Cars, Cars - and More Cars

<Published with permission of the author.>

Cars, Cars - and More Cars

Andrew Byrne
The Ukrainian Observer:
Jun 7, 2007

Driving or riding down any Kyiv city street today, you have no trouble realizing that the pre-independence auto census of about 150,000 has now grown to upwards of one million. In fact, there are times when you're sitting at some gridlocked corner or square with nothing but cars, trucks, buses and marshrutkas as far as the eye can see that you could easily believe that most of this huge number of vehicles is converging on your location.

Ukraine's relative affluence in recent years has led not only to expansion of public transport but much wider ownership of private vehicles. In fact, for the growing legions of young professionals, the evidence of financial and social success is usually measured by the ability to purchase an automobile. With seven year financing readily available, auto purchase has now become easier than ever.

Auto driving is neither a privilege nor a right any more than riding in an elevator is. It is a lifestyle. Depending on where you live, it may be mandatory. Work and the need to access the basic necessities of life dictate where we must go. How we get there depends on large-scale construction and engineering projects and very large amounts of public money. How we get there depends on whose needs get met first.

The lure of the open road notwithstanding, any urban population can only use a mode of transportation that has been provided to them and designated for their use. There is very little spontaneity in urban planning and when there is it is probably a bad thing.

Stalin's lieutenant Lazar Kaganovich directed the construction of the first Moscow metro in the 1930's relying on forced labor to build the Sokolnicheskaya line. In the words of Soviet propaganda the "palaces of the people" i.e. metro stations, were destined to be "a majestic school in the formation of man."

Kaganovich is also famous for his part in the All-Ukrainian Party Conference of 1930 which endorsed the policies of collectivization that many historians argue led to the catastrophic 1932-33 Ukrainian famine (the Holodomor) in which millions of Ukrainians died.

In the early 1990s, six cars at an intersection in the center of Kyiv constituted a traffic jam. Meanwhile the public transportation systems had been systematically enlarged and operated with unrivalled reliability.

Today - 16 years after independence - Kyiv's main streets are very heavily congested with slow-moving traffic, and city planners are struggling to cope with the continuous increase in the number of vehicles of all kinds.

http://www.ukraine-observer.com/articles/232/1043