"A place for hustle and queues": Muscovites appreciated the new station "Vostochny"

As you know, on May 29, a new Vostochny railway station opened in Moscow, located in Cherkizovo near the Lokomotiv MCC station and Cherkizovskaya metro station. It is intended mainly for transit trains (mainly from St. Petersburg and Murmansk, following to the south and east). Also, several high-speed "swifts" and "swallows" will be sent from it to Nizhny Novgorod and Ivanovo.

The opening of the Vostochny railway station in Moscow is interesting not only with the appearance in the capital of the first new station in 100 years, but also with the rise of the mobility of Muscovites and Nizhny Novgorod residents to a qualitatively new level. Residents of cities can now move around Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod using only one Troika card.

The agreement signed this year on the joint use of Troika cards will allow residents of the Nizhny Novgorod region to come to Moscow on a Lastochka, take advantage of a free transfer to the metro or the MCC, walk around the city or get to any airport in the capital. Muscovites, in turn, will be able to calmly leave the Vostochny for Nizhny Novgorod with one Troika in their pockets and freely move around the city by any type of public transport.

However, the rest of the station did not suit Muscovites too much. Network analyst Vasily Alexandrov found several flaws in it at once:

“If you look closely, it turns out that the station is a collection of all possible design jambs. The designers seem to have decided to build the most inconvenient station. And they succeeded in this.

1. Location and necessity

Vostochny station is the farthest from the center of Moscow. Obviously, this is inconvenient for passengers. However, this did not stop Deptrans from lying about the fact that the new station will reduce travel time by 20-30 minutes. Yes, for trips to the east of Moscow, it will shorten the travel time, but for trips to any other part of the city, the travel time will increase by 20-30 minutes. Well, how can you lie so blatantly?

2. Low bandwidth

a) The station is not even designed for the uninterrupted reception of passengers from just one train.

The main corridor from the station to the metro and the MCC is three or four meters wide, and there is only one door to the exit to the MCC concourse! This is tolerable for the MCC station, but not for the station, where the flows are very concentrated. Moreover, this is a wide door for disabled people and passengers with luggage, in order to pass back disabled people and passengers with luggage, apparently, you need to learn how to teleport.

b) There are only two platforms and three reception and departure tracks at the station. And this is with the third traffic intensity in the city!

Moreover, one of the platforms is low for the Swifts and is poorly suited for serving passengers on other trains. It turns out that there are only two ways for non-swifts at the station. The schedule of such idiocy does not take into account, as a result, swallows have to be taken on a low platform.

This problem is also recognized by some people at Russian Railways, who, on the day of the opening of the station, made statements about the need to build a third platform. Why was it impossible to calculate everything in advance and build three platforms at once, and not wait for obvious problems?

3. Inconvenience of use

There are many inconveniences in using the station, therefore, for structuring, we will walk through the station with arriving passengers from the platforms to the exit to the MCC.

a) Low platform, about 0 mm high from the level of the rail head

b) The high platform has a height of 1100 mm instead of 1300 like the rest of the platforms on the MCC

c) Inaccessibility of the station for a large number of passengers with luggage.

d) Illegal elevator operation scheme

e) Low throughput of elevators

f) Poor navigation.

g) Queues for the clerk (luggage inspection - ed.) at the exit from the station to the metro and the MCC

4. Inconvenient passenger services

a) Few food outlets

At the station there is only one catering service (hello, FAS!) And a couple of vending machines, moreover, it is expensive in the catering service, they do not accept cards.

c) Poor protection from precipitation

d) No lighting in the area of the stairs on the island platform

5. Transplants

a) Transfer to the metro and the MCC.

I'll start with the good: the transfer to the metro and the MCC is really short, this is a direct new level of transfers (in a good way). If there is no queue for shmon, then from any platform of the station to the platform of the MCC or the metro you can change in just 3-4 minutes. This is the European level!

b) Transfer to buses

Let's start with the fact that there is no navigation to buses at the station!

Despite the fact that the Shchelkovskoe highway passes near the station with a large number of routes, the designers did not foresee convenient transfers to buses.

It is more than 200 meters to go to buses to the center, and to buses to the region is completely indecent 430 meters (does not fit into the TPU standard). Moreover, the stops could be moved closer to the station.

c) Personal transport and taxis

In addition to the banal absence of an exit to the station from the center, there is also a more serious problem: the lack of parking and disembarkation and landing places. The existing traffic scheme assumes that either all passengers will enter the parking lot with a capacity of 10 cars, or they will disembark and board in a split second. Of course, this is impossible, as a result, passengers sit down from the roadway, cars turn chaotically, overtake, park in front of the crossings. There are no regular places to wait for passengers.

d) Night transport

Every third train arrives at the station during the period when the metro and even more so the MCC are not working. Therefore, Deptrans did not bother with providing the station with night transport at all. It takes about 30 minutes to go to the nearest night bus through the extremely uncomfortable surroundings of the temporary storage warehouse.

6. Design and positioning

a) Train station - poor gray box

b) There is no station name on the station building.

The station is ugly, unnecessary, inconvenient for passengers ... "

Network analyst Maxim Slepov shared his, also rather bleak, impressions of the new station:

“I cannot call it a station. A purely utilitarian building, made to the very minimum of requirements: there is just enough space to pass N passengers in M time of boarding the train. Everything.

Architecture, halls, turrets or panels with collective farmers - there is no such thing anymore. Quick-detachable aluminum panels, glass, narrow escalators. The area with vehicle access is mockingly small, there are no parking lots. A Muscovite and a guest of the capital don't need a car, everyone is in the metro.

Compared to the Kursk railway station, from where trains are transferred to Vostochny, this is some kind of minimal techno after Tchaikovsky. The future is coming: functional, unkind, cut off in all the bones. The station is no longer the gateway to the city, not a face or a monument of architecture. This is the place of shmona.

In general, it would be wildly interesting to look into the Moscow future, in 20 or 30 years, well, at least for 5 minutes! Huge skyscrapers to the sky on every scrap, hundreds of such functional TPUs, everyone walks with plugs in their ears, looking at the smartphone screen, the boys' Maybachs rustle up the flyovers, below the wool and fraer move along the dedicated paths, otherwise a fine ... "

And here is the opinion of a Muscovite who has already managed to fully "enjoy" the infrastructure of the new station:

“A train arrives, and literally five minutes after it - ours, from St. Petersburg. We go to the platform, to the fifth car, to meet our guest. We go down the stairs - and there are even more people, it becomes even closer. There is simply no free space.

The train arrives, new passengers leave. We meet the girl and move back. Go up the escalator to the metro passage. And we run into a real flea market! It's almost like a queue on the plane, when they are not allowed yet, and people can't wait to be on the plane ...

The queue doesn't move at all. Everything just stands. Nobody knows what the matter is. Then we begin to move at least somehow. We just need to get out of the station, but we have to waste 20 minutes ... I guess this is probably due to the security control at the entrance to the MCC and the metro zone, but these are only 2 trains arrived! The station has to cope.

We leave in the transition. People are tired and start to resent. Moreover, there can be no question of any social distance. It's strange, because all the irons are pouring information about its importance, and at the same time, the authorities themselves are contributing to the creation of such dangerous situations.

The thing turned out to be that at the exit from the station there were only two metal detector frames and one (!) Tape for "scanning" the luggage!

Thus, the notorious "bottleneck" is formed, because it takes time to put your suitcase on the tape and have it checked. And most importantly, there is simply no room for a second tape! So I don't know how this will be fixed ...

Moreover, if passengers are traveling in an organized group, then there is nowhere to even get up to wait for the laggards and get everyone together.

In general, I do not really like railway stations and try to visit them as little as possible. I love trains themselves, but I don't. Therefore, it is possible that my opinion is too biased. But looking at the other passengers, it was clear that they didn't like it either, and the station made a double impression. It is clean and easy to reach from the metro or from the MCC station, but too cramped halls and ill-conceived spaces with security measures, creating a crowd of people, discourage all the desire to return here..."

However, not all bloggers agreed with the critics, recalling that the construction of such stations is a widespread practice:

- If we ignore the quality and design of buildings, then in Europe there are a lot of such stations in the capitals where passing trains stop for 2-5 minutes.

- I don't see anything unusual. Today the station has arrived and left. These are not the times when it took a long time, maybe even days, for a long-distance train. Many do not even understand this. How much architecture has traveled in its life is so casual. The main thing is the platform and quickly find the departure route. Everything else is fiction. Moscow has enough train stations and attractions for tourists.