People were lining at the entrances to the Moscow metro stations on the morning of April 15, as police checked all passengers’ digital passes necessary to move around the city, Medusa.io reports.
In some cases, people waited in lines for 30-40 minutes. At one of the stations, two policemen were checking everyone who came.
At about 11 a.m., Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported that the queues had been eliminated. He said that in the future the passes should be checked automatically. Meanwhile, the mayor asked the police to carry out checks so that people would not gather at the stations.
Also because of the pass regime long traffic jams have formed in the east near Lubertsy and Balashikha and in the south on Varshavskoye highway and Lipetsk street. Traffic jams appeared at the entrance to other highways: on Kashirskoye, Mozhayskoye, Shchelkovskoye, Yaroslavskoye highway, on Svobody street, Marshala Zhukova avenue and others. However, there are almost no traffic jams in the city itself.
Suburban buses whose passengers did not wait for passes to be checked and continued their way on foot also ended up in traffic jams. A digital pass is not required to walk around the city on foot.
On April 10, the city administration issued a decree approving the pass control regime in Moscow; it came into force on April 15. People order electronic passes through the Internet or by phone, but the system is still working unsteadily.
