Moscow's wonderful world of paid parking has some good news and bad news this week.
The bad news is that starting this week, parking tariffs within the Boulevard Ring have gone up (see page 3 for the depressing details). The good news is that this might finally — or at least temporarily — act as a deterrent to potential parkers and free up traffic in the city center.
The other bit of good-bad news concerns tow trucks. The bad news is that the city is still going to haul away any car that's illegally parked. The good news is that they'll only do it where there is a pictogram showing a tow-truck lifting up a car. The really good news is that there will only be 5,000 tow-truck zones in the city, five times less than last week. So now you can make a better cost-risk analysis — No pictogram: big fine. Pictogram: big fine and a day spent bailing out your car.
With news like this, you may decide that the metro is the way to go. Always a good choice — unless you use one of dozens of metro stations undergoing renovations this month. For a full listing of repair schedules in English, see mos.ru.
