To ban or at least limit road works on holidays – deputies want to give motorists such a generous gift on May 1. The first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Natural Resources, Vasily Vlasov, showed the care of the drivers storming the tracks at the start of the summer season. The youngest parliamentarian (23 years old) sent a letter with the corresponding proposal to the Cabinet of Ministers.
Vlasov is outraged by the persistence of the road builders. In his petition addressed to the deputy chairman of the government, Maxim Akimov, the deputy is perplexed: at the same time every year, the number of vehicles on the roads increases markedly. In particular, with the beginning of the summer season and the May holidays, many citizens seek to leave the city and “ground themselves” on their favorite beds.
“The paradox is that the road works do not stop at all during this period, and a huge number of people have to stand in traffic jams due to repair of one or even several lanes,” complains Vasily Vlasov.
People’s elected found a way out radical: to limit the repair work on the roadway during the beginning of all official public holidays. True, the author of the initiative himself admitted that the idea needs detailed study and evaluation. He held it and asked the officials.
Experts in the field of road safety believe that it makes no sense to prohibit road works for the entire period of folk festivals and long weekends. It is enough to establish restrictions on the days when people leave the city and return to the metropolis.
“On April 30 and May 12, the largest flow of cars is recorded,” notes Alexander Shumsky, the head of the project “Probok.net”. – It makes sense to impose restrictions on these days at peak times. It is necessary to register in the regulatory documents.
– Local officials are able to independently determine on which public holidays it is better to impose embargo on road works, the expert is sure. This is due to national holidays, which are celebrated in individual regions. At the federal level, it is enough to prescribe in the law the obligations of the regional authorities to establish such restrictions.
Some experts believe that the restriction on road works will not improve the situation with traffic jams. The repair plan is drawn up in advance and is tied both to the rigid framework of the procurement procedure and to the weather conditions.
“You cannot stop repairing a bridge or a section of a roadway simply because the holidays have begun,” says Dmitry Romensky, deputy head of the Center for Independent Integrated Transport Research. – The problem is usually not the repair itself, but the culture of repair. The work of reversing traffic lights is poorly regulated, operational issues are completely left to contractors.
According to experts, it is necessary to fix the rules for the operation of the road for the period of its repair. Now, state standards do not set any requirements for contractors for the quality of road signs that they put on the roadway during the work period. Such marks can be made from cheap Chinese film with a zero reflectance. At dusk and in bad weather, the driver does not see such a sign, which often becomes the cause of accidents.
Thus, according to the traffic police, since the beginning of the year, 130 road accidents have already occurred on Moscow highways due to violations of mandatory road condition conditions, in which 14 people were killed and 162 injured.