Moscow Mayor Goes on Traffic Control Tour

The monitoring center ensures the smooth running of the city’s transport network, which for five days of the January holidays carried a record 35 million passengers.

MOSCOW, January 7 (Sputnik) – Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin on Thursday undertook a tour of the city’s control center for road traffic management in Moscow, and was full of praise for its efforts in coordinating the heavy traffic which flows through the city.

“The monitoring center is one element of the transport monitoring system in Moscow. It is completely fitted out, and now is gradually being integrated into the real life and work of Moscow’s transport complex,” said Sobyanin, according to Moscow24. “The system itself is one of the best and most contemporary of world cities, and allows the control of above-ground traffic, suburban transport links, regimes on the road and floods of traffic.”

During the tour, the deputy of the city’s Department for Transport, Hamid Bulatov, told the mayor and his companion on the visit Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, that the center had recorded transport figures for the first five days of January’s national holiday, according to which, in total, the public transport network carried 35 million passengers.

The number is almost a million more than the same period of last year, said Bulatov, and comprises 16 million users of the Moscow metro, 11 million passengers on above ground city public transport, and almost eight million passengers of the Moscow railway.

The monitoring center first began work in December 2013, and serves to provide a link between traffic engineers and controllers, and those on the front line of interaction with the city’s residents, responsible for among other things ensuring the smooth passage of traffic and dealing with illegal parking. The specialists of the monitoring center are able to draw on a wide spectrum of instruments to manage road traffic, ranging from transport detectors and cameras to traffic signaling, which can be adapted to match the actual situation at hand.

The new center is part of a wider drive on the part of Moscow’s authorities to improve the user-friendliness of the city’s transport system. Last year the local government announced the release of a suite of mobile applications which make the lives of transport users in the city easier. Among other things, it offers the ability to send free text messages to other drivers based on their registration number, and provides information on transport fines and the receipt of notifications when public transport services arrive.