The Moscow city government wants to replace cumbersome streetcars and trolley buses in the city center with minibuses made by the city-controlled ZiL plant.
Last week, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov signed Order 61, instructing the city's second largest minibus operator, Transagentstvo-T, to work out a plan for changing the public transportation scheme within the Garden Ring. Transagentstvo-T director Sergei Frolov said no tender had been held for the project.
According to the company's preliminary plan, public buses and trolleys will be gradually phased out as Transagentstvo-T buys more and more ZiL minibuses.
Initially, the smaller vehicles will run parallel with the big ones on some routes. New routes through the streets where big buses cannot pass are also in the plans, Frolov said.
Frolov has a month to present his scheme to the city government. If it is approved, Transagentstvo-T is prepared to start gradually taking over bus routes in early spring.
Constant traffic jams and exhaust fumes generated by heavy buses are the main reasons the city is thinking about cutting the number of large public vehicles downtown, said Yury Ostrovsky, the city official responsible for improving the transportation network.
Traditionally, public transportation schemes have been the domain of the city's urban planning center, the Moscow Institute of the General Plan, and of Mosgortrans, the city-owned public transportation company that operates the Russian capital's 1,600 trolleys, 895 streetcars and 5,500 buses. But Transagentstvo-T nonetheless decided to approach the mayor with its own initiative, Frolov said.
There are 30 licensed minibus operators in Moscow. Transagentstvo-T is second in size only to Avtolain, founded by Oleg Muzyrya, who now heads the Moscow City Duma's budget committee. Transagentstvo-T runs 150 minibuses in Moscow and another 500 in the Moscow region and in St. Petersburg.
The firm's plan appealed to the mayor because it gave him a chance to boost his pet project, the revival of moribund truckmaker ZiL, which employs 23,000 workers in Moscow.
"The main part of our program is buying from ZiL," Frolov said.
Transagentstvo-T promises that it will purchase 1,000 to 1,500 of the factory's new ZiL-3250 minibuses within next 12 to 18 months. ZiL is currently developing the model, designed to carry 22 passengers, on the basis of its Bychok lightweight truck. Only about a dozen ZIL-3250s have been built so far, but Frolov says he needs only 70 of them to start implementing his scheme.
According to Frolov, the vehicles will be at least twice as expensive as Gazelle minibuses, which make up most of Transagentstvo-T's current fleet. A 13-passenger Gazelle, made by GAZ in Nizhny Novgorod, retails for about $5,000.
The new ZiL minibuses' engines are also inferior to those in the Gazelles, said Sergei Dorodnikov, a senior expert with Mosgortrans' transportation management department.
"I understand, this could look strange, like a utopia," Frolov said. "But we do want to support our local producer."
He said he had already lined up foreign loans to purchase the ZiLs and only Luzhkov's signature was needed for the money to be released. The plan would allow Transagentstvo-T to boost the number of its routes in Moscow from the current 200 to 500 or even 700.
Pavel Alyonichev, head of operations at Avtolain, which operates 1,600 minibuses in Moscow, questioned the wisdom of allowing Transagentstvo-T to work on the public transportation scheme.
"It's like asking a bus driver to redesign a transportation system," Alyonichev said.