Moscow city authorities have budgeted up to 6.26 billion rubles (approx. $222 million) this year for the creation of an intelligent transportation system that improves traffic management.
The program will upgrade traffic lights and use satellite navigation systems to improve public transportation. As EWDN recently reported, a new law requires that all vehicles transporting passengers use GLONASS-supported navigators beginning July 2011.
“To call things by their right names, this is only about modernizing the existing system,” said Alexander Ovanesov, a partner at Strategy Partners, to Russian business daily Vedomosti.
Sitronics won the tender for this important contract, reports Vedomosti, and is expected to both deliver a project conception and to create a unified center for road traffic management by the end of the year.
Sitronics, a subsidiary of Sistema, is a major Russian provider of corporate telecommunications solutions. It comprises three core business divisions, Telecommunications Solutions, IT Solutions and Microelectronic Solutions.
However, no major international players were invited to take part in the tender, complained a spokesman for a consortium gathering AA Traffic of Singapore, French STI and British Verrus, developers of transportation systems and software.
An unnamed city government official confirmed to Vedomosti that it was a closed tender, and that bidders were required to have the permission of the FSB and Federal Guard Service to work on government roads.
Over the last 15 years, Moscow has become one of the most congested cities in the world. Driving to the airport has become so time-consuming that the matter is now considered a serious obstacle to the government’s ambition to turn Moscow into an international financial hub.
In Soviet times, when individual cars were considered a luxury, urban planners in Moscow gave priority to collective transportation. Since the ‘90s, when the introduction of the market economy made cars readily available, the infrastructure of city roads has proven totally incapable of handling the rapid increase in automobile traffic.
