The General Director of JC “High-Speed Rail Lines” Alexander Misharin spoke at the traditional business breakfast hosted by the Minister of Transport of the Russian Federation within the framework of the X anniversary International forum "Transport of Russia".
“Dear colleagues, first of all we should discuss the transport system of the non-primary economic sector. This is a very important premise which forms the long-term program of the development of the country. Therefore, some criteria should be adapted.
One of the most important parameters of the commodity economy is speed. Our experience indicates that today we already transport every 10th passenger by the daytime high-speed trains. As for the volume of passenger traffic we have been completely mistaken.
We have been mistaken concerning the Sapsan trains, but to the lower side. This year we will transport over 5 million passengers loading all available trains, and the average load will be 90 %. We also have been mistaken concerning the high-speed lines to Nizhny Novgorod and Smolensk. Moreover, we have been mistaken on the load of the Central Ring Road which was expected to reach over 300 thousands only in two years but we already transport this volume of passengers today. So, we can say that in our county the demand for speed is so high that it cannot be even imagined! Namely the speed of public transport. This is very important.
The program for development of fast and high-speed traffic includes 4300 km of HSRs and 7000 reconstructions of the existing networks operating at the speed of up to 200 km/h. This program will touch over 100 mln people living in our country which represents more than three quarter of the total population. The effects of the program run to trillions. This year we did quite a lot of work on the Moscow-Kazan project excluding fast traffic.
Today we are completing the project documentation, receiving departmental expertise for the first section to Nizhny Novgorod. The railway which allows trains move 3-4 times faster requires different design solutions, so we performed a lot of work on certification of the main technical solutions.
We came across two issues. One of them was technical: the maximum price can be set on the basis of analogues or standards which are not developed for new modes of transport. The second issue: if we want to create new modes of transport we should recognize the revenue generation mechanisms for future periods which we will apply for Public Private Partnership projects. Non-recognition of these mechanisms is one of the reasons preventing the implementation of Public Private Partnership projects
I am convinced that today we have everything to start implementing the first real high-speed project in the next year”.
Source: http://www.hsrail.ru/
