With the single exception of Novy Arbat, every street, sidewalk, playground and private balcony in Moscow is fair game for drivers. This is the stuff of serial nightmares for the capital's pedestrians, but for any New Yorker or Parisian behind the wheel of a Zhiguli, it is a source of secret delight.
Moscow being a major world capital, with a population somewhere between 9 and 11 million, this state of anarchy -- an urban driver's paradise -- obviously has to end sometime. The mayor's plan to install parking meters on Tverskaya Ulitsa is doubtless a signpost to the future.
It is, of course, eminently sensible to install parking meters and car parks all over the city. They should help to reduce increasingly congested traffic and to raise the money so desperately needed to maintain Moscow's offroad-style roads. It could even make life a little easier for the poor pedestrians.
But will it? In a driving culture that treats red lights as gentle hints and sidewalks as the roads you drive on when the traffic backs up, the prospects for orderly parking are grim indeed -- with or without the lowly parking meter.
To have any chance of success, a parking-meter system needs attendants to regularly monitor the parking spaces and to ticket offenders. Then you need an efficient system to collect the fines, and an efficient court system to punish those who refuse. Perhaps a tooth fairy, too.
That is, of course, only if some of the money collected is to end up in the city's coffers, rather than in the collective pockets of Moscow's GAI traffic police, which cannot be taken for granted.
But what must strike fear into the heart of every driver as they watch the $600 German meters installed up and down Tverskaya sometime next year is the realization that they will have to buy the tokens. So there will have to be a place -- four, to be precise -- where one can buy them. Will these places all stay open? Or will you find yourself walking from one end of Tverskaya to the other to get the token you need to make you legal? What happens when inflation jumps and makes parking tokens a good inflationary bet? And will the vendors take a lunch hour?
It is, admittedly, unfair to take potshots at the city government as it strives to make advances that are clearly necessary. But there is a real concern that, before buying expensive symbols of orderly urban planning from Germany, the mayor has made sure he has the means here in Russia to make these trappings work.
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