A slow start of a “high-speed” tram
365 million hryvnias invested in the reconstruction of the line, but “it continues knocking as it did before”
Last Saturday Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and the first deputy head of the Kyiv City State Administration Oleksandr Popov opened the first part of the reconstructed line of the capital’s high-speed tram.
Now 40 trams will run on the line with a capacity of 15-20 thousand passengers per hour. In the opinion of officials, this will decrease the amount of buses on the route by 80 units. According to Oleksandr Popov, trams will run at an interval of 2-6 minutes, and it will be possible to cover the entire route in 20-30 minutes. “Thus we will solve the transportation issue for the Borshchahivka residential area’s residents,” Popov pointed out.
This is the first high-speed tram line on the territory of the former USSR. Its construction started in 1975 and was finished in 1978. In June 2007, in order to update and modernize the roadbed of the railway and the rolling stock, which would allow increasing the speed and decreasing the noise, a reconstruction of the speed line was started. It was planned to be finished in 30 months. However, due to a lack of money and difficult weather conditions, the opening of this reconstructed line was constantly postponed. Though as Azarov pointed out during the opening ceremony, the government, in view of the objective state of the reconstruction, did not plan such a sudden opening of the high-speed tram line. However, the city government managed to persuade the government that with extra efforts they would cope with finishing the reconstruction before the local elections.
The reconstruction, according to the Kyiv City State Administration, cost 365 million hryvnias. According to the estimates of the head of the permanent commission of the Kyiv Council on Transportation and Communication, a member of the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko Dmytro Oliinyk, this sum would be enough to build a railway line. “According to the estimates of specialists from the Kyiv Electric Transport Institute, for these costs it would be possible not only to build a tram, but also a railway branch ‘Sapsan,’ and commute to Borshchahivka with the speed of over 200 kilometers per hour,” he stressed. Oliinyk reminded that the inspection of electric transport of the Ministry for Residential and Municipal Economy repeatedly stopped the reconstruction of the tram due to detected violations, therefore the reconstructed tram will be “high-speed” only formally.
Meanwhile the government assures that all drawbacks and defects were removed. In particular, Popov highlighted that for two months they had to replace about six kilometers of rails. However, as employees of Kyiv Passenger Transportation anonymously told The Day at the opening ceremony, this replacement was dodgy. “Cleaned out, trimmed old rails — the replacement is done,” one of the employees said ironically.
Moreover, out of the forty trams that will run on the high-speed line, only eight are new. Seven were purchased in Dnipropetrovsk from the Pivdenny machine-building plant. One more tram from the Leningrad machine-building plant is only temporarily in Kyiv. The remaining 32 machines are repaired old models that were already used on this route.
Traveling from the station Kiltseva Doroha to the station Starovokzalna will be free of charge for passengers during the first week, assured Popov. However, so far one can use the high-speed tram at only five out of 13 stations. Apart from the Kiltseva Doroha and Starovokzalna stations, the stations Romain Rolland, Hnat Yura and Simia Sosninykh were opened. “On March 1 let us finally put it into operation,” said Azarov, addressing Popov.
Borshchahivka residents are glad the reconstruction is over. “In order to get home I spend up to an hour and a half in traffic jams,” tells The Day Natalia, an employee of a supermarket located near the station Starovokzalna. “Of course, it will be faster by tram.”
However, not everyone notices the positive effect of the reconstruction. In particular, the first passengers of the reconstructed tram never felt the promised sound-absorbing technology. “It keeps knocking as it did before,” states the pensioner Heorhii. And the speed doesn’t correspond to the name of the tram — only 25 kilometers per hour. Officials promise to increase it in March to 30-35 kilometers per hour. However, already one can declare it a failure: Kyiv residents will not be deprived of the rattle of the old trams, which will be “high-speed” only due to a fall in the number of stops.
