THE REGIONAL STRUCTURE OF SUBURBAN PASSENGER RAIL TRANSPORTATION IN RUSSIA AND THE PLACE OF ST. PETERSBURG THEREIN

Abstract

Suburban rail passenger service carries many more passengers than long-distance rail service. At the same time, the former acts as an important component of the transport system both for urban agglomerations and for intra-regional communication (sometimes with no alternative available). However, there are very few geographical studies on such transportation. To analyze information on suburban passenger flows, the authors use their own methodology for calculating suburban railway interaction based on the shift-share analysis, widely used in economics and human geography. The application of this methodology, together with other indicators, made it possible to establish the main trends in the transformation of the country's suburban rail transport. During the period under study (2005 – 2022), the importance of Moscow and the Moscow region in such transportation showed an unprecedent manifold increase. In a small number of regions, suburban transportation is slightly increasing (with reasons for this being different), but in the vast majority of the constituent territories of the Russian Federation it is significantly decreasing, up to the point of actual disappearance. Suburban traffic to St. Petersburg in 2022 was much less than in 2005, but there was noted some growth in 2020 – 2022. In some directions, suburban transportation was completely stopped and the railways were dismantled. In other directions, transportation decreased sharply, but the railways themselves have been preserved. Suburban traffic increased in an extremely limited number of destinations. In general, railways have lost the functions of the ‘organizing axes’ of the suburban area of St. Petersburg, though being such for more than a hundred years, since the end of the 19th century.