Moscow mayor calls his city's planning "a collection of faults"

Moscow collected all the town-planning blunders imaginable, the capital's mayor Sergei Sobyanin told a international conference Tuesday.

In the conference devoted to organization of the traffic in Russia, the city mayor said that for the last 20 years, which is the term in office of his predecessor Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow has been crippled beyond recognition, RBC news agency reported.

While the city's population rose by 30 percent, the length of the roads grew by less than two percent, Sobyanin said.

He also criticized the sluggish pace of subway lines construction.

As a remedy, Sobyanin submitted his plans of building the transit roads bypassing Moscow, cutting all illegally built entrances to the highways and speeding up subway construction.

He also proposed the government of Moscow region to scrap the mega-malls in the city vicinities which have no parking space big enough.

Sobyanin, who took over the Moscow City Hall in October, promised to make coping with notorious Moscow's traffic jams a backbone of his tenure.

Source: Xinhua