The cost of building the M-12 highway from Kazan to Yekaterinburg may cost 850 billion rubles, calculated experts interviewed by Izvestia. This is more expensive than the route from Moscow to Kazan, the cost of which was previously estimated by the Cabinet of Ministers at 650 billion rubles. In a message to the Federal Assembly on April 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered to extend the M-12 highway to Yekaterinburg by 2024. The total cost of the M-12 highway may reach 1.5 billion rubles, analysts said. Experts call the project ambitious and argue that it will be a serious task to implement it in three years.
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Long road
High-speed highway M-12 “Moscow-Nizhny-Novgorod-Kazan” under construction will be extended to Yekaterinburg… This task was set by Vladimir Putin in his message to the Federal Assembly on April 21, noting that the project needs to be completed in three years, so that in 2024 safe high-speed traffic will be ensured across the entire European part from the Baltic to the Urals.
Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev said that all work should be completed in 2024, having specified that the President’s instruction to extend the M-12 “Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod-Kazan” highway to Yekaterinburg is being fulfilled.
“As part of the extension of the road to Yekaterinburg, it is planned to use both sections of the existing road network and to ensure the construction of new ones,” the press service of the department told Izvestia the words of the head of the Ministry of Transport.
According to Vitaly Savelyev, the road will ensure an increase in the flow of travelers between the largest cultural centers, open up new tourist destinations, provide a high level of user comfort, as well as give an impetus to the development of entrepreneurship and the creation of new jobs along the entire route…
GC “Avtodor” (single operator of toll roads in Russia) subject to the provision of appropriate funding already this year can begin design and survey work, and in 2022 construction, the company informed Izvestia. They noted that the new highway will unite the Volga and Ural federal districts, pass through the territory of the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, the Sverdlovsk region.
– Travel time on the new route will be halved… From Kazan to Yekaterinburg from 2 pm to 7 pm. This will increase the transport accessibility of tourist facilities in the gravitational zone of the highway, ”Avtodor told Izvestia.
The road from Kazan to Yekaterinburg will be a continuation of the already ongoing project of the M-12 highway from Moscow to Tatarstan, the travel time along which will take 6.5 hours instead of 12, the state company said. They added that now the M-12 is preparing the territory for construction on all almost 800 km, design work is underway at the same time.
Avtotor Izvestia was told that Petersburg Roads JSC is conducting a survey of the existing road network in the gravitational zone, including economic surveys, collection of initial data, preparation of data on the forecast of intensity and proceeds from paid operation (transport modeling). Taking into account the received data, the route of the highway is determined, added to the organization.
An ambitious task
The start of the construction of the high-speed toll road M-12 “Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod-Kazan” was given in July 2020… Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin then said that the total amount of financing will exceed 650 billion rubles, having specified that 150 billion rubles will be directed from the NWF. At the same time, the head of the Cabinet instructed the then Minister of Transport Yevgeny Dietrich to quickly work out the issue of extending the section of the M-12 “Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod-Kazan” highway to Yekaterinburg by 2030. In 2021, the government will allocate 40 billion rubles for the construction of the M-12, Mikhail Mishustin said at a meeting with the deputy prime ministers on April 19. The road should be commissioned in the first quarter of 2024.
In the first versions of the project, a new highway from Kazan to Yekaterinburg was to be built starting in 2024, and by 2030 it was put into operation, Hussein Pliev, General Director of Smart Engineers Group, told Izvestia. It took six years to build an 800-kilometer track, half of which is a new track.
“At the same time, this construction was to be implemented by the same companies and specialists who would have erected the M-12 highway, already ready by that time, from Moscow through Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan,” the expert said.
The route from Moscow to Kazan includes nine sections. In September 2020, only seven contractors were identified. Gennady Timchenko’s Stroytransgaz is building the first 80 km section worth 53 billion rubles. The second (from 80 to 116 km) is a subsidiary of Transstroyinvest for 21 billion rubles. The third (116-224 km) is the VAD company (60 billion rubles). The fourth stage (224–347 km) is the road construction company Avtoban (80 billion rubles). The fifth (347–454 km) is the Russian subsidiary of SiArSiC Rus LLC (58.3 billion rubles). The sixth (454-586 km) – “Autobahn” (69 billion rubles). The eighth (663–729 km) is the “daughter” of Mostotrest by Arkady Rotenberg “Transstroymekhanizatsiya” (123.2 billion rubles).
The government’s single megaproject – the M-12 high-speed highway – began to be built last year and it is assumed that the entire large-scale corridor to the Urals should actually be built in less than four years. From the point of view of the technical side of the issue, the implementation of such a complex infrastructure project is an extremely ambitious task, says Hussein Pliev.
If we consider that the cost of the assessment for the last year of the route from Moscow to Kazan exceeded 650 billion rubles, which is 794 km of track, then the route to Yekaterinburg (this is the same amount of mileage) will have to cost even more., the expert believes. He explained that the cost of building materials is growing at an outstripping pace: sand, crushed stone, concrete, as well as the services of contractors in 2020 rose in price by 15-20%. All these factors, combined with the accelerated pace of construction, can increase the cost of the site to Yekaterinburg up to 700 billion rubles and more… The total amount of the entire route from Moscow to Yekaterinburg may exceed 1.2 trillion rubles, Hussein Pliev estimated.
According to the chief analyst of the Alor Group of Companies Alexei Antonov, the construction of 800 km of the track from Kazan to Yekaterinburg can cost from 690 to 850 billion rubles (then, taking into account the cost of the Moscow-Kazan section of 650 billion, the entire project will cost up to 1.5 trillion )… The spread may be associated with a significant increase in the cost of building materials throughout the entire construction, as well as due to possible forced changes in the technical documentation of the project during its implementation in certain areas. Almost half of the route can be built from scratch, which means that more investments will be required than for a similar mileage in the project from Moscow to Kazan, he believes.
According to Hussein Pliev, the work on the project is complicated by the fact that it should be not just a highway, but an artery that residents of those agglomerations where it passes through can use. It means that local authorities will have to simultaneously and promptly solve the issues of building new local roads or repairing old ones, that is, to build access infrastructure and bridge bypasses.
The functions of a contractor can be taken over by large road companies of both local and federal levels, said Husein Pliev. Another question is on what conditions they will be involved in the implementation of the project. Such options and financing schemes as PPP or concession agreements, the issue of infrastructure bonds, and long-term investment agreements can be used, the expert added.
According to the vice-president of the Center for Strategic Research (CSR) Tatyana Gorova, now the government, with the participation of the Ministry of Construction and the Ministry of Transport, is carrying out large-scale work to optimize the processes of preparation, approval, and acceptance of construction documentation, which will significantly reduce the construction time, including transport infrastructure facilities.
“Preliminary estimates of the project cost are already available in several implementation options,” she said.
In the case of a decision to allocate funds for the implementation of the project, the year of completion of construction in 2024 is quite realistic, the expert concluded.