The primary theme of post-Soviet urban planning in Russia has been privatization: vast sections of land and infrastructure were turned over through various processes to private owners, vastly diminishing the power of the state as planning agency. Moreover, the very legitimacy of large-scale, long-term urban planning was challenged, in a backlash against the excessively formal urban planning process. Rather, the focus was on maintaining daily operations, in what Hirt terms “laissez-faire planning”. This, however, has led to myopic decisions, causing a slow decline in the quality of urban services. (Hirt 1–2)
Unfortunately, this was made worse by the state of urban transit at the creation of the Russian federation: the flaws in Soviet urban transit and economic planning combined to produce a transit system on the brink of collapse. Although urban areas were nearly universally covered by transit, this was usually of questionable quality, especially in inner cities, whose overall infrastructure was beginning to crumble; the overall situation was that upgrades were desperately needed across the country. (Hirt 87–88)
Nevertheless, several challenges were faced in attempting to renovate the Russian urban transit system: the government of the Russian Federation has (perhaps until fairly recently) found it difficult to find enough funding to overhaul transit. Meanwhile, the increase in automobile use has further strained road transport in particular. This has caused the Russian government (and municipal governments) to prioritize spending on road development, sapping resources from other modes of transit, while simultaneously encouraging even more road transit. (Hirt 88–98)
This lack of effective planning has led to some calls for privatization of transit services, hoping that the market will create better transit solutions. This has met little success, as there are high maintenance costs in most existing transit systems, not to mention the necessary upgrades to modernize them. Accordingly, they are simply not appealing investments to foreign or domestic capital; meanwhile, the focus on privatization has diverted governmental attention and funding even further from transit development and renovation. (Hirt 101–102)
And, indeed, the situation I encountered in Russia would suggest as much: those means of transit I was most impressed with (namely the two metro systems) were those built by the centrally-planned Soviet system, while the laissez-faire policies since seem primarily to have created too much car traffic and failed to maintain transit systems. This is not meant as an endorsement of Soviet-style communism, nor the transit policies in place during the Soviet Union. Indeed, I am quite cognizant of the many shortcomings of this style of transit planning. Rather, I mean to point out that the the Russian government, and that of its municipalities, has yet to find planning systems and institutions that live up to even the poor legacy of Soviet planning. Perhaps this is because transportation stands as one of the primary successes of the Soviet system; housing, food distribution, and so on, fared much worse—and perhaps it is the focus on improving those areas (which have, indeed, been ameliorated dramatically) that deprives urban transit of the necessary attention and focus to continue to improve the level of service offered to Russians.