Moscow to continue its endless road patching quest

Hardy had Muscovites recovered after three months of pavement replacement than another major road reconstruction has started in the Russian capital.

With brick pavements banned, asphalt layers are back with a vengeance in Moscow.

The authorities have splashed an extra 1.2 billion rubles ($40 million) to fix the city’s potholes.

Originally, the city planned to spend around 19 billion rubles on the project, but a check-up revealed there were more problems with Moscow’s roads than was initially thought.

This is not the first makeover Moscow roads have had this summer. Back in June, the mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, ordered that more than one million square meters of asphalt on the city’s streets be replaced with pavement bricks.

The bricks are identical to those used to pave the Arbat and Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Contractors say the quality of the material far exceeds that of asphalt. It is designed to be used for some 20 years and can easily be removed during subsequent renovations.

The initiative was part of Moscow’s program to make the city more appealing to tourists.

The new brick roads, however, proved a black hole for the city’s budget. Recently, the authorities decided to splash out an extra three million rubles on the controversial pavement revamp. The money will be used to control the quality of the brick-laying. Builders had to start again from scratch on several sidewalks after the authorities were unhappy with their work.

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