Muscovites who had hoped for snowfall for New Year may now be ruing getting too much, too late, as heavy snowfall shrouded the city on Thursday and froze traffic to a virtual standstill.
"Snow in Moscow has complicated road traffic" today, Yandex.Probki, a mapping and traffic monitoring service, said in a Twitter message.
Yandex.Probki gave Moscow's roads eight congestion points out of 10 during Thursday morning rush hour as kilometers-long lines of cars formed around the city.
The snowfall, which began overnight and continued on Thursday morning, paralyzed traffic on an 18-kilometer stretch of the Moscow Ring Road, RIA Novosti reported.
Even the newly commissioned multi-lane Odintsovo bypass road saw jams entering the city, caused by delays at toll booths.
The arrival of snow followed record-high temperatures in late December and an almost snowless holiday season that stretched from New Year's Eve to "Old New Year," which many Russians ring in on the night of Jan. 13, based on the old Julian calendar.
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