Which minibuses have been canceled since August 15th. Comfortable environment with the hands of Urbantin. Cancellation of minibuses, crooked tiles and future demolition - anna_nik0laeva. Schedule and intervals

Without a doubt, the current year will be remembered for a number of bright and significant events in the field of public transport: the launch of the Moscow Central Circle (MCR), the dismantling of trolleybus lines in the city center, the reorganization of ground transport routes in the central part of the city, the introduction of clock intervals and the removal of turnstiles on all tram lines routes of the Krasnopresnenskaya tram network. This list will include one more an important event: transfer of private carriers to a contract model of work on city orders, in other words, the elimination of “minibuses” in the most “classical” sense of the word.

We have already written about why minibuses are bad, now we can only repeat the main points, which have not changed at all:

1. In minibuses, travel cards, single city tickets and the Troika card are not valid. If a person who regularly uses public transportation in the city has a travel card, he always has to pay separately for travel on a minibus. This is inconvenient, entails an increase in transport costs, no discounts for big number trips are not cumulative.

2. The vast majority of minibuses are small and cramped. The distance between the seats is always minimal (to squeeze in more), so it’s simply impossible to get into a minibus with luggage or a baby stroller.

3. A special pleasure is the payment system: when the entire salon first hands over the fare, and then hands over the change back.

4. Minibuses do not run according to a schedule, but according to capacity. In fact, this is pure mockery of passengers, which for some reason they tolerate and consider normal. Sometimes you can just sit for 10-15 minutes in a minibus, because it is not full and is not moving, during which time 2 buses manage to pass.

5. The technical condition of many minibuses raises great questions and concerns, and drivers often work without any compliance with labor laws.

6. Compliance with traffic rules by minibus drivers has long been a topic for jokes. At the same time, it causes serious road accidents with human casualties. In terms of safety, the minibus was and remains the most dangerous type of public transport.

7. Minibuses do not invest at all in the infrastructure (the same stops or settling areas) that they use.

But the main thing is that all minibuses operate in “gray” mode. That is, the funds received from fares are in reality not controlled by anyone.

This creates the ground for a huge number of financial frauds.

We should not forget that public transport is public good. This means that all income coming from it must be public - that is, controlled by the city. The case when private carriers work on the existing city infrastructure only in the most profitable and “tasty” places only means that the city is not receiving a huge amount of funds because of this, which could be used for the development of the state carrier Mosgortrans, its renewal rolling stock, repair of its infrastructure (including the trolleybus network) and even the abolition of turnstiles.

To put it simply, answer the most popular question last days“Who were the minibuses disturbing?” quite simply: minibuses interfered with the entire city and, first of all, with the public transport users themselves. They interfered with motorists (mainly by parking in the wrong places and stopping wherever the passenger wanted) and other public transport - often the crowd of waiting minibuses simply did not allow buses and trolleybuses to approach the stops normally. That is why minibuses were and remain a relic of the past, which the city should have said goodbye to long ago.

Which path exactly did the city decide to take under these conditions?

In fact, Moscow has chosen the most correct and logical path, which is equally a compromise for the city, passengers and private carriers.

It was announced that all routes in the city would be operated by order of the Department of Transport to the extent strictly stipulated by the government contract. The city will order from the carrier a certain number of flights on certain routes, for which the carrier will receive money from the city. All income from the transportation of passengers goes to the city treasury. Carriers also undertake to accept all types of city passes and discount tickets.

To do this, at the first stage, an analysis of the route network of Mosgortrans and private carriers was carried out to identify duplicate routes (looking ahead, let’s say that this task was far from being completed perfectly). After this, the city began to put routes up for auction, following which it signed a contract with carriers to service the routes for a period of 5 years. This whole procedure took place last year; around the beginning of May of this year, carriers began to operate routes.

All routes that were affected by the “new model” of ground public transport can be divided into three categories:

Routes previously served by private carriers, which are now being “socialized”.
Routes previously serviced by Mosgortrans, which are being transferred to service by private carriers under government contracts. Duplicate minibuses are closed.
Routes of private carriers that are closed altogether due to the strengthening of the work of duplicate routes of Mosgortrans.

In total, it was planned that non-state carriers would enter 211 city routes (67 were to be transferred from Mosgortrans).

In general, the picture looks quite logical, but how did it actually go?

Already from about the second week of May, when private carriers were supposed to enter the routes en masse, the first problems began to appear. To begin with, carriers began to massively miss the deadlines for launching their routes. The reason for this was quite banal: they did not have enough buses.

LIAZ-5292.65 carrier "Piteravto"

The fact is that in order to operate on routes, carriers had to massively purchase buses that meet the strict requirements of the city. Since purchasing used European buses was impossible due to the requirements, and the products of Chinese manufacturers had become more expensive due to exchange rates, the products of only two factories in the CIS actually met the requirements of the capital: LIAZ and MAZ. At first, it was reported that the Avtoline group would purchase products from the Belarusian manufacturer for its routes in the city; nothing was known in advance about the preferences of other carriers. But this is where the first problem occurred, when it turned out that due to problems with the supply of components, MAZ would not be able to fulfill the order of Avtoline and other private carriers in full. Under these conditions, the main burden fell on... the same LIAZ. It is not surprising that the plant was simply choked with so many orders, because in less than six months they had to assemble several hundred buses for private owners, and this was superimposed on another large order from Mosgortrans (which then, by agreement, had to be postponed to the second half of 2016).

MAZ-203 on route 26.

As a result, the delivery of these buses continued not only in May, but also at the beginning of summer, although orders have not yet been fully fulfilled. In order to prevent collapse, Mosgortrans transferred a number of routes to private owners much later than the established deadlines (when the buses arrived), and in exceptional cases, it was forced to return to their service again, because the situation with the non-exit of passengers crossed all reasonable boundaries.

Several other features of the “new model” of ground transport are associated with rolling stock. Firstly, this model does not have particularly large capacity buses (in other words, “accordions”). The reason for this remains completely unknown to anyone, although a number of routes diverted from Mosgortrans to private owners were previously served by just such buses. To compensate for this, private operators had to operate with shorter intervals and a larger number of flights, but as practice has shown, this solution is far from obvious.

Evolution of rolling stock on route No. 714.

So one of the most difficult situations arose on bus route No. 714 (Rizhsky Station - Pavel Korchagin St.). Before the transition to the “new model,” the route was served entirely by accordion buses, but now it is served simply by large-capacity buses. Yes, there were 3 more of them on the route than before, but this did not solve the problem of overcrowded buses at all. The only relief came only with the arrival of summer, when passenger traffic naturally decreases, but September is coming, which means we will most likely see overcrowded buses again.

In addition, another incident occurred with the rolling stock. A large number of routes of private carriers under contracts must be served by medium-capacity buses. But the problem turned out to be that the city’s requirements for this type of rolling stock forgot to include a ban on the hood arrangement. As a result, one of the largest carriers, the Avtoline group, decided to purchase Iveco VSN 700 “oversized” minibuses for such routes - such a large half-plastic invention, created on the basis of an ordinary cargo van.

Nizhny Novgorod-VSN700 (IVECO) - became the main symbol of minibus reform.

VSN700 body without trim. It's scary to think what would happen if a truck drove into it.

Everything would be fine, but this bus is not low-floor. Only formally, the rear area has a low floor, where you can enter with a wheelchair or large luggage, but by default, boarding is done at the first door, because It is she who has a validator, where the traditional 3 steps are located at the entrance.

Note that such buses partially entered the routes that were served by Mosgortrans low-floor buses. It turns out that conditions for passengers have not just worsened, but have rolled back 10 years. Let’s add to this the extremely narrow passages, rigid suspension, ineffective air conditioning, and also the fact that the purchased buses have a manual transmission (carriers try to minimize the cost of purchasing rolling stock), and it turns out that the “new model” not only did not give passengers a new level of comfort, but also, on the contrary, deprived of the old one. It is noteworthy that, unlike LIAZ, the production of these “overgrown” ones managed to rivet not just a lot of them, but even more than necessary. As a result, now such buses sometimes operate on routes where the contract provided for the operation of regular classic high-capacity buses! For example, this is exactly what has been happening on route No. 282 for several months now.

However, the first months of work of non-state carriers under government contracts turned out to be an unspoken transition period. According to Federal Law 220-FZ of July 13, 2015 on the cancellation of routes, carriers servicing them must be notified by the authorized body that made such a decision at least 180 days in advance. Therefore, all the old, classic “minibuses”, canceled by order of the Moscow Department of Transport dated February 15, 2016, could safely continue to operate until August 15, 2016. But on August 15, that same “X” day came, when all minibuses that did not correspond to the new model were supposed to disappear from the city (not counting New Moscow and the Moscow-region routes). True, several small carriers did not agree with this decision and decided to try to challenge this order in court, but their share of transportation is so insignificant that we will not pay much attention to this fact.

On August 15, passengers who came out of habit to public transport stops did not wait for their traditional minibuses. Complaints, angry posts on social networks, and articles in the media poured in. Why did such a long-implemented reform fail at the very last and most important stage?

The first and biggest mistake was made in terms of informing people. When new routes were launched, as a rule, everything was limited to just a few small announcements at stops, where in very small print a list of canceled routes was indicated, and in the entire district at once.

It must be admitted that this format is extremely unsuccessful from the point of view of perception by the average passenger. Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration to say that many passengers simply did not know about the cancellation of minibuses on August 15 and any compensating routes to replace them.

The second problem that began to appear was the movement intervals. Minibuses left many residential areas in the morning with a frequency of 2-3 minutes, and now they have been replaced by a larger bus, but with an interval of 10 minutes. Of course, in some cases the compensating route runs more often, but this is rather an exception. True, here we should also note the fact that in the evenings near the metro, minibuses usually departed less often. It’s just that passengers, as a rule, didn’t notice the wait, because... We were expecting a ride in the minibus at this moment! The favorite pastime of minibus drivers - departure only after the cabin is full - has not been canceled.

Another thing is that for some reason we have historically developed to compare intervals only during rush hours, as if no one drives at other times. And here the situation turns out to be completely different. If even in the late evening, minibus operators tried to maintain intervals of 10-15 minutes, then most of the routes replacing them at this time operate at 30-minute intervals. And this is actually a serious problem.

The issue of coordinating the route schedules of non-state carriers and Mosgortrans has not remained resolved. It’s funny to say, but in a number of cases, when a private owner services a shortened version of the “long” Mosgortrans route, both buses travel behind each other (a good example is the T9 bus and route 379).

The third problem was that compensatory bus routes under government orders did not always completely repeat the routes of minibuses that were canceled earlier. For example, route No. 76k does not enter the territory of the New Marfino microdistrict, as minibus 258m did earlier. There are other examples, for example, in the area near the Dynamo metro station, previously minibuses 4m and 592m followed from Stary Petrovsko-Razumovsky Passage to the metro along the shortest road through Left Palace Alley to Leningradsky Prospekt, followed by a U-turn along the overpass at the interchange with the Third Transport Ring. And for some reason, the new social routes 592 and 22k instead follow a one-way ring through Petrovsko-Razumovskaya Alley and Novaya Bashilovka. Not only is this route initially longer (and therefore slower), but it is also more congested! And who will like it?

Traffic diagram for buses No. 595 and No. 595m in the Dynamo metro area.

However, on August 15, another serious problem escalated much more sharply - the banal non-export of people. It turned out that obvious miscalculations were made in calculating the carrying capacity of the new routes. Firstly, a number of “minibus” routes, having become publicly available on single city tickets, became so popular that even without the abolition of commercial doubles they began to travel with full buses (the vast majority of which are of small or medium capacity). There was simply nowhere to put people from the canceled commercial routes. In other cases, Mosgortrans routes were not strengthened enough. All this leads to overcrowded buses, as well as to the fact that in some places minibuses that are already banned in the city still continue to operate, although now it is completely illegal.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that for the most part, the “new model” of ground transport and the integration of private carriers has been quite successful. For passengers using travel cards, the network of ground transport routes has increased significantly, minibus chaos at metro stations has disappeared, and in most areas transport has begun to run much more often. These are big advantages that seem obvious from the point of view of the average passenger.

As for the problems and local deteriorations that users of the “new model” have to face, it should be noted that the situation is completely fixable. Firstly, any contract can be modified by adding an additional agreement to it. Moreover, this work is already underway on a number of routes. Thus, it is possible to modify or change the route layout, traffic intervals and the type of rolling stock operating on the line. True, for some of the routes here, you have to wait for the carrier to finally deliver buses of the size that were provided for in the contract. By the way, special attention is required to remove intervals in the evening and off-peak hours. Now there are really huge problems with this on a number of routes. In the fall, the period of Mosgortrans drivers returning from vacation will begin; it is quite possible that some of its routes can be strengthened, so to speak, on their own. Although, you need to understand that transport reforms similar to this have not been carried out in the city before, so it is quite logical that it cannot go completely perfectly. Most likely, over the coming months we will see more than a dozen additional agreements to already signed contracts with carriers.

For those who want to immerse themselves in all the details and features of the transition period of the “new model,” we recommend a series of publications from our colleagues on the TR.ru website.

Well, for now we offer to help the Department of Transport find the most problematic points in the city and places where the “new model” has failed. Write in the comments, it is advisable to refrain from emotions and identify the problem as clearly as possible.