Arkady Rotenberg chose the road leading to the trillion

Mostotrest may be awarded a contract to build a highway along the Black Sea coast to Sochi.
11.03.2019
Vedomosti
Origin source
The project of the highway along the Black Sea coast by the summer can get access to budget financing. About a month ago, Rosavtodor presented the Ministry of Transport to the Ministry of Transport (Vedomosti familiarized itself with a copy, the content was confirmed by three people participating in the design of the project and two federal officials). Now a justification is being prepared for the inclusion of road sections in the development plan for the trunk infrastructure, on the basis of which budget investments in this presidential term of Vladimir Putin will be distributed.

The existing road from Dzhubga to Sochi is heavily overloaded, traffic jams stretch for kilometers, in many areas it is a two-lane serpentine. Movement is periodically suspended, only this year - at least twice. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Transport considered the construction of a new four-lane highway with a length of 119 km impractical: the price is too high - 1.6 trillion rubles, and the project is technically complex. But Transport Minister Yevgeny Dietrich promised to consider including the road in a comprehensive plan if the project "will be in demand and not priced out."

Rosavtodor has already found a way to reduce the budget by more than 1.5 times - up to 1 trillion rubles. (with VAT in prices of the IV quarter of 2018), reducing the length to 80.5 km. Although the project in the documents is still referred to as Dzhubga - Sochi, now Rosavtodor proposes to build a road to Sochi not from Dzhubga, but from Tuapse. But it will be built significantly longer than previously thought - until 2037 instead of 2024-2025. “Setting realistic deadlines gives a chance for a project,” says a federal official.

It is the section from Tuapse to Sochi that is the most problematic: under the most favorable conditions, the road takes 2.5 hours, said Rosavtodor materials, and in the summer - all 6 hours, since the load on the track increases to 27,200 vehicles per day with a capacity of 6,000 cars.

The project is being actively discussed with the builders, and Arkady Rotenberg is planning to make Mostotrest as a general contractor, say three people participating in the discussion of the project, and contractors are already selected. “As long as these intentions are concerned, there must be a competition,” says a federal official. A spokesman for Rotenberg declined to comment, and Mostotrest did not respond to the Vedomosti request.

Construction and reconstruction of roads in the North Caucasus is one of the priorities of Mostotrest, according to its annual report. The company is the largest construction infrastructure builder in the country and, according to its estimates, occupied almost 15% of the market in 2017. It was she who got the project of the most expensive bridge, the Crimea. “Its construction ends, and the construction business is arranged so that it is important to immediately transfer capacity, so as not to pay for simple builders and not lose the team,” explains the motivation of Mostotrest to the person involved in the discussion of the route to Sochi. Mostotrest has already built in Sochi a doubler of Kurortny Prospect, a combined (road and rail) route Adler - the Alpika-service mountain resort, the Adler Ring interchange, and so on.

Now on the highway Dzhubga - Sochi undergo engineering studies that will determine the optimal trace, but for such an expensive project you need a political decision of the president and it can be made before the end of the year, a regional official indicates. "There are three options for the timing of the decision on construction: by the summer, when the trunk plan will be updated, by the end of the year, when the project will generally be in a higher degree of development, or never," says a government participant.

Rosavtodor proposes to begin construction this year with a roundabout of Sochi worth about 156 billion rubles. - a four-lane road with a length of 14.5 km, which consists almost entirely of bridges and tunnels. The cost can grow to 180 billion rubles. because of the greater length than the plans of Rosavtodor, the length of the route, says a participant in government discussions.

Now there is a road that allows you to bypass only the center of Sochi. The design and estimate documentation for the new round was ready in 2009, and it was planned to update it by January of this year, the meeting participant said. The project has not yet been submitted to Glavgosexpertiza, its representative said.

The deadline for completing the construction of the Sochi bypass in the documents of Rosavtodor is 2026. But it can be completed earlier - by the end of 2024, which allows the site to qualify for funding from the trunk plan, say the project meetings participants “The plan may include 1–2 sections of the road,” says the person participating in the discussion of the project, which is now preparing the necessary investment justification. But while Rosavtodor proposes to build the remaining sections - the Tuapse roundabout and the settlement. Lazarevskoye, as well as connecting roads after 2023. It is necessary to remove the transit flow from the cities in order to improve the environmental situation, improve traffic safety and reduce costs, it is indicated in its documents. Bypasses will significantly accelerate the movement, said the participant of the project.

The materials have not yet been received, Vladislav Onishchenko, head of the analytical center under the government, who evaluates projects that claim to be included in the plan, told Vedomosti. He does not exclude that the project may come in any day.

The project is being discussed by the Ministry of Transport, Rosavtodor and the state-owned company Avtodor, and meetings were held with the participation of members of the presidential administration, officials say. Representatives of transport vice-premier Maxim Akimov and the president declined to comment. And Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Rosavtodor did not answer the questions of Vedomosti. The representative of Avtodor limited himself to comments that the state-owned company is participating in the Black Sea Coast Transport Group jointly with the Federal Road Agency. A representative of the Ministry of Transport only said that construction was not planned for the horizon by 2037.

To include the project in the trunk plan (while it includes only the reconstruction of the bridge across the Makopse river worth less than 1 billion rubles), other projects will have to be excluded from it, its total cost is 6.3 trillion rubles, half of which are budget . Money was transferred between projects before: for example, for the construction of the Crimean bridge, the project of a bridge across the r. Lena in Yakutia, recalls the partner of the practice of "engineering" company "NEO-center" Alexey Efanov. But decisions were made subjectively - there was no uniform methodology. Now, inefficient projects in the trunk plan will be replaced by others according to the method approved by the government, says Efanov. The Dzhubga-Sochi route is really necessary, which means that the chances of getting funding are high, he points out. Herbert Smith Freehills partner Olga Revzina recommends building a road not by a government order, but by a concession, concluding an agreement for each section separately.

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