Public Transit in Russia
Elana Schor writes up a new survey of international transit usage:
Sadly, only one nation can boast that a majority of its population rides transit at least once a day… the surprising answer comes after the jump.
Russia ranked the highest on the Greendex scale, with 52 percent of respondents reporting daily or near-daily use of transit. Hot on its heels was China, where 43 percent reported very frequent transit rides. More than four out of five Chinese surveyed ride transit at least once a month, according to the Greendex.
I wasn’t surprised by this, Russia has excellent public transportation and a highly urbanized population. The Moscow Metro is absolutely lovely, and the Nizhny Novgorod Metro is pretty good, too, and at least when I was there Nizhny also had a good system of streetcars and trolleybuses.
And when you think about it, none of this should be that surprising. Without real market prices, the Soviet Union was horrible at producing mass market consumer goods. But when it comes to things for which there is no real free market, Soviet production was fine. Soviet nuclear missiles, fighter planes, etc. were just fine. That’s why the USSR wound up falling apart over popular discontent rather than an inability to militarily deter the west. Cars, of course, are a consumer good. But there’s no free market in subway systems. So the Soviet Union had crappy cars but great subways, which led to transit-oriented lifestyles, and that legacy continues today.
43 Responses to “Public Transit in Russia”
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May 16th, 2009 at 11:52 am
I don’t know exactly what modes of transportation the Greendex counts under “daily use of transit,” but I’d like to point out two other things you won’t find in America. (My knowledge is all of St. Petersburg, but I imagine these exist in the other big cities.)
One, almost every private car serves as a taxi. You just flag one down, name your price and destination, and the driver accepts or declines. Everyone uses them, and they are fairly safe if you use common sense (don’t get in a car with multiple people in it, better if you travel in a group, etc.)
Second, private van services drive the same route as public buses. The vans are (if I remember) only a little more expensive, but much faster. They were always filled to capacity.
Basically, Russians are even less car-dependent than the already impressive Greendex numbers suggest.
And I’ll add, the St Petersburg Metro stations are lovely as well. Plus, I stil dream of the street food I bought from the booths outside of these stations – caviar blini and spiced khichin. Delicous.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:59 am
The same holds true for former Soviet Republics. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Georgia I often rode the Tbilisi Metro. It was (relatively) clean, efficient, and actually went where you wanted to go. It put Boston’s T to shame. It was also still very cheap – even for Georgian standards.
It was said that any Soviet city over a certain population got a standard issue metro. The above-ground mass transit in Tbilisi (other than private ‘marshrutkas’) is almost non-existent and intercity rail is unreliable and much decreased from Soviet times. It’s probably similar in other former republics.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
It should also be noted that most of those who don’t take transit often, at least in China, also don’t drive. They’re either peasants in the countryside who never leave their village, or they’re peasants in the city who bike or walk wherever they go.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I visited St. Petersburg last summer and noted the excellent subway system. There are some things that an authoritarian government is good at– do they really have to worry about zoning laws or anything like it? No, they just tell you that they’re going to build a rail line through your house, and you’ll be out by such-and-such a date.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Ah, mass transit in a country unable to support consumerism. It’s BigY’s ultimate fantasy.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
The buses and street cars in Russia are not as good as they might be now, mostly due to lack of maintanence. As with all things in Russia, the further you get from Moscow (or, to some degree, Petersburg) the worse they get. “Regularized” cabs have largely taken over from Gypsy cabs in most cities, but it’s still easier and cheaper to get a cab than in the US and people will still sometimes give rides. (This is partly due to more people having cars- car ownership has gone up massively, leading to huge traffic jams.) As noted, the system of privetely owned (but regulated) “taxi buses” (mini vans) that run along the bus lines is great and a huge help. It would be nice to have them in the US. They cost more than the bus but are faster, too, and less bad than a taxi. They are a huge part of the transit system in most Russian cities. People wait at long-distance bus and train stops to pick up riders, for a fee. It’s safe. The biggest change I’d like to see for the US metro systems (especially NYC!) compared to Moscow is that in Moscow the trains _always_ come no more than 5 minutes apart, usually 2 minutes or less. And, the stations are very clean- one of the cleanest parts of the city, in contrast to NY, which is like an open sewer.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Putin Flaunts New Russian Car: Moscow — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is showing off his new Russian-made SUV…
May 16th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I don’t really think this measure is highly useful. I don’t take mass transit on a daily or near daily basis because I decided to live within walking distance of work and biking distance of most of my daily essentials. I do take mass transit on certainly a once or twice a week basis if I want to go downtown, but the fact that I don’t use it daily doesn’t mean I’m driving a car. In many countries, I would think many of the non-transit users would not actually be car users.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Do the Russians crack down on subway ipod-blarers? This is a surpassingly important point. Or like New York City, do they let ipod-toting, broken-eared douchewads wreck the transit ride for everyone else?
[Let intelligent discussion resume.]
May 16th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Of course, Matt omits the cost of the high urbanization in Russia and China that he so admires. There are plenty of books that detail just how much death was caused by the things that make Matt happy today…
May 16th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Putin Flaunts New Russian Car
Funny, because while that might be a new yearly model, it’s not a new car at all- it’s just a Lada Niva, a car that’s been around for a long time. It’s not terrible, though it has a lot rougher ride than most would expect in the US. There was a version co-made w/ Chevrolet for a while that was pretty good, but, I guess, too expensive. It’s hardly a new car, though. The body is almost exactly like the one that’s been made for well more than 10 years and I’d be surprised if the inside was much different, too.
May 16th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
“khaki colored”? And they wonder why mainstream journalism is dying.
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May 16th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Am I the only one a bit disturbed by the tone of this post? Now we are to admire Russia, where the length of the average human male life is something like the late 50’s, and the quality of living is terrible? Is this what Yglesias has in mind for the optimal future for the West? Great public transport, but absolutely horrendous quality of life? Which one is more important?
May 16th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Myles, 13. Heh, I think the figure is now into the late 40s and dropping. Russia is a total mess, and increasingly totalitarian. This article is so wrong on so many subterranean levels that I wasn’t even going to comment, but you’ve inspired me. I’m surprised that Matt didn’t mention that the trains run on time, or that Uncle Joe was really an old sweetheart, or that the kulaks were ‘just resting’.
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May 16th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
And when you think about it, none of this should be that surprising. Without real market prices, the Soviet Union was horrible at producing mass market consumer goods.
In any case, it wasn’t so much horrible goods, as the non-availability of goods at all. When you have wait in a 9-year line for even the crappiest car, not to mention the fact that the majority won’t even be in the queue, of course you are going to use more public transit.
Again, this article is just disturbing on so many levels. Yglesias needs to explain himself.
May 16th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Matt, I’ve been a fan for a while, but it is time for some career advise: do something other than journalism or blogging for a while. Get some new experiences. They will enrich your blogging and keep it from getting stale.
The impetus for this comment is the contrast between this and the imfamous “Oprah” post from yesterday. This post was enriched by being shaped by the experience of having lived in a provincial Russian city. The Oprah post, by contrast, was shockingly ignorant about the basics of our legal system as was pointed out by most of the commenters. Nobody who had a sense of what goes on in appeals courts would have written something like that. Since you are a DC journalist now and might be expected to pick up some basic sense of the legal system from your job, I tend to think that this sort of ignorance is pretty good evidence that you aren’t expanding your intellectual horizons much at all. If you don’t do so while you are young and intellectually agile, your writing is likely to become fairly uninteresting by the time you are in your mid-thirties.
May 16th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Ask any ordinary Russian; they will gladly swap their subway passes for cars and life in the suburbs, only if they can possibly afford such a lifestyle.
God, Yglesias, you are dumb.
May 16th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Re: Ask any ordinary Russian; they will gladly swap their subway passes for cars and life in the suburbs, only if they can possibly afford such a lifestyle.
Ah, the decadent Edwardian is back. Actually, Myles, the Russians don’t need cars and suburbs. They have something better: the assurance and knowledge that they are the front line of Christendom, and that they have the historic mission of holding the line against capitalism from the West and jihadism from the South. The Russian soul lies in peasant cooperatives in the Urals and in their deep Christian faith, it does not lie in the kind of pot, porn and Playstation lifestyle that you apparently endorse.
This was the nation that saved the world from the Nazi barbarians, at a time when your p*ssified Vichy French were doing everything possible to collaborate with the German hordes. Russia saved the world in 1942, and it will do so again when liberal capitalism and Islamic Jihadism have destroyed each other.
May 16th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Hector, I kindly suggest that you come to reality, to life as it is practised in 21-century society.
May 16th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
“Ask any ordinary Russian…”
I suspect that most are supportive of public transit. For starters, even middle class cannot afford a lifestyle with a car for every able-bodied family member above age of 16. So even if a family has a car, access to mass transit remains vital.
Second, I suspect that jobs are still well-aligned with mass transit, while the road network is much more prone to traffic jams. Those who commute by car would be absolutely miserable if their numbers would grow too quickly. We forget that our model actually required enormous public investment to make “rugged individualism” possible.
May 16th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
I use public transport, and am in favor of improving it more. Having said that, I would agree with the commenters who were shocked that MR YGLESIAS used Russia as an example.He almost seemed nostalgic about the USSR.
I do hear that Moscow’s subway is beatiful.But thousands of slave laborers died building it.I would rather live in a free democracy like America, than a dictatorship where a large percentage of the people can not afford a car.
We can, and should have a great public transportation system in this country.But to use Russia as an example is incredible.
There are plenty of democracies that have great transportation systems, and built them without resorting to mass murder and slave labor!
MR YGLESIAS writes some great posts. But sometimes he writes posts that make me wonder if he is in reallity, a right wing nut, trying to mock liberalism by making posts that almost seem like a parody.
May 16th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Hector, 18. Well, the Soviets saved the world in WWII with Dodge trucks with which they replaced the horse drawn wagons which up until then were what they resupplied the Eastern Front with.
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May 16th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
As alluded to by a number of people above, construction of the “absolutely lovely” Moscow subway, initiated by Stalin, involved the heavy use of forced labor from prisoners of the Gulag. It is lovely. But the history is also painful and it’s important to be mindful of that.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
” . . . onstruction of the “absolutely lovely” Moscow subway, initiated by Stalin, involved the heavy use of forced labor from prisoners of the Gulag.”
Much of the American East, particularly the Southeast, was built with heavy use of forced labor that arrived on slave ships from Africa, and from their children. Much of America was made available for settlement by white Americans as a result of the dispossesion (and often brutal butchery) of the original residents.
America is a lovely country. But the history is also painful and it’s important to be mindful of that.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
The old joke is that Stalin closed or demolished all the cathedrals above ground and rebuilt them underground as Metro stations.
You cite Russia and China, no doubt prompting frothing from the right; but actually most of the capital cities of capitalism — New York, London, Frankfurt, Zurich, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo — have good mass-transit systems.
May 16th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
there’s no private market for highways either.
Perhaps a better explanatory variable would be the extent to which the political system is geared to serve urban vs. Rural constituents.
Russia and Chinese governments tended to be dominated by urban-living apparatchiks- the US system notoriously over-represents rural citizens, so a more distributed transportation infrastructure is more likely.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
It’s been 15 years, but I remember the Moscow metro as a green creaky deathtrap, a horizontal roller coaster filled with drunken skinheads who would periodically be beaten over the heads with batons by Russian cops. The tunnels may have had some lovely socialist realist art but the trains were terrifying back then.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Those Blue Kulaks were pinin’ for their fjarms. Heh.
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May 16th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
26: aparatchiks taking subway: hm. I will a websearch, but I do not recall such heroics.
Just think about the logistics. His Honor Mayor of New York takes subway at occasion, which necessitates a ride with two huge SUVs, one for His Honor, and one for police escort.
OTOH, lower echelons of “apparat” had to schlep to their offices and their could influence the opinions of their superiors.
I would defend Matt: why is it so wrong to notice that some despicable social systems could produce this or that admirable outcome? A good singer can be a bad athlete, a good jurist can be a bad economist etc. I also doubt that subways of Moscow and Leningrad (now, St. Petesburg) were built with slave labor. After all, living in those cities was a privilege. Prison labor was used in places where there was not enough willing workers, and given the size and climate of Russia, there was no shortage of those places.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
@27,
I rode the Moscow subway extensively in 1998 and again in 2003. The stations and the trains were immaculate. There were no skinheads visible during the daylight hours when I rode,
I’ve ridden the NYC and Washington DC subway systems extensively, but have also ridden the BART, the Chicago subway, the Boston T, the London tube and the Paris subway. The Moscow subway easily equalled the DC system for cleanliness and has no rival for interesting station architecture.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
In interesting book is Dmitri Orlav’s “Reinventing Collapse”. Orlav discusses the collapse of the USSR and how people got by. Mass transit was one way, another was the housing method used by the Soviets (sure, the apartments sucked, but nobody got evicted, either).
This isn’t to say that we should all live like the Russians, which some people upthread seem to think is what MY is saying.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Joel, you’re right that we must be mindful of the sad and ugly facts of our own history as well. If one went to Mount Vernon, say, and there were no note made of the slaves held there and how they lived compared with how Washington lived, that would surely say something bad about our country.
None of which however gets Yglesias off the hook for his own lack of historical consciousness in this instance. In that sense your attempt at irony does a disservice to the more important impulse underlying your comment.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
I live in DC and did so without a car for several years and have also been on the subways in New York, Boston, Philadeplphia, San Francisco, London, Paris, Prague, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, and Budapest and I would second Matt’s comment — the Moscow Metro is unbelievably good. The longest wait I ever experienced was 3 minutes — on a Sunday afternoon. And it gets you everywhere you want to go. The DC Metro sucks in comparison.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
REGARDING MR PJTOR COMMENT # 29 AND JEREMY’S COMMENT # 31
MR JEREMY Iam always looking for good books on russia .Thanks for the recomandation, it sounds like an interesting book.
MR PJTOR I would have to respectfully disagree with you.I do not know how to link. But if you google the words “slave labor moscow metro” , the first website at the top of the lists says that 20,000 slave labors died building the subway.There are 4170 other websites listed under those search words.
The reason many of us have a problem with the post is that there are so many great subway systems built WITHOUT slave labor.But the main reason is not that slave labor was used. But that MR YGLESIAS is basicly useing Russia as an example of how to run things.
I know MR.YGLESIAS is an Europhile [so am I ,for that matter] ,but this posts goes a little too far.We have our faults but Putin’s Russia [ aand yes Putin is still effectively in charge] is not a role model for anyone.
I say this as someone who admires Russia and the Russians,and has collected dozens of books on Russia and read dozens more. I am defintly a Russophile. I hope that one day Russia will truely find freedom.
They should not completly copy us.They should find their own path.But we should not try to copy them as well.
Baltimore has a crappy subway.But at least i can critisise the leadership of this country without getting shot in a stairwell.
I just Googled “russian journalist shot dead” to remember the name of the one female journalist and dissident, who was shot dead .But there were so many journalists in russia that have been shot in the head, that I gave up trying to find her name.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Sort of. One thing the Soviets were piss-poor at reproducing and developing at anything other than small quantities was small electronic stuff, like micro-computers, PCs, and miniaturized electronics. You read up on the history of Soviet military thought from that era, and one of the vibes you get from the Soviet military leadership was a sense that in terms of both military technology in particular and technology in general, they were getting left behind in the 1980s.
Hell, they were the ones who originally coined the idea of a “Revolution in Military Affairs”.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Actually, Pete, Prime Minister Putin is a great example of how to run things. Thank God, he isn’t a soft p*ssy who lets every yahoo in Russia do what they want. Abortion is a great example: a few years ago he outlawed elective second term abortions with the stroke of a pen. And the Russians were required to obey- none of this ‘emanations and penumbras’, ’sweet mystery of life’ sh*t. He knows that Russia can only be ruled with an iron hand, and that liberal ‘democracy’ is thoroughly inappropriate for that great nation. In the end, only an iron hand can keep Russia free of corruption by the liberal West and the jihadist Middle East. Let there be 2, 3, 100 Putins!
May 17th, 2009 at 6:50 am
Larry,
There is nothing in Matt’s post that isn’t historically conscious. That he didn’t use the occasion to bash Stalin as a brutal dictator doesn’t subtract in the least from the point he was making or the historical accuracy of his post.
Just as one may discuss the history of America without always making reference to the eviction and slaughter of its original residents and still be historically conscious, so one may discuss the merits of public transportation in Russia without always making reference to Stalin era slave labor and still be historically conscious. What you are advocating isn’t so much historical consciousness as political correctness.
May 17th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
There’s something to what you say. But political correctness is the insincere and bureaucratized version of a positive sensitivity to the sensibilities of other people. Moscow’s subway is an iconic instance of the difference between the glittery hopes and brutal reality of Soviet Communism. Yglesias either doesn’t know this or he doesn’t care. Does his comment remind some people of the liberal “useful idiots” who travelled to Russia and saw only what they wished to see? That’s because it isn’t clear that he’s aware of the lesson of those times and takes them into account in his thinking about our current problems.
May 17th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
One thing the Soviets were piss-poor at reproducing and developing at anything other than small quantities was small electronic stuff, like micro-computers, PCs, and miniaturized electronics.
Why did they need to? If I’m remembering correctly, Speak ‘N Spells had an extraordinarily large sales volume around New York City. It wasn’t that New Yorkers had a passion for teaching their toddlers how to spell, it’s that the Russians were buying them at retail and shipping the electronics back home to make things that sorta kinda were PCs. And when your television system only has three channels you don’t need things like remote controls. And when the phone system is still using mechanical switches, phones that have “last number redial” … for that matter they weren’t terribly good at things like basic telephones that the West has been pumping out in mass quantities for 75 years.
May 17th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
“That’s because it isn’t clear that he’s aware of the lesson of those times and takes them into account in his thinking about our current problems.”
Nor is it clear he *isn’t* aware. Why is your null hypothesis that Matt is a “useful idiot?”
Why assume he doesn’t know about Stalin era slave labor? Why assume he doesn’t care about Stalin era slave labor? Those are pretty bold conclusions to draw on the evidence of one brief blog post, Larry.
You can find thousands of articles extolling the virtues of American capitalism and the American political system that omit entirely any mention of slavery, the fact that women couldn’t vote until the 20th century and the fact that most of this country was stolen from its original inhabitants by force. Are all such authors of American history “useful idiots?”
You’re insisting on political correctness here, Larry.
May 17th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Name one.
May 18th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Matt, please stop spouting off about Nizhny as if you actually know something about the place. You’re just embarrassing yourself. Yes, it’s a pretty Metro – but it doesn’t actually reach the part of the city where most working people live and work. Look for yourself –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nizhny_Novgorod_Metro
It’s a white elephant for bureaucrats. Any decent sized German city has a far superior system of public transportation to Nizhny.
Another problem with public transport – it often tends to be unfriendly to young single woman. Ask any Russian woman about the pervs on the Metros (or any Japanese woman).
May 18th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
REGARDING VANYA ‘S COMMENT # 42
I do not know what MR YGLESIAS was doing in Nizhny , but i think it is safe to assume that he was not working in a factory and living with a bunch of steelworkers.
This raises an intereting point. Many of us visit an area and praise it without actually living there as a normal resident would. My father worked in the UK in the late 70’s and early 80’s and i have fond memories of The London Underground.
But recently i read about it and saw the prices for fares ,and wondered how someone on a low wage could afford it.I bet many low income workers take the bus instead.When i lived in the DC area in the late 80’s i avoided the DC Metro.
Not because it was bad. But because when i made $4 an hour i had no choice but to ride the bus even though it took more time than Metro.
When using public transport abroad,we should all realise that there is a difference between riding as a tourist and riding as a low wage worker.