Russia: Muscovites scramble to protect parking spaces

If you make it out of a Moscow traffic jam, the next challenge is where to park your car

Moscow's apartment-dwellers are increasingly splashing out on parking barriers to stop people from taking advantage of their free spaces, it's reported.

Residents who can park for free within their private courtyards are securing the entrances at their own expense, the Moscow Times reports. People living at one apartment block tell the paper that they clubbed together to raise the 130,000 roubles ($2,600; £1,700) to install a barrier and a little booth for a guard. They also pay for the guard's 30,000 rouble-a-month salary out of their own pockets.

It has meant a boom for the companies that sell the barriers - one Moscow district reported a four-fold increase in installations in 2014. "Every second call we get these days is from Muscovites in a panic, who want to close their yard off from strangers as soon as possible," Yelena Repushkina, a commercial director at one barrier company, tells the paper.

Parking costs 80 roubles ($1.5; £1) per hour in central Moscow, and gets cheaper outside each of the city's ring roads. But paid parking is a relatively new concept in the Russian capital, and some people still want to be able to park for free. Charges were introduced in central districts in 2013, to end years of parking chaos which saw many drivers just pull up on the pavement.

It's a problem familiar to other former Soviet cities in Europe, many of which were not designed with mass car ownership in mind. In Kiev, where most parking spaces are kerbside, a Facebook group devoted to creative parking efforts continues to thrive. The page features cars parked on zebra crossings, blocking pavements, and one parked on a grass verge, half embedded in a hedge.

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