Parking

I did not realize until a couple of weeks after I arrived that this big city has no parking meters.  If I were using a car then I'd probably have noticed it sooner.  Someone explained to me that the city government did try to introduce parking meters twice, but the public opposition was, shall we say, effective enough that the officials backed off and the meters were taken out.

Along with the lack of parking meters, Muscovites have a very relaxed attitude about where and how they park. Vehicles can park on the curb, in the wrong direction (that is, against the flow of traffic on that side of the street), perpendicular to painted parking lanes, and in a crosswalk.  This does not apparently lead to tickets. Here are some samples of Moscow parking.

Here is zippy car facing the correct way a few weeks later, but look behind it:

The sign on the gate in the next two photos (taken a few weeks apart) says "No parking: fire exit".

The cars in the next two photos are not making turns, but are stopped. There are no drivers in them.

The next day that green car was still parked in the crosswalk (you can tell it's a different day because the ground is drier):

Across the street from that green car were two adjacent cars, so there were 3 cars parked in a crosswalk:

But the outer car is only there for a few moments. You can see its driver walking over to the car, which he then takes away in the photo below (the back of that car is making its escape on the left side) and we see that everything is back to normal: one car parked on each side of the crosswalk.

In the next photo, the interesting thing is not the parking (which looks correct), but the sticker on the back window.  That exclamation point means "Watch out! I am driving for less than 3 years."

The sign on the next car means "Tate Shafarevich group" on board.

OK, actually this sign means there is a school child on board.  So it's a "baby on board" sign for older children.

Here is a pair of street signs which looks to me like an accident waiting to happen:

Elsewhere James Bond is at work:

The lack of extensive parking rules includes no residential parking permits. This makes it very simple to park your car in a new lot when you move to a new area of Moscow: just start parking anywhere near your building.  No paperwork is necessary.

I did once see a tow truck take a car away, so even here some offenses can be too much. I wonder what the driver could possibly have done wrong. Instead of hooking the car up from the front or back, the tow truck had a crane mechanism that simply lifted the car vertically in the air and then swung it over onto the platform on the back of the truck. Clever. I didn't get a picture of that, but if I see it happen again I'll post an update here.

The license plate code on cars (not including plates for diplomats, the police, etc.) has the format 1 capital letter, three digits, two capital letters, followed by the car's regional number above a Russian flag.  (Moscow has several regions, like 177 and 199 as seen in photos above.)  In the Soviet period all Cyrillic letters were used on license plates, but in Russia today the only letters that are used on new license plates are those which resemble letters in the Latin alphabet: А,В,С,Е,Н,К,М,О,Р,Т,Х,У. This lets all cars go abroad without having to change the license plate (since the license plate still makes sense to local authorities), however there is a serious combinatorial problem: only 12 capital letters are used, while there are actually 30 Cyrillic capital letters. So for a given choice of numbers on a license plate in a particular region, the number of three-letter combinations that can appear is (as every number theorist knows) 1728, while if all Cyrillic capital letters were available there would be 27000 available plates.
This is leading to concern about an insufficient supply of plates, which is discussed in the section titled ''Runout problem'' here.

Soviet license plates were not required to be replaced after the end of the USSR, but if the car's owner changes or the original owner moves to a new region then a new plate is needed.  So in principle, if someone today is still driving their old Soviet car and they live in the same place, the car could have an old USSR license plate with letters like Ж on it.  I have seen old cars on the street, but they all have new plates.  In 2003 I did see one car with a Soviet plate on it.  Maybe by now they really are all extinct.