Every day, motorists in Kyiv face problems: numerous traffic jams and difficulty finding parking spaces. Volodymyr Prokopiv, Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration, explains this by the significant increase in the number of cars on the roads (and in the yards) of the capital.
According to Prokopiv, there are currently about 1.2 million cars on the streets of Kyiv.
«This is an extremely large number of them for our city, and something will have to be done about it,» he admitted.
For comparison, in January 2022, before the outbreak of full-scale war, the Kyiv City State Administration estimated the average daily number of cars on the capital’s roads at 820,000, and the maximum at 1.12 million. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there were 1.38 million registered cars in Kyiv at the time. This figure alone is more than 2 times the capacity of Kyiv’s roads. The transportation model showed that Kyiv’s road network was designed for 500 thousand cars.
According to Volodymyr Prokopiv, the number of cars in the capital is growing «because of the war». This creates an additional burden on the roads. Refusing to use cars on a daily basis will help to remedy the situation.
However, according to Prokopiv, such a car-free policy should be voluntary and motivated by a grassroots movement. At the same time, Kyiv could introduce some restrictions, such as a ban on cars that do not meet certain emission standards, as was done in London.
The official also noted that residents of Kyiv’s suburbs, which is about half a million people, could leave their cars in municipal interceptor parking lots. However, they were never built.
However, Prokopiv did not mention that the number of cars on Kyiv’s roads can also be affected by the suspension of public transportation during air raids and the inability to resume the traffic schedule for several hours after the shutdown. This makes people refuse to use public transportation.
Source: hmarochos