Why do you have to wait a long time for public transport in St. Petersburg and who is to blame for this?

The waiting time for a bus at a bus stop has increased significantly since the beginning of transport reform in St. Petersburg, and officials are going to punish commercial carriers for this. At the same time, banal arithmetic shows that the carrier, even with all its desire, will not be able to fulfill the requirements for the interval.

With the beginning of the optimization of public transport in St. Petersburg, which is proudly called “transport reform” in Smolny, there has been a collapse at bus stops - people have to wait for a long time for their routes and then almost fight to squeeze into them. Moreover, from June 15 the situation will worsen even more - it is then that the so-called “low-capacity transport” (in common parlance – “minibuses”) will disappear from the city streets.

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Experts see the reason for “human traffic jams” in incorrect measurements of passenger flows that were carried out during the pandemic, in an ill-conceived payment system, and simply in the city’s peculiar “savings” on residents. However, all the answers, as expected, lie on the surface - in a very large city, the transport infrastructure as a whole is simply very poorly developed, and the whole “reform” is to reduce the number of transport while simultaneously increasing its capacity.

_{However, in practice it turns out that 1 large bus is not equal to 4 small ones, even if it accommodates more people - hence the greatly increased intervals.}

The second important point is fuel and refueling of these same buses. The fact is that subsidies from the state are allocated to regional budgets for transport powered by natural gas. Moreover, officials emphasized that the overwhelming majority of this very transport would run on liquefied natural gas (LNG), but did not think through gas stations for them. So, only in May 2022, the city governor Alexander Beglov made a deal with the head of Gazprom about the construction of gas stations, which will begin only in 2023. However, even the most modern buses will not be able to work a full day without refueling in a huge city.

A little simple arithmetic. The most modern domestically produced medium-capacity bus at the moment able to pass at one gas station about 300 kilometers with a cryobak volume of 350 liters. Last year St. Petersburg in large numbers bought the new LiAZ-5292 LNG - their tank volume is slightly larger - 375 liters, but in accordance with the characteristics, a bus can also drive on this tank no more 300 kilometer.

_{It turns out that the lion's share of routes existing in the city today will not be able to work even one shift on one tank - they will have to refuel.}

Here we return again to the question: “where?” Because, let us remind you, officials did not think through the issue of gas stations in the city in advance, but only now began to urgently allocate land for gas stations to Gazprom without tenders.

Now we open the map of St. Petersburg bus routes and look, for example, the length of the route bus number 207 – 47 kilometers. Bus 343 – 36 km, № 299 - 32,5 km and these are only those that are located in hard-to-reach areas - Kronstadt, Lomonosov, Pavlovsk. That is, on one cryobask, these buses will be able to travel on average about 8 trips without refueling. And according to the standard, it seems like you need to make 10 flights.

It’s about the same story with the city center - for the sake of reform, many bus routes were extended without thinking about how they would work, but in this case we are primarily interested in the outskirts of the city - as we said above, the transport system is not developed - There are no metro, trams or trolleybuses here. Electric trains are also not an alternative - the only project that would allow commuter trains to travel not according to a schedule, but at regular intervals, it seems, no one implement is not going to St. Petersburg.

_{It turns out that residents of distant areas have no alternative to road transport - but they are deprived of minibuses, and instead of them, buses are installed on the line, which will run at intervals much greater than electric trains.}

However, when studying these routes, we managed to find someone who was previously designated as guilty in Smolny. These are commercial carriers who, as part of transport reform, have to buy all these high-capacity buses at their own expense. Head of the city transport committee Kirill Polyakov speaks plainlythat carriers will not be paid if the interval is constantly violated. Now, if we carefully look at who owns all the longest routes in the city, we will find that these are just commercial carriers.

What do we have in the bottom line? Large buses will physically not be able to fulfill the traffic intervals set by officials; because of this, carriers will not receive full funding, and the end consumer - the passenger of this very bus - will suffer the most.