how a city with such vast avenues could have such awful traffic. Hatoyama raised three fingers.

"There are three main factors that determine a city's traffic," he said.

Finger 1: "Driver behavior." Do drivers care that if they enter an intersection before a light turns red there's a chance they'll get stuck and create gridlock? Russian drivers do not. Impatient, angry, they will seize whatever inch of road is offered them. Russian drivers are jerks. Hatoyama put this differently. "Russian drivers lack foresight," he said.

Finger 2: The traffic system itself, that is to say the organization of the roads. Moscow's radial character puts it at a slight disadvantage compared with cities laid out on a grid, like New York, but the disadvantage need not be decisive: Tokyo is also a radial city. Hatoyama's main criticism of Moscow is the lack of left-turn possibilities.

Finger 3: The social system, which is always reflected on the roads. One night last summer, I was out late and took a cab home. The streets at that hour were empty. As the cabdriver and I made our way past Pushkin Square, we noticed a policeman sprinting ahead of us and then mounting a traffic booth at the corner. The light turned red. He emerged from the booth and sprinted to a booth at the next corner. "Someone's coming," my driver announced. We sat before the red light for several minutes. Everything was quiet. Then a motorcade of black Mercedeses and SUVs appeared from the direction of the Kremlin, whizzed past us, and disappeared into the night. Ten seconds passed, and the light turned green. "It is a feudal structure," Hatoyama said of the privileges accorded Russia's elite in the traffic system. "It causes many problems." He had put down his three fingers and returned to his sandwich.