Getting around a Ukrainian city

Ukrainian cities inherited dense, well-designed public transport: metro systems, extensive tram and trolleybus networks, and a settlement pattern built around them rather than around cars.

What happened to it

Underinvestment. Rolling stock aged, track deteriorated, and fares were held below cost for political reasons, which guaranteed that operators could not maintain the system.

Into that gap came the marshrutka: privately operated minibuses running fixed routes. They filled a genuine service gap and are, in transport terms, a poor solution — small vehicles, high labour cost per passenger, congestion, uncomfortable, unsafe by comparison and inaccessible to anyone with reduced mobility.

What reform involves

Replacing minibuses with proper buses on scheduled routes, which requires municipal capacity to operate or contract them.

Electronic ticketing, which sounds trivial and is transformative: it produces data on who travels where, which is the basis of any rational network planning, and it removes cash handling.

Fare policy that admits the real cost, with subsidy delivered transparently to the people who need it rather than hidden in a below-cost fare for everyone.

And renewal of tram and trolleybus infrastructure, which is expensive per kilometre and cheap per passenger over the asset's life.

Why it matters for reconstruction

Cities being rebuilt will decide their transport pattern for a century. Rebuilding around cars is the expensive option that looks cheap initially. The existing rail-based bones are an inherited asset most European cities would pay a great deal to have.

Rebuilding a system dismantled over thirty years is a familiar calculation in my trade: deferring maintenance always looks cheaper than rebuilding and never is. Taking out a tram line takes a year and putting it back takes ten. Its importance for reconstruction is this — a city's public transport decides who is able to return to it.