WE AND THE CAR
CITY
PONT'S KAZAN
Alexey SOLOPOV
In this picture there is a city ice crossing …. The endless cavalcade of cars crawling at a speed of 15 km / h resembles a funeral procession. Fortunately, there were no cataclysms in the vicinity, no casualties and destruction. Nevertheless, the ice crossing in the city center is an extraordinary phenomenon caused by extraordinary circumstances.
With bridges, the capital of Tatarstan (and there are only three of them) was unlucky. Built in the late 70s using the latest “glue” technology, the third bridge threatens to collapse. Having limited movement along it, a double bridge is feverishly being erected nearby. Two bridges a hundred meters from one another look absurd, but this makes it possible not to die in one of the main urban transport arteries.
The second bridge in the city center has long suffered from chronic overload. When it was closed for several days for research, something unimaginable was happening in Kazan. Indeed, all three bridges pass the most important public transport routes.
Even before the automobile boom of the last five to seven years, the need to build a fourth bridge across the Kazanka River was more than obvious. They even began to build it. That is, not the bridge itself, but one of the approaches to it. The project of the second - from the historical part of the city - was ready ten years ago, but has still not been implemented.
The result was a practical automobile collapse of the city last summer. The solution was, frankly, bold: they proposed to make the fourth bridge a pontoon, laying it on the decks of used barges. "Pontoon crossing" - from the arsenal of sappers. But there were no military operations in Kazan, thank God, since the Civil War. But here it’s not up to prestige - only ecologists spoke out against the pontoons.
True, the case with the barges did not burn out. The ripening winter traditionally narrowed the roadway with snowdrifts. Riding became almost impossible. The only way out was the ice crossing.
They opened it shortly after the New Year, immediately determining the life expectancy - until spring. Closing in snowfalls and thaws, it lasted two months: at first it acted from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., unloading the center during the hours of main loads. From mid-January, it became round-the-clock. Everything is as it should be: a warning to unlock the doors and unfasten seat belts, traffic police post, the Ministry of Emergency Situations …
Both pontoon and ice crossings are the essence of non-trivial solutions to one of the many problems of the big city. The city hall workers who accepted it, as well as those who ensured its implementation, deserve all praise. But…
The threat of road thrombosis has been hanging over Kazan for many years. Ice and pontoons are temporary, extraordinary solutions to only ONE transport problem. In a city with more than a million inhabitants and the corresponding number of cars, TWO underpasses and THREE road crossings at two levels …