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State Duma Displeased with Traffic Jams
Russia’s State Duma called on Moscow authorities Wednesday to find out the reasons that led to the six-hour traffic jams in the city’s center the day before. But the analysts don’t blame jams on Luzhkov’s team, rather attributing them to the lack of roads, excess number of cars and to leaders of other states, who tend to visit the city.
The yesterday’s concern of the State Duma was the situation on Moscow roads. The cause for it was the jam on Sadovoe Ring Road and the Third Ring Road, where the cars were unable to move from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Tuesday.
One of the aftereffects of the jam was that players of Spartak Football Club had to use metro to be on time for their Champ League match in Luzhniki Stadium. This incident “casts doubts on ability of Moscow to execute functions of a capital,” said Alexey Mitrofanov, Duma’s deputy from the LDPR faction. “The funds that the city gets from federal budget to widen roads and construct interchanges are spent for things unknown,” the deputy said.
Set to motion by Mitrofanov’s rhetoric, the deputies demanded from Moscow authorities to provide data on actions taken for normalizing the traffic movement in the city.
In Moscow Traffic Police, they don’t think Mitrofanov’s claims justified. “Twenty traffic accidents usually happen in Sadovoe Ring Road each day. But there were 28 from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Tuesday. So Sadovoe came to a halt. As a rule, if it stops, the whole downtown stops as well. In these cases, our officials can shift only to the hand control of the traffic,” said a representative of the Moscow Traffic Police. One of the reasons of the jam was the visit of Angola’s President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, which led to blocking a number of streets in the city, representatives of the traffic police specified.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 02, 2006
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