Transport as a driver for the country's development

The new national Transport project will be developed by the summer, and it will include developing aviation, rail, maritime and road transport infrastructure.

Its draft concept was presented in January. As the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Andrei Belousov noted, two systemic processes have been ongoing since 2022. The first one concerns the changes in traffic flows due to the sanctions. While the second one is a rapidly growing number of passenger trips by Russian citizens within the country. This calls for a radical improvement in the quality of the transport infrastructure.

Transport Minister Vitaly Saveliev is convinced of the need to create a unified management model for the development of the transport industry and all types of transport.

The project structure provides for launching 10 federal projects. These include the development of the infrastructure of the Central Transport Hub, high-speed railways (HSR), border checkpoints, backbone networks for airfields and airports, railways, seaports, inland waterways, and highways. Digitalization of the transport complex and the development of human resources will be addressed, too.

The national project's primary objective is to ensure that all types of transport infrastructure are connected cohesively.

"The national Transport project provides us the opportunity to create a single project and a single management, for example, at the level of the Deputy Prime Minister, which will serve to manage work more efficiently and in an organized manner if we need to liaise with different ministries (for example, in addressing financing issues)," says Pavel Ivankin, president of the National Research Center for Transportation and Infrastructure. – The biggest challenge for us now is to organize supervision and administration as part of such a national project. Knowing who will receive funds and who will be responsible for attracting extrabudgetary funding is crucial."

Financial issue

For the period 2025-2030, the total amount of funding for the new national project ("Development of transport infrastructure") will amount to about 10.2 trillion rubles ($ 100 billion). Meanwhile it is planned that the sources of financing will be distributed as follows: 3.46 trillion rubles – the federal budget, 6.74 trillion rubles – extra-budgetary revenues.

In particular, 332.8 billion rubles will be allocated for developing the backbone network of Russian seaports under the new national project, of which the bulk (291.7 billion rubles) has to be provided by extrabudgetary finance sources.

The modernization of the infrastructure of inland waterways will be financed exclusively out of the federal budget: it is planned to spend 121.1 billion rubles for these purposes.

Road projects are estimated at 2.8 trillion rubles, of which 2.7 trillion rubles has to be financed out of the state budget.

By 2030, 75 airfields are slated for revamp. Plans include allocating an additional 250 billion rubles out of the budget to put the airfields in order. Attraction of 82.9 billion rubles from extrabudgetary sources is also included in the plans.

From 2027 to 2030, airfields in new territories will be revamped, requiring another 35 billion rubles from the budget. Mariupol Airport will be the first to be restored.

According to preliminary estimates, more than 4.3 trillion rubles can be spent on railway infrastructure over six years, and 4.27 trillion rubles are planned to be provided from extrabudgetary sources.

By implementing the national Transport project, we may be able to achieve seamless logistics and lack of competition between modes of transportation that have been discussed for more than 20 years, believes Yulia Zvorykina, a member of the Public Council of the Ministry for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, Professor at MGIMO university. In her opinion, a unified analysis of all transport systems and integration into a single network is needed.

"The interchangeability of all transport systems is essential, as is the synchronization of all systems to ensure that if one mode of transportation suffers a downtime, the others can quickly replace it." According to the expert, infrastructure projects will improve the transportation component and allow new technologies to be introduced.

"The main purpose of the new national project is to complete multi-level work and build a new system based on a single backbone transport network, a master scheme. The second stage is to achieve a transport and economic balance, which is expected to reveal the bottlenecks and vulnerabilities of the transport system. And the third one is to optimize the transportation infrastructure, taking into account the identified bottlenecks, so that cargo and passengers are distributed in the most optimal ways," Andrei Belousov summed up.

Sergey Volkov