Putin to inject trillions into solving one of Russia’s “two perennial problems”
NOVOSIBIRSK, Russia - It seems that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in his ‘second coming’ to the Kremlin intends to completely do away with Russia’s bad roads, more famously known among citizens as ‘one of the country’s two major perennial misfortunes.’ The other is stupidity or foolishness. To achieve this colossal feat, Putin plans to catalyze a ‘real transportation infrastructure breakthrough’ in the field of road construction by tripling the current volume of funding the industry in the next 10 years to over 8trln rubles.
The nation’s powerful prime minister made these promises and other strategic pledges in Novosibirsk in his keynote address to the delegates to the All-Russian Transporters Conference, a gathering of ‘who is who’ in the nation’s transportation and related industries. Specifically, governments at all levels, according to Putin, will spend about 8.3trln rubles on road construction between now and 2020, thus almost tripling the sum of 2.7trln rubles invested in this industry in the past eight years, from 2002 to 2010.
Henceforth, all new roads in Russia will be built by using modern technologies and new highway construction standards and will feature modern flyovers, numerous lanes and higher capacity outputs to accommodate more vehicles, while at the same time alleviating traffic jams or collapses that have become the negative hallmarks of post-Soviet Russian roads and cities.
Besides, new road constructions will also be accompanied by modern roadside infrastructure and utilities such as medical, communications, hospitality services. “We really have to secure infrastructure and transport breakthrough in the field of road construction as a whole, as individual, isolated projects in this industry are no longer enough for today's Russia,” Putin added.
According to the prime minister’s data, the transportation sector of the Russian economy currently employs about 3.3mln people, who annually generate up to 6% of the nation’s GDP.
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