31 january 2009

Vladimir Putin and IOC Coordination Commission Chairman Jean-Claude Killy visited a section of the bypass road around Sochi intended to ease traffic in the city during the 2014 Winter Olympics

Participants:
The Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the head of the IOC Coordination Commission for the preparation of the 22nd Winter Olympic Games and the 11th Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi, Jean-Claude Killy, have visited a section of the bypass road around Sochi intended to ease traffic in the city during the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the head of the IOC Coordination Commission for the preparation of the 22nd Winter Olympic Games and the 11th Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi, Jean-Claude Killy, visited a section of the bypass road around Sochi intended to ease traffic in the city during the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin showed Vladimir Putin and Jean-Claude Killy a scheme of the development of Sochi's motorways.

Igor Levitin said that an 8.2 km stretch of the 17.7 km detour road has already been built. It will have 15 bridges and 5 tunnels with a total length of 10 km. The cost of building the road is 37.5 billion roubles.

The Minister said the detour would be completed in November 2009, at which point the development of the inner city road network would start.

The main construction project (a road parallel to Kurortny Prospekt) will begin in the second half of 2009. It will be launched in 2013 to provide enough capacity to handle all the cargo and passenger traffic inside the city. The first section of the parallel road will cost 27 billion roubles to build. The building of the detour currently employs 8,000 workers and in 2010, a total workforce of 50,000 will be engaged in the building of the entire transport infrastructure.

"One further benefit of such large-scale projects for us in the present-day conditions is that they create jobs," Mr Putin noted.

When asked by Mr Putin about the total cost of building the transport infrastructure in Sochi, Igor Levitin said that it would reach about 400 billion roubles by 2014.