UrBC, Moscow, September 16, 2019. The Russian Government is considering adopting a large-scale public transport renovation program initiated by the VEB.RF, Kommersant reports.

The ten Russian cities that are already ‘well prepared’ for the upgrades are expected to become part of the program. These are: Yekaterinburg, Perm, Nizhniy Novgorod, Saratov, Tver, Voronezh, Volgograd, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, and Kazan (total population count: 11.1 million people). RUB 196bn will get allocated to replace 5,900 buses, 1,500 trams, and 1,300 trolley-buses with new ones and RUB 112bn will get directed to infrastructure rebuilding.

Once the pilot renovation projects have been completed, the program will get applied to forty more cities and towns in 2020-2024; the investments required for improvements in all the fifty locations involved in the program (27.3 million people all in all) come to RUB 707bn.

The program is expected to cover over a thousand towns eventually, with RUB 2.1 trillion in required funding, preliminary estimates indicate.

95,700 new buses, 6,500 trolley-buses, 6,700 trams, and 3,500 electro-buses will get purchased for the public transport infrastructure by 2035. This will be accompanied by state regulation of the pricing policy, the urban transit business getting handed over to larger operators, and electric transport upgrades becoming concession-based.