Ramping up road safety and Russian infrastructure

Good basic infrastructure is essential for economic development anywhere, and in a country as vast as Russia it is as much a challenge as a necessity.

The recent completion of a new highway linking the cities of Khabarovsk and Chita - the first ever to cross the remote wilderness between Siberia and Russia’s Far East - was therefore hailed as historic by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The prime minister marked the event in late August with a 2,000 km road trip across Siberia in a canary-yellow Lada, noting that Russia “has never in its history been fully linked up with highways.”

Last year President Dmitry Medvedev underlined the need to tackle chronic under-investment in Russia’s 50,000 km road network. As of 2011, a new federal fund financed by additional taxes on gasoline and vehicles should generate 377 billion roubles ($12.5 billion, €9.7 billion) per year in order to upgrade 45,000 km of federal highways and to build 14,000 km of new roads by 2015.

Authorities also want to improve road safety, an area where Russia, with nearly 285 fatalities per million inhabitants a year, still lags far behind its international partners (in the EU, for example, the figure is 70 in 2009). The Russian government is considering adopting a number of German traffic rules and technical standards, and the German Transport Ministry recently announced it had already started translating them into Russian.

The government hopes that better road connections will help strengthen the country’s economic performance, increasing the mobility of workers, improving Russia’s integration into international transit corridors and spurring the development of services in the transport sector. Russian infrastructure development is also one of the main pillars of the Siberia 2020 strategy, which aims to diversify the region’s economy by encouraging the development of its high-tech, science, and tourism industries.