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Политические барьеры отказа от турникетов в наземном городском транспорте Москвы
This chapter is devoted to an examination of the transition to a turnstile-free system of payment for fares in ground transport in Moscow. In a sense, this chapter concludes the conversation about the life cycle of technologies, allowing you to see how a single technology is formed, maintained, and at some point dies off, being replaced by the next.
Central questions: what factors made it possible to switch to the new fare payment technology, why the turnstiles were removed exactly in 2018, and what lesson Moscow learned from this experience.
As part of the study, we observed how passengers paid for travel with turnstiles in December 2017 and without turnstiles in 2018. In addition to observations, in April 2019, we conducted interviews with six experts who are involved in this topic: a representative of an NGO protecting the rights of passengers, a journalist for a newspaper about construction in Moscow, a researcher at the Institute of Transport, an expert in the field of transport consulting, an analyst Department of Transport and bus driver. We also sent an official request to the Department of Transport, to which we received an official response (see annexes 1 and 2).
With the help of the collected material, we are considering several versions of why it became possible to abandon turnstiles. Among them: the growth of payment discipline among passengers, the recruitment of progressive experts to the Department, an increase in the number of large-capacity rolling stock, including the new Vityaz-M trams, the electoral cycle and patent wars.
As a result, we show that there was no linear transition from one payment system to another, that the binary opposition “power - passengers” for understanding the current situation does not work, and that there was no static plan that assumed passing certain stages, one after another. Instead, we are witnessing an extremely confusing situation where completely different factors of a socio-technological nature - changing user practices, the formation of an expert community, the commissioning of new trams, electoral cycles and patent wars - together determine large-scale shifts, the consequences of which can affect more than a dozen years and cover the entire country.
In book
