Instead of paving the sidewalk with tiles, as was planned earlier, the Russian capital decided to return to asphalt pavements. From media sources it became known that the city authorities are thus saving budget funds.
On August 16, the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper published an article about the suspension of the program to replace the asphalt pavement in the capital with paving slabs. The Moscow government has decided to stop all plans in this area for the current year. The funds allocated for laying the tiles are planned to be used to solve other top-priority problems of the city.
The newspaper reminds that a large-scale campaign to replace asphalt with tiles began last summer. It was initiated by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. The plans of the city administration indicated that a tiled pavement would appear on 1, 134 million square meters of the capital's sidewalks. The amount allocated for these needs reached almost 4 billion rubles.
Already in mid-August of last year, Sobyanin announced that the authorities were failing to cope with the planned task, having completed only half of it. He noted that the work on laying tiles in the cold season, which will soon come, is very difficult. In total, in the summer of 2011, the replacement of asphalt affected 400 thousand square meters of sidewalk. About a billion rubles were spent on this. In 2012, paving slabs were supposed to appear on almost 240 thousand square meters. More than 100 thousand of them are located in the historical center of the city.
In March, a tender was announced for the execution of these works, but the tender did not take place. At first, they were postponed, and then completely canceled. From reliable sources it became known to Moskovsky Komsomolets that extremely unpleasant rumors for the image of the mayor became the reason for the rejection of the program for the widespread laying of tiles. According to some reports, Sobyanin's wife is engaged in the laying of tiles and its production.
However, the head of Moscow stubbornly denies this fact. The official reason is the presence of a huge number of claims of city residents to the new coating. Most of the complaints are about the quality of the tiles. Citizens also note that the asphalt surface was much more convenient for pedestrians with strollers.
