MOSCOW, December 23. /TASS/. The advance section of a new motorway linking Moscow and St Petersburg opens in the Moscow region on Tuesday. It covers 43 kilometers of the route, from the fifteenth through to the fifty-eighth kilometer.
Spokespeople for the Administration of the Russian President said the chief of administration staff, Sergey Ivanov, Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, and Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobyov, officials of the state automobile road company Rosavtodor, and executives of the bridge construction group Mostotrest and VINCI group are expected to attend the official ceremony.
The opening of even the first section of the M-11 road motorway will mean a considerable alleviation of transport problems for a number of towns and densely populated areas located to the northwest of Moscow City, like Khimki, Dolgoprudny, Skhodnya, and Zelenograd, which is administratively a remote district of Moscow.
The new road also offers a much easier access to Sheremetyevo airport, the city’s largest air hub.
The section will be toll-free until next summer when a fee of 4 rubles per kilometer is to be introduced.
The state corporation Rosavtodor is the ordering customer in the project and the Northwest Concessionary Company co-owned by the French corporation VINCI and the Russian infrastructure group Mostotrest is the contractor.
The overall cost of the M-11 project effectuated in the form of public-private partnership exceeds 70 billion rubles (about $ 1.3 billion), of which the state has provided 22.8 billion rubles.
Connection of the M-11 motorway with the Outer Automobile Ring Road, which runs around the outer perimeter of Moscow City within its administrative boundaries prior to 2011, as well with the streets inside Moscow has required construction of new flyovers and interchanges
M-11 toll road that will run more or less in parallel to the existing M-10 Rossiya federal road will match all the European standards in terms of safety and quality. It will cover a distance of 669 kilometers between Moscow’s Outer Automobile Ring Road and the St Petersburg Ring Motorway.
Like the old road, new one will cross the territories of the of the Moscow, Tver, Novgorod, and Leningrad regions.