Great video of Purple Line Extension….in Moscow

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Grab your Troika Card and check out this great video of construction work on the Purple Line Extension in Moscow — only thing missing is “Eye of the Tiger” from the soundtrack. Of course, Metro is gearing up for construction of the 3.9-mile first phase of the Purple Line Extension between the existing Wilshire/Western station and Wilshire/La Cienega in Beverly Hills.

With car traffic in Moscow having taken a turn for the much, much worse since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Moscow subway is undergoing a tremendous expansion this decade with additional mileage and stations being added to several lines.  Wikipedia (to be taken with an appropriate grain of salt) says there are 15 tunnel boring machines currently at work, which sounds plausible.

Categories: Projects

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8 replies ›

  1. It’s not a fair question because Russia and the US is totally different.

    Over in Russia, you don’t get to question government projects. You don’t like it, too bad, sucks to be you. Your ideas triumph over what the people want so shut up and let us do our job. And they get the job done faster and cheaper.

    Over here, you can come up with any lame excuse to sue the government to stall it just because “you don’t like the idea.” Who cares about what the voters want, I don’t like it, so I’m gonna do whatever it takes to kill that project. That’s the American way. This leads to slow progress and more expensive cost over runs. A lot of time and money is wasted in studies, meetings, discussions, before even a shovel is put to ground.

    Just look at all the projects in LA that are being stalled today and that were stalled the past. Green Line is a train that goes from nowhere to nowhere thanks to lame excuses like it’ll eat into parking fees and special interests of taxi companies. Purple Line is stalled thanks to Beverly Hills NIMBYs. High rise condo constructions from Hollywood to West LA are halted thanks to lame excuses from neighborhood leaders who say stuff like “the project is just too big, it’ll cause more traffic.” The LAX expansion can’t be done for the same reasons too. The CAHSR project? Yeah, that’s a dud too thanks to selfish Palo Alto residents. And it took forever for LA to do common sense things as locking up the gates and it’s taking forever for Metro to fix TAP.

    All of these are thanks to selfish people who have too much money to influence politics that they look after what’s best for their own interests. Politicians look at who has the most money and who is the most vocal rather than looking for the best interests of the public. That’s the American way.

    What we really need is a new law to shut up these folks and prevent special interest groups from influencing politics.

    As soon as we the voters decide upon the idea, it should be done immediately without wasting time and money on stupid studies, meetings and discussion that get us nowhere.

  2. Steve, what do you think Metro can learn from their Moscow coutnerpart about transit expansion? Or, is that even a fair question given the differences in policies between cities in the US and those abroad?

  3. I’m sure Moscow doesn’t have NIMBY whiners flapping their arms crying about “won’t someone pleaaaase think of the children” stalling everything like we have.

  4. Moscow Metro runs on 90-second Headways. They have clocks at the ends of the stations that start counting up as a train leaves, and even late at night, those never register much more than 3 minutes. I’m looking forward to seeing that level of service in Los Angeles!

  6. The Moscow traffic congestion is easily the worst I have seen anywhere in the world. The really depressing part is that the city has a fantastic subway system with absolutely beautiful stations and I didn’t see any big rig-size trucks traveling through the city taking up room on the streets, only delivery-size ones. We spent many hours during both the day and night stuck in traffic between our river boat and where we wanted to go. But hold onto a safety bar while riding on their subways–they seem to go at the speed of high-speed rail. It will be very interesting to see if Moscow traffic improves with the addition of more subway miles, or if as that country’s economy improves, more cars will be added to the road and no improvement will be seen at all.