Cars

From the steps to the service entrance of the Teatr Satiry
overlooking the Garden Ring, Dec 7, 8:55pm

The reason I stopped to take this picture was that the VW you see to the left in the shot was hot pink. However, I liked the way the shot turned out in B&W better. You don't need color to see that Muscovites are jetting around these days in a variety of fine autos - note the Lexus and Mercedes SUV's in the right-hand half of the shot - and being aggressively sold even finer ones (see the billboard selling BMW's for "A New year's price that is simply a fairy tale" in the background). Moscow has for years been known for its luxury cars, but lately there seem to be more and more of them.

This while 90% of Russia drives around in unsafe, environmentally horrible Soviet-era cars (which are still being manufactured in large numbers with little-improved designs), or 5-to-10-year-old West European cars of questionable origin - i.e., often stolen or totaled in the West - which are still usually of better quality than and preferred over the Russian-made vehicles. Note also that there is still no system for regulating on-street parking in Moscow, which frequently turns, as it has here, to on-sidewalk parking.