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why is moscow such a popular thing to post on /c/urbanism about? it's no doubt a beautiful city, with a fascinating mix of soviet and pre-revolution architecture, but if you look closer you will discover essentially the opposite of martxism-urbanism: it is not a walkable city, bike infrastructure is scarce and for the most part really subpar, the city is completely dominated by cars, with all the accompanying problems like sound/air pollution and lovely things like спальные районы, which are essentially like suburbs in the us but vertical
if anything, it should be used as an example of completely incompetent city government with all the resources to turn it into a fucking urban paradise but chooses to do nothing
it is, older trains are a bit too loud for my sensitive ears, but aside from that it's fucking beautiful, trains are very frequent, pretty cheap (~5 usd per month for students), soviet aesthetics UwU
but alas the city government is trying to fuck it up: newer trains, although more spacious and in general more comfortable, have fucking tv screens that show ads, older trains are starting to get more and more poster ads, when going down/up the escalator you are subjected to like 40 giant (3 by 2 meter) ads, the fares have more than doubled in the last ten years, newer stations look meh, there are facial recognition cameras on every terminal on most stations, there are cops on every station enforcing that everyone buys a ticket etc etc
with all that, public transport is just one component, although significant, needed for proper urban landscape, and moscow fails in almost every other component
i don't know anything about urbanism but i hate when cities are built in a circle. makes it hard to know cardinal directions unlike cities built on a grid
