Fighting Traffic Jams: Paid Parking, Public Transportation, Polycentric Development

Traffic jams are a disease that has plagued Almaty for a long time, and only a radical solution will cure it.

During the years of the oil price boom, when money was plentiful, a large number of interchanges were built. Interchanges keep going up, yet the jams do not go away. This paradox will always be with us: either the entire city has to be rebuilt, which is essentially impossible, or the number of vehicles on the roads has to be reduced.

Why can't the roads be unclogged simply by building interchanges? Because one has to look at the flow of traffic as a whole, not at an individual stretch of road. This is the bottleneck principle: traffic speeds through a wide section, runs into a narrow one somewhere else, and a jam forms. That is why the problem should be addressed not with interchanges (although they are certainly needed and should be built), but by reducing the number of cars moving around the city.

There is a standard set of tools for this, which I will list from the easiest to the most difficult.

1. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the easiest ways to rein in drivers is paid parking. Psychologically it is very, very hard for everyone, including me, but there is no other way. Using one's own car simply has to become unprofitable. And there must be a quality substitute: the taxi. On this I fully agree with the akimat (city administration). Once people realize that it is cheaper to take a taxi or a bus, they will switch. But this cannot be a stand-alone measure; it must, and I repeat, must, be part of a package with other measures.

It is also important to develop commercial paid parking under public-private partnerships (PPPs), because we cannot end up with a simple shortage of parking spaces.

2. Developing public transportation and taxis. The taxi situation is clear, and the trend in Almaty is good: Uber and Yandex Taxi have launched, and there are many taxi fleets. Public transportation, however, will take more time and effort. Many people resisted the Onay program, but on the whole it is necessary, and the task is simply to make the system work reliably. It is a good idea whose execution suffers. Onay needs to be refined and its rollout pursued persistently.

Second, we need to deal with dedicated lanes, route optimization, timetables and, above all, the quality of the bus fleet. The current fleet of our operators is a pain point, and it calls for a comprehensive solution.

Given the low fare (believe me, if we want to ride in Mercedes buses, the fare should be not KZT 80 but much higher), the high cost of vehicles after the devaluation, and the need to improve the quality of drivers, this project will be loss-making a priori. As will the metro. So the best option here is either a PPP or a municipal enterprise, so that there are uniform buses on all routes, a single payment system across all modes of transport, uniform dress for staff, and a proper bus schedule (not the races that drivers stage now). This is an enormous amount of work that still lies ahead for the akimat.

3. Paid entry into the city and development of suburban routes. Paid entry into the city is widely used around the world. It filters out those who come into the city only for work, and if there is an alternative way to travel, they will gladly take public transportation. For many suburban residents, giving rides is also a way to earn money: fellow passengers pay KZT 200 for a ride into the city. So a joint solution with the oblast is needed to develop suburban service. That means comfortable buses and, better still, commuter trains that would use dedicated lanes to bring people quickly to the city center. Many would switch and give up shared rides.

The revenue from the entry fee could be used to subsidize suburban service. For those who commute regularly, season passes could simply be sold at an affordable price. Almaty does not have many entry points, so this is not so hard to do.

4. Urban architecture. This is one of the most difficult issues, but without proper placement of construction projects it is hard to solve the problem of traffic jams. Almaty needs to move away from monocentrism toward local district centers. Here everyone wants to live in the center, build in the center and work in the center. The right approach is to build offices evenly across all districts, along with housing, shopping centers, stores, kindergartens, schools and so on, so that people have little need to travel from their own district to another for work, leisure, shopping and the like.

In general, this is complex work in which not only architectural matters but also tax and other issues must be coordinated. For example, if we had a proper tax system in which municipalities set the rates of land tax, property tax and the tax for small businesses, it would be a good tool for the proper location of productive capacity.

I think I have covered the main points. Naturally, many people will now write nasty things and object, but you cannot please everyone. There will always be those who dislike this and whose rights will be curtailed. But democracy is democracy precisely because it meets the needs of the majority, and people who ride buses and do not own a car are, alas, the majority.