Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 11 – To link the
country together in the 21st century, the Russian Federation should
be promoting the development of domestic air routes instead of building new
rail lines, according to Vladislav Inozemtsev. But unfortunately and reflecting
Moscow’s conservatism and corruption, it is doing just the opposite.
In today’s “Vedomosti,” Inozemtsev,
who heads the Moscow Center for Research on Post-Industrial Society, argues that
Moscow is making a major mistake in continuing to spend money on railways and
especially high-speed links rather than choosing to invest in the development
of air links (vedomosti.ru/opinion/news/12987471/vozduh_protiv_relsa?full#cut).
Indeed, he writes “for half the
price of a hypothetic rapid railway between Moscow and Kazan, it would be
possible to make all of Russia much more united and without quotation marks” by
building more airports and allowing for more regular flights not just between
regional centers and the capital but among those centers.
For Russian railways to recoup the
cost of a high speed train between Moscow and Kazan alone, he points out, would
take 89 years if all the fares were spent entirely on retiring the amount the
Russian government plans to spend and up to 50 years if, as would certainly be
the case, some of that money would be spent on the operation of that line.
Russia is “a great railroad power,”
Inozemtsev says, occupying third place (behind only the United States and
China) in terms of the length of its tracks. But because of its enormous side,
Russia has one of the least dense rail networks in the world, one that is an
order of magnitude less dense that that found in Germany, Italy and France.
The “golden age” of railroads
occurred in the 1950s, when trains carried approximately 40 to 60 percent of
the goods in Europe and the United States. But now this figure has fallen to 38
percent in the US, to 17.5 percent in Canada and to 8.2 percent in 15 countries
of the European Union.
That decline in traffic has been
paralleled by a decline in the length of the rail networks. In the US, rail lines fell from 409,000 km to
225,000; in India, from 114,000 to 64,000; and in Britain from 34,000 to
16,000. Moreover, in large countries like Russia, the fashion of high speed
rail appears to have passed. China is the only exception to this pattern.
In contrast, air traffic has boomed,
especially in large countries with dispersed populations. Canada has more than 752 airports with
regular flights and another 1700 to service private planes. In Brazil, these
figures are 718 and 3545; in Indonesia, 683and more than 2400; and in the US,
15,000 airports with concrete runways alone.
In the Russian Federation, on the
other hand, the number of airports is now 257, down from 1302 in 1992, despite
the enormous distances within the country and the absence of roads and rail lines
in many places. As a result, only 39 percent of Russia’s air passengers are
flying on domestic routes.
The Russian government, Inozemtsev
says, does not appear capable of developing the air sector but “nonetheless
defends it from competition,” in ways that prevent private interests and
especially foreign investors from getting involved. Given that the latter would find it
relatively easy to pay for new airports in Russia. That is a tragedy.
“In any case,” he writes, “for six
to eight billion US dollars, the eastern regions of the country could be
covered by a network of completely contemporary airports especially if they
were constructed by private investors rather than government corporations,”
much less than the cost of a high speed train between Moscow and Kazan.
According to Inozemtsev, the explanation for Moscow’s
failure to do so lies in the following reality: “the aviation branch is too
contemporary for our ‘statified’ country, which lives by the rules of hands on
management,” values “not flexibility but stability,” and “not the result but
the sum of money spent.”
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