Light metro is located in an intermediate position between the usual metro, which everyone has long been accustomed to, and light rail transport systems. Like the classic metro, it is completely isolated from street transport. A light metro in the Moscow Region appeared about 12 years ago, when the Butovskaya line was built, which at one time successfully connected the final section of the Kaluga-Riga line with South Butovo.
What are the main differences?
The light metro line, as a rule, is built on the surface or located on special racks. For convenience, interchange nodes in large cities are arranged in tunnel sections. Light metro trains include a small number of wagons (from two to five). Light metro stations have a smaller length and are located outdoors.
Despite all the high cost, such a transport system costs 4-5 times cheaper than the classic version. That is why the light metro in the suburbs is the most promising direction for solving transport problems in the capital region.
Immediate plans
According to the governor of the Moscow region, the question of creating a light metro in the Moscow region should soon enter a new round of development. Given the enormous strategic importance, design work on the new branch can be carried out throughout the current year.
Turning your plan into reality will not be so easy. To date, the construction of new lines only in terms of developing a common scheme and concept requires investments of 150 million rubles.
Why is this needed?
Where will this grand transport project be implemented? The thing is that the construction of the light metro in a short period has moved from the sphere of rather vague promising directions for the development of Moscow Region transport to the zone of really implemented projects. The Moscow region is already so stuck in endless traffic jams that the need for new types of urban transport has become very obvious.
It is necessary to ensure the possibility of guaranteed and unhindered movement between various settlements of the Moscow region for a strictly standardized period of time. Only a light metro in the suburbs of Moscow can cope with this task. Any resident of Moscow and the region is well aware of endless trains of cars and buses, which in the mornings, like a river stream, continuously move towards the capital. Toward evening, the direction reverses. And all, it would seem, is good, but only until the slightest failure occurs. Then this turbulent river instantly turns into a standing swamp, which is not possible to leave until the moment when it itself begins to move. As a result, much more time is spent on the road than was originally planned, plus a spoiled mood and unrealized opportunities.
How are they moving within the Moscow region at present?
Specialists in the field of transport have long paid attention to the peculiarities of passenger flows on the Moscow Ring Road. It turned out that about 40% of cars use this route for the purpose of traveling between settlements located in the near Moscow suburbs.
There are simply no alternatives for establishing a normal transport connection. The light metro scheme will be constructed in such a way that the existing drawback is fully filled. Any transport system should provide a balance between urban public transport and private. In other words, every resident should have the right to choose: to use a private car today or to go on business by metro.
What is planned to build in the near future?
Light metro lines will run parallel to existing railway lines and thus complement the infrastructure of ground rail links. By and large, they will not have any relation to the metro. The first step is to build a light metro line to Khimki (across the left bank). The light metro will arrive in Odintsovo via Nemchinovka. Further plans include getting to Zheleznodorozhny and Pushkino.
All Moscow airports, according to long-term plans, must be contacted by new transport lines. The train movement interval will be no more than 7 minutes (with a reduction in peak hours to 4 minutes).
The geography of cities near Moscow, where new transport will become available, is very diverse. This is where the light metro will be available: Balashikha, Reutov, Mytishchi, Krasnogorsk, Vidnoe. In addition to the already mentioned settlements, final stops are planned in Kryukovo, Lyubertsy, Domodedovo, Podolsk, Nakhabino, Sheremetyevo.
At the moment, the situation is such that freight trains are forced to get along on the same railway lines with passenger trains, commuter trains and aeroexpress trains. The implementation of the light metro project will allow to separate these traffic flows. The task is to ensure that any passenger is not tied to any schedule. Arriving at the station at any time, he must be one hundred percent sure that the waiting time for the train to Moscow will not exceed 6-7 minutes.
Along with the large-scale project that is planned to be implemented in the Moscow Region, the construction of small transport systems of high-speed transport is planned in some areas. These areas include the Shcherbinka - Bobrovo - Drozhzhino - Rastorguevo line, where the population rapidly reaches 145 thousand people. To achieve the maximum reduction in the load on the local road system, a decision was made to organize the construction of an off-street high-speed transport system.
Distant perspective
Ideally, the light metro should act as an effective integrator of the transport system of the entire Moscow region into the transport system of the capital. The ultimate goal of this project should be the construction of the so-called chord lines, which should gradually become enclosed in a giant railway ring and cover the entire Moscow region. Such a transport line will make it easy to get from Domodedovo to Odintsovo or Ramenskoye.
In what form the project "Easy Subway - Moscow and the Moscow Region" will be implemented, they still do not know for sure. Given that in Russia, railways are adapted to any type of transport, in the future we can see a monorail, and a railway, and a high-speed street tram.
Will it be that simple?
The construction of light metro lines pulls quite a large-scale transformation in the layout of highways and urban infrastructure. At the very least, up to 30 pedestrian crossings will need to be reconstructed and about the same amount built from scratch. This is necessary in order to solve the issue of safe movement of pedestrians through the railway track.
Next, you need to think about combating the noise that trains make. Noise isolation of transport lines will be one of the paramount tasks, since moving trains create additional noise load on city streets.
Probably, construction of new road junctions or moving them to new places is indispensable. In some areas, it may be quite simple modernization. In most cases, the urban landscape will noticeably change.
In a word, such a large-scale construction generates a lot of overhead costs, which greatly affects the timing and total cost of construction work.
Some information in numbers
As a result, the new transport system will have a total length of lines of at least 200 km. There are 48 new stations to be built. At least 57 new viaducts will need to be built to equip the new metro lines. To provide convenient transfers to commuter trains and the regular metro, it is planned to build more than 200 intercepting parking lots that will accommodate up to 80 thousand cars. The number of trains running on new lines will be at least 120.
The cost of implementing the program for the construction of a light metro will be more than 230 billion rubles. Financing will be provided by Russian Railways together with the federal and regional budgets. The implementation of the light metro project will almost double the passenger flow, by 2020 it will be at least 1 billion people.
More about new projects
The project of the Strela high-speed transport system has been developed. Its task is to connect the Khimki housing estate with the Planernaya metro station. The length of this speed line is 7.2 km.
Who will implement the plan?
The authorities of the region have already received agreement on cooperation from a number of well-known companies. Officially, Siemens already became interested in this idea. This company has vast experience and established practice in the field of consultations on the organization of modern transport systems, the construction of railway lines, infrastructure and the creation of rolling stock. But the light metro in the suburbs is open for Russian manufacturers, who will certainly become participants in a grandiose project. It does not matter if they will cooperate with foreign companies or act independently. The authorities of the region pay special attention to the creation of the necessary production capacities in the Moscow region, able to master the production of modern rolling stock for a new transport project.
