Kyiv's traffic and the transport economics behind it

Kyiv's traffic problem has a specific and well-understood cause. The road network was planned for a city in which private car ownership was a rarity, and car ownership then rose several-fold within two decades without a corresponding change to the network.

Every element of the current situation follows from that mismatch.

What the network was designed for

Soviet urban planning allocated road capacity on the assumption that most journeys would be made by public transport, and it built the public transport to match. The result is a city with wide radial avenues, few parallel routes, very large blocks, and a metro system built to move a high share of the population.

That design works well at low car ownership and poorly at high car ownership, because the wide avenues have no capacity relief valves. When a radial route congests, there is no parallel street network to absorb the overflow.

The metro

Three lines, deep, fast, and carrying a very high share of daily journeys. It is the reason central Kyiv remains accessible at peak times and it is the single most important piece of infrastructure in the city.

It is also at capacity on the central sections at peak, has not been meaningfully extended in a decade, and the extensions that were planned have been repeatedly deferred for financing reasons. Rolling stock renewal has been partial.

Any serious transport plan for Kyiv is a metro plan first and everything else second.

What has been tried

The interventions of the past fifteen years have been a mix.

Parking enforcement improved substantially, which freed carriageway capacity that had been used for informal parking — a cheap intervention with a measurable effect.

Bus lanes have been introduced on several corridors, with mixed enforcement.

The urban electric train service using existing rail infrastructure has been developed as a low-cost capacity addition, and it works where the alignment happens to suit demand.

Cycling infrastructure has expanded from almost nothing, though the topography limits how far it can go — this is a city of steep hills.

What has not happened is congestion charging, significant new road capacity, or the metro extensions.

What it means practically

For a visitor or a business, four points.

Use the metro between four and eight in the evening regardless of what a mapping application says about driving times. The application is optimistic.

Locate an office near a metro station if staff recruitment matters to you. Commute time is a real factor in retention and the difference between a five-minute walk to a station and a twenty-minute bus connection is significant.

Plan logistics deliveries outside peak hours. Restrictions on heavy vehicles in the centre apply during the day and the enforcement is real.

And note that river crossings are the binding constraint. There are a limited number of bridges, they carry very high volumes, and an incident on one of them affects the whole city.

The wider point

Kyiv is a case study in a general phenomenon: a city built for one transport model acquiring the vehicle fleet of a different one, without the intervening investment.

The cities that handled this transition well — Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Vienna — did it by investing heavily in rail-based public transport during the motorisation period rather than after it. Kyiv did not have the fiscal capacity to do that during the 2000s, and the cost of not having done it is paid daily.

Related in this archive

• Tourism: what the sector was, and what a recovery would require
• Andriyivskyy Descent and the old upper town: reading a city from one street
• Kyiv for the visiting professional: districts, distances and what is worth the time
• Ukraine Annual Review 2010: recovery on two channels

Car numbers tripling while the road network stayed the same is an arithmetic whose result was never in doubt. It is also why the metro keeps the city working — its capacity is independent of the traffic. In practice that means this: when I plan a delivery in this city I account not for the hour but for whether the route runs parallel to the metro.