Drivers feeling pinch of traffic snarls caused by work on two of Kyiv's central bridges
of twisted steel rails laid out along the center of the bridge. The tracks, wrenched from the pavement, will likely never carry another tram again.
Following a Kyiv City Administration order signed by Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko, municipal workers on June 9 began dismantling the tramline that connected Leningrad Square on the city’s Left Bank with Druzhby Narodiv, a major roadway leading into the city’s center, on the right bank.
The city said that the tramlines on the 51-year-old bridge would be removed by June 25, while reconstruction and asphalting would be completed by July 3, transforming the bridge’s four-lane roadway into six lanes.
Volodymyr Zhukov, the general director of Kyivavtodor, the city’s road repair company, said that the Paton Bridge would eventually be converted to eight lanes, but only after the construction of two new bridges is completed in 2009.
Construction of the Podil Bridge, which will run across Trukhaniv Island, has already begun, and the city has plans for the construction of a combined road and rail bridge, along the Kyiv-Moskovsky-Darnytsya railway line.
The tramline across Paton Bridge will be replaced by a bus route running from Leningrad Square to Kontraktova Square, and the city will eventually add a trolleybus route over Paton Bridge.
“On the one hand, the work on the Paton Bridge is good, since it will make it wider,” said Serhy Kryvolabov, a driver for the Express Taxi service. “The thing is that work on the bridge is being done in the daytime, when it should be done during the night. Yesterday I was stuck in traffic at the bridge for 40 minutes.”
Municipal workers have been laboring at all hours of the day, despite a city administration order that road work should be done between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m. only.
Kryvolabov said that he welcomed Kyiv’s plans to widen and build roads, “because driving has become impossible in this city. Traffic has become as bad as in Moscow.’
Kyiv tabled the plan to rip out the tram rails on the Paton Bridge last November as part of a large-scale plan to construct more roads, overpasses and bridges in a bid to relieve congestion in an increasingly traffic-ensnared city.
The city plans to build a total of five additional bridges by 2020.
Currently, only four bridges span the Dnipro River, with three of them – the Metro Bridge, the Paton, and the South Bridge – in the center of town. The Moscow Bridge connects the right and left banks’ northernmost districts.
Kyivavtodor’s Zhukov said that the Paton Bridge, which is one-and-a-half kilometers long, and 21-meters wide, was built to accommodate 10,000 cars a day.
Official city data estimates that more than 100,000 cars pass over it every day. That number is expected to keep rising.
Serhy Sahnenko, the head of auto insurance at insurer Alcona, told the Post that there are currently about 3.5 million cars registered to individuals and businesses in Kyiv. That’s more than the city’s official population of 2.6 million people, the number that was recorded in Ukraine’s 2002 census.
With the city’s car population rising dramatically over the last several years, hours-long traffic jams during the morning rush hour on the Paton Bridge – mostly due to car accidents, or routine repair – have become an increasingly common occurrence.
With road repair work also underway on the South Bridge as of June 1, and scheduled to end October 30, traffic on all three of Kyiv’s central bridges has been nearly paralyzed during morning rush hour.
That’s poor city planning, Kryvolabov said. He said that many drivers try to circumvent traffic on the Paton Bridge by taking the South Bridge, but with municipal works on two of the city’s three main bridges going on concurrently, the Metro Bridge has become overburdened.
“There are two main points here,” he said. “First, you have to work on the bridges one at a time, and second, the work should be done at night.”
