Ready but not open

I've been writing about our local footbridge over Puławska since the old one collapsed catastrophically in April 2010. Thank God no one was standing at the bus stop under it when a huge chunk of concrete fell off the footbridge, or indeed that no one was crossing at that time.

The footbridge was rightly closed; within a week temporary traffic lights were put up to allow residents of Green Ursynów (our part of the world) to cross one of Warsaw's busiest arteries.

In August 2010, the old footbridge was demolished. Not long afterwards, work started on a new one. Not a clanky, clumsy one, but a new-styled one with wheelchair lifts and cycle ramps at either end. Hurrah! But when will it be ready? In May, I mentioned that it was nearly done... the ramps needed to be extended down to pavement level. This work (which until then had progressed at a snail's pace) was finally completed at the end of May. The workers left the building site... And you would have thought that the temporary lights would disappear and ul. Puławska could flow smoothly from Karczunkowska through to Kapeli.

But no. Just like the footbridge on ul Wawelska, which took from completion on 23 March to 24 May to be formally accepted by the authorities and finally opened, the footbridge on Puławska has been ready for well over a month and half - and the traffic lights continue to hold up traffic, pedestrians are still forced to cross this way rather than safely over the top.

The concept of odbiór (formal acceptance) of a new piece of infrastructure is a piece of Polish bureaucratic nonsense that needs to be reformed. The footbridge needs to be signed off by Uncle Tom Cobley and All. The fire service (like, is the concrete flammable?), Sanepid, the state sanitary inspectorate, the City's road authority, ZDM, the heritage buildings conservator and others; each has a statutory 30 days to sign off, after which the next institution on the merry-go-round gets to go through the formal acceptance procedures. Of course, each does it on the 29th day - hence the annoying delay.

On Wawelska, the local people took the law into their own hands; when the footbridge was completed, they ripped down the red-and-white plastic tape and simply started to use it. THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN HERE, OH NO! On both sides of Puławska, wooden barriers have been erected (above), and a security guard is watching the installation from a yellow booth (just visible in to the far right of the photo below) to make sure there's no samowolka (taking the law into one's own hands).

Below: so in the meantime, people wanting to cross Puławska need to press a button and wait a long time for the lights to change red. They're red for a long time. At rush hours, literally hundreds of cars can be waiting in both directions, halted by a single pedestrian or cyclist. And when the light turns green, hundreds of cars rev up and accelerate, catching up lost time.

For the record. This is a 38 million zloty (£7 million) project to replace seven footbridges around Warsaw - average price £1 million each. Of this money, 22 million (£4 million) has come from the EU's Transport and Environment fund. So British taxpayers have also dipped their hands in their pockets for this one - and the galling thing is - it's ready, but not open. The traffic lights must turn red hundreds of times a day, each time releasing clouds of climate-changing exhaust fumes into the air.

Panie Urzędniku! Get out of your office, come to inspect the footbridge, sign it off and let it be used! As soon as possible! If a whole airport can be signed off in weeks, surely a footbridge will take less time?

This time last year:
Dusk along the Vistula

This time two years ago:
Mediterranean Kraków

This time three years ago:
Around Wisełka, Most Łazienkowski, Wilanowska by night

This time four years ago:
Summer storms

This time five years ago:
Golden time of day

Latest aerial photos of S2 progress

A business flight to Gdańsk and back gives me the chance to get some aerial photos of progress (or lack thereof) on the 'Elka' - S79-S2 expressways running to the south-west of Warsaw.

Below: looking along ul. Poloneza, the viaduct to nowhere. Just to the right of the photo, the road peters out into a dirt track. In any case, the city roads department (ZDM) has blocked it off at either end to prevent anyone from using it.

The great big hole in the S2, west of the Poloneza viaduct, has been filled in and asphalted - marks for that. The two junctions at either end, Węzeł Lotnisko and Węzeł Puławska, are far from ready, as I've mentioned recently.

Below: Węzeł Lotnisko, looking west, where the S2 intersects the S79. The southbound carriageways of the latter then stop dead in the middle of a field. No immediate plans to extend.


Left: looking west along the S2 towards Węzeł Puławska, ul. Poloneza in the foreground. It looks as though the main focus of the work is to maintain smooth traffic flow along ul. Puławska; enthusiasm for finishing the job has evaporated.

Below: looking down onto Węzeł Puławska. The prospects of an eastern extension of the S2 in the foreseeable future look bleak.

This time two years ago:
Up Ćwilin

This time three years ago:
Sunset across the tracks, Nowa Iwiczna

This time four years ago:
The storm the forecasters missed

This time five years ago:
Peacocks in the park

Thunderbolt and lightning/Very very fright'ning

O what a storm last night! It bore down upon Warsaw from the north-west, getting ever closer, a broad front. Around 22:00 we could hear it coming; by 23:45 it was right overhead.


Left: the scariest strikes are the ones closest to you - flash - CRUMP! No time to count to 'one'. This thunderbolt must have hit somewhere along ul. Karczunkowska. Certainly this side of the railway line. The rain is lashing in through the balcony door.

Below: the storm recedes towards the south. Flashes are still frequent but intervals between them and the thunder are now much longer. Ten past midnight.

All shots at 100ISO, f10, with shutter set at 'B', manually closed after enough flashes have occurred - guesswork, corrected using Photoshop Lightroom. Auto Noise Reduction turned off (it takes as long for the camera to get rid of the artefacts - gaily coloured pixels amidst the darkness - as the exposure itself). This is frustrating, for while NR is going on in your camera, you're missing flashes. I get rid of the artefacts manually in Photoshop afterwards.

A thrillingly scary display of nature's wrath, though in intensity it did not match the Corpus Christi storm of June 2010.

This time last year:
Getting lost on top of Łopień

This time three years ago:
Regulatory absurdities in Poland

This time four years ago:
Czachówek and Alignment

This time five years ago:
Joy, pain, sunshine, rain

More about Modlin

Some more facts from yesterday's visit, from the Pani Edyta, the tour guide.

• The building of the airport - the entire investment - cost 350m złotys. The refurbishment of Warsaw Okęcie's first terminal (the maroony-purple one) will cost 380m zlotys, to put it into perspective.
• There's no radar at Modlin. The airport will use the radar at Okęcie.
• Only two types of aircraft will initially use the airport - the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320.
• Birds are scared off by recorded avian distress calls played through speakers around the airport's perimeter, occasional explosions, and a falconer with his bird of prey - said to be the most effective.
• The Marshal of Mazowieckie province, Adam Struzik, is keen on extending the rail spur that will serve the airport terminal on to Płock - his home town, 70km to the west.
• Local residents might complain about the fact that the airport's in use 24/7, but modern jet airliners make much less noise than the Soviet-era military jets that roared in and out of Modlin until 2000.
• The terminal building is not equipped with air-conditioning. Which will not make it a comfortable place to spend two hours before your flight, but is in keeping with the low-cost travel philosophy.

Wikipedia has this page about Modlin airport. As of today, Modlin is not yet shown on FlightRadar24.com. Flying into Modlin, your baggage will be tagged 'WMI'.

Modlin Airport - not a chimera

Yes, it's here - yes it exists - but will it be ready on 16 July? Poland's first all-new passenger airport to open in 44 years had its open-day today - thousands came to see Modlin, but there's still a question mark over whether Poland's civil aviation office (Urząd Lotnictwa Cywilnego) will sign off the runway as being ready for commercial passenger use in time. [Incidentally, urząd = 'office', biuro = 'office', but urząd does not mean the same as biuro.]

Rumours of the non-existence of Modlin Airport may have something to do with the fact that all the way up the siódemka ('national route 7') from Warsaw to the turn-off for it there is not one single road sign telling you where it is. Modlin Airport is actually easy to get to by car - head up the Wisłostrada, cross the river, take the first right after the Vistula onto DK62 (ul. Generała Wiktora Thommée - named after the Polish general who commanded the garrison that defended Modlin in September 1939) and first left off that. Easy.

There will be a bus service from town to Modlin (operated by Translud) for 33 złotys one way, or else take a Koleje Mazowieckie train to Modlin station (12.50 złotys), a bus will take you to the terminal (4 złotys). By 2014 (it is said), there will be a direct rail spur to the airport. But then the viaduct taking ul. Poloneza over the S2 was meant to have been ready by December 2010 and Jeziorki's still waiting. The bus is quicker than the train at night, the train quicker than the bus during peak hours.

The old website gives the impression that the former military airport is still little more than a planner's dream; Google searches throw up this site ahead of the new one, so confusion is expected (note to Modlin airport managers - find yourselves a search engine optimiser this week or it will be thin).

Anyway, today's dzień otwarty was a great opportunity to see the place a mere eight days before it (hopefully!) opens, and for the airport authorities it was a chance to see how the place works in practice. In the morning, people were invited to come along with dummy 'luggage' and enact check-in - suitcases were weighted and scanned; for the rest of the day, pretend passengers were allowed to test security.

Above: the drop-off zone in front of the terminal. As no one was flying anywhere today, and the temperature topped at 34C, dress code was... informal. Jaguar owner boasting of Knightsbridge address?

Above: departures hall. Information board can show up to 22 flights simultaneously (only). This is Poland's first purpose-built low-cost airport. No sleeves to take passengers to planes - no coaches - you walk from the gate. Planes are to be turned around in 25 minutes. The result should be fares significantly lower than from Okęcie.

Above: the guided tour takes visitors air-side. We can see the runway, 2.5km long, and 60m wide (the old military runway was 80m wide). No radar - that's based at Okęcie.

Above: we go back via the arrivals area. We are told that customs officers are not only looking for the usual drugs, tobacco, alcohol and foreign currency smugglers - they will also be looking for crocodile-skin belts and fake Nike T-shirts and Louis Vuitton handbags - you have been warned! Baggage reclaim is just around the corner.

Modlin will be open 24 hours a day, low-cost carriers first (WizzAir and RyanAir), though there are hopes that charter flights will start to fly from here in the autumn.

Above: vue générale of the Modlin terminal. Location-wise, to put into perspective with other European low-cost airports, as the crow flies, Modlin is 35km from Warsaw city centre. 'Brussels' Charlesroi is 45km from the centre of Brussels, 'Glasgow' Prestwick is 45km from Glasgow, 'London' Stansted is 50km from London, 'Paris' Beauvais is 70km from Paris, while 'Frankfurt' Hahn is a 102km from Frankfurt! (note - these are 'as the crow flies' distances and do not compare actual travelling time).

If the waiting list for your very own Clément Ader Éole or Avion III is too long, you can always consider buying a Polish-built Ornithopter (above) for your aerial commute.

The open day was well organised and fun for all. Above: musical entertainment laid on - a covers band that stuck to 1970s British music - Smokie, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Dire Straits.

Above: cooling things down on a scorching day, the Modlin airport fire brigade showed off their kit - and I hope it's never used in earnest. The open-day was a great example of community and customer relations, fostering pride that another infrastructure project has been completed (though I still worry about our flight on 18 July - will the ULC give its approval on time?)

This time last year:
Along Austro-Hungary's strategic railway

This time two years ago:
Gone is the threat of Państwo Smoleńskie

This time three years ago:
Get on your bike and RIDE!

This time four years ago:
Moles in my own garden

Is there hope for Russia?

For Moni

To the Royal Castle today for a talk about contemporary Polish and Russian cinematography, led by Gazeta Wyborcza's Tadeusz Sobolewski, and Russian movie critic, Irina Rubanova. The meeting was part of a series promoted by the Ministry of Culture and the Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding. The two pundits agreed that movie-making in both countries was better in the communist days. Mr Sobolewski touched on the important influence of the Afghan War (1980-1989) on Russian movie-making, which, for the USSR started and finisheda decade and half after the US involvement in Vietnam, and had similar social fall-out. Polish cinema, he said, had no Afghanistan or Vietnam hanging over it. Poland's cinema industry may churn out drivel like Kac Wawa or Wyjazd integracyjny, but it does make 50-60 films a year and they do attract a reasonable, though undemanding, audience.

Russian audiences used to love Polish films in the old days, said Ms Rubanova; today's generation of cinema goers, however, are largely ignorant of the works of Wajda and the other great Polish directors. Russia currently makes fewer films than Poland does, she said, speaking of the huge wall of money on hand to make state-sponsored films - some €1.25 billion a year. Yet few directors are willing to make such movies, distributors are not interested, few privately-owned cinemas would want to show them and few Russians would wish to see them. Yet at the same time, 64 anonymous directors have recently signed a petition calling for an end to 'dark' films that portray Russia in a bad light.

After the discussion - a screening of Aleksey Balabanov's Kochegar/('Stoker'). A well-crafted film, but a 'dark' one; so utterly bereft of hope for the Russian condition that any concept of Polish-Russian dialogue might as well crawl under a carpet and die. For how can Poland (or indeed any other nation) have a meaningful dialogue with a nation as brutal, dumb, greedy and so entirely lacking in redeeming characteristics, as the one portrayed in this film?

The titular stoker in the film is a Hero of the Soviet Union, a Red Army major of Yakut nationality, who was invalided out of the war in Afghanistan and now spends his life keeping the fires burning in the basement of a run-down block of flats somewhere in Russia. As a Yakut, he is an outsider, a gentle and honourable man. The local mafia use the furnaces to dispose of corpses; something to which the stoker turns a blind eye as one of the mafiosi is another Afghanistan vet. If he tells the stoker that it was a bad person going into the furnace, then so must it be.

Unlike Hollywood, where the American mafia is portrayed with generous dashes of humour and humanity (I'm thinking Goodfellas here), the Russian mob as shown in Kochegar are devoid of any human characteristics whatsoever. Murderous, deceitful, avaricious, without any scruples - or thoughts, or reflections, or conscience - they are one-dimensional cut-outs of mindless evil, driving around in their black SUVs with darkened windows, murdering colleagues for a bundle of banknotes or for a larger cut of the business.

Between shovelling coal into the furnaces, the stoker spends his time typing a story about an evil Russian coming into a Yakut home, back in tsarist times. The stoker's daughter, tarnished by Russia, has herself become like Russia; bereft of emotion, sponging the last roubles off her father despite being co-owner of a furrier business. Russia is shown as without any redeeming features; utterly corrupt, crumbling and mindlessly brutal. The film carries in it a strong charge of nostalgia for the USSR; there was order back then; order and honour.

If you've been to Modlin (the fort, as opposed to the airport), you will find the scenery familiar - the film was set in Kronstadt, the fortress-island in the Gulf of Finland, 25km west of St Petersburg. Kronstadt, of course, was the setting of the major insurrection against the Bolsheviks in 1921, brutally crushed by Lenin and Trotsky, a major sign that the 1917 Revolution was not intended to improve the lot of the ordinary Russian, but a seizure of power by an ideologically motivated gang.

At the end of the film I thought - if this is the way that a contemporary Russian film director portrays his country - then the only rational thing that Poles can say to Russians by way of dialogue is "thank the Lord God that we are out of your clutches; that Poland's in NATO and the EU".

It is not a happy film to watch. It has not come from a happy nation. After watching it I felt I understood the 64 anonymous film directors and their criticism of this type of movie. Yet what is cinema but a reflection of the state of the nation? Look at how the dark, introspective, self-questioning American films of the 1970s gave way to the gung-ho brashness of the Reagan era. Society changed, and with it, its movies.

This time last year:
In praise of Marmite XO

This time two years ago:
Second round of the presidential election - on a knife edge

This time three years ago:
Summer dusk, Jeziorki

This time four years ago:
Classic cars, London and Warsaw

This time five years ago:
Lublin and the Road

Making any sense of this, Warsaw?

Photographed yesterday evening on a 401 bus heading for Al. Witosa, below. Can you make out what vitally important information is being imparted by Warsaw's transit authority ZTM?

Clue: it's important. As of Monday, 2 July, bus timetables have changed. Some bus routes will disappear for good; some will disappear over the school holidays and reappear in September; some will run less frequently. The trouble is that passengers can't make out which lines are affected because the information has been printed double-sided on translucent paper. Keeping passengers informed is very important. Paying attention to detail in how it's done is equally important.

Sitting here at home with access to the excellent ZTM website, I can tell what's running, what's not and what's running rarely. It's less easy to tell when you're on a bus and wondering whether your connecting bus will soon arrive as you change to another line. Not everyone has a smartphone...

This time last year:
Farewell to separate alcohol tills at Polish supermarkets

This time two years ago:
Twin turboprop cargo planes at Okęcie

This time three years ago:
To the countryside, Czachówek

This time four years ago:
Why I feel freer in Poland than in the UK

This time five years ago:
Stormy summer night

Modlin Airport connected by rail - but will it open on time?

As of Friday, 29 June, one can travel to Warsaw's new airport at Modlin by train. According to Rozklad.pkp.pl, the service operates around the clock, which is useful, as check-in for WizzAir's popular 6:00 departure to 'London' Luton opens at 4am. The airport's press release mentions a bus service, coordinated with the train arrivals and departures, to take passengers on to the airport. There's a train arriving at Modlin station at 3:20 and the next at 3:51. A bit of an all-nighter then.

Eddie and I are booked to fly on the third day of operations at Modlin (rather than taking the night train across Europe - booking the tickets proved simply too complicated and the passport checks on Eurostar take longer than the journey to London). It is still possible, on 18 July, that the airport will not be open - this alarming piece in Dziennik Gazeta Prawna suggests that Poland's civil aviation authority has not yet signed off the airport for commercial flights.

Modlin was meant to serve as Warsaw's low-cost airport back in 2006, but things being as they are it did not happen, nor did Modlin open in time for the Euro 2012 championships. So - what's the chances that the airport will open now? What if it isn't - will WizzAir revert back to Okęcie? What about the slots it's given up?

Watch this space...