Russians refuse to ride Moscow Metro because of toilet problem

The number of passengers of the Moscow Metro has dropped during the recent months. Dmitry Gayev, the Director of the Moscow Metro, said that the number of rides dropped by 400,000 a day in comparison with the previous months, when there were hardly any vestiges of the economic crisis seen in Russia.

Photo: Russians refuse to ride Moscow Metro because of toilet problem

The Moscow Metro has lost up to 200,000 passengers a day because of the crisis, Gayev said. An average passenger makes two or three rides in the metro a day, which means that the total number of passengers using the Moscow metro has decreased by 180-200K people. About nine million people use the Moscow Metro every day.

The Moscow Metro will lose about three billion rubles because of the decreasing passenger traffic, Gayev said. “I think that I will lose up to three billion rubles as of the year-end.

Gayev also said that the cost of the construction of one kilometer of the double-track metro line makes up some seven billion rubles. This year, the Moscow government has assigned 36 billion rubles for the construction of additional metro stations in the city.

The head of the Moscow Metro builds new stations, but he refuses to build toilet rooms there. He stated during a recent news conference that the question of installing toilet rooms in the metro was not serious. “Why does everybody want to have toilets in the metro, but they do not want to have an extensive network of toilets in the city, not to make people relieve themselves in the bushes?” he said.

The crisis makes Russians save on their music and film preferences too. The sales of bootleg CDs and DVDs have increased in the country from 70 to 80 percent recently.

The sales of official DVDs dropped by 9 percent in January 2009 in Russia in comparison with December 2008. The Russian sales of official CDs and DVDs were growing at the end of 2008.

CD and DVD retailers say that the market has become 25 percent smaller from December 2008 to March 2009. The sales of official disks dropped by 40-50 percent during that period, copyright holders said.

In 2008, the Russian market of official CDs and DVDs yielded the profit of up to two billion dollars. The market had a steady 30-percent growth in Russia during the recent five years.