The correspondent of “Evening Petersburg” spent a long time looking for parking near the Artillery Museum
In St. Petersburg on weekends, of course, you want to get out somewhere, for example, go to a museum with your family. But if you're driving, don't expect the trip to go off without a hitch!
Museum visitors are honestly warned: no need to park!
Where are the parking lots? The center is filled with public and private organizations, restaurants and cafes. The latter, in turn, are not averse to tearing off a piece of the roadway for their visitors in order to display orange cones and their parking attendants, who allocate parking spots, doing this, by the way, without permission. And if it is easier for entrepreneurs to pay a fine using a percentage of their profits, then it is much more difficult for government organizations to organize a stopping place for visitors.
I decided to check the numerous complaints from readers about parking in front of the Artillery Museum. So, let's arrive. There is no parking on Kronverkskaya Embankment, opposite the museum. Every 50 meters there is a “No Stopping” sign, and in the museum itself they warn that tow trucks are working.
"Dear visitors! - said in the announcement at the entrance. — To avoid misunderstandings, do not leave your cars on Kronverkskaya embankment. Parking on the embankment is prohibited. The cars are being taken away by a traffic police tow truck.”
Indeed, without violating traffic rules, you can park here only at the entrance to the main entrance. That's where the cashier employee sends me. I think how many vehicle owners are able to park here freely and easily. Six sedan class cars maximum!
At the same time, on the way to the museum, I noticed a guarded parking lot with about 50 parking spaces. As the museum's press service found out, it is designated for official use.
“There are no plans to open it to visitors in the near future,” the press service clarified.
Theoretically, it would be possible to leave cars near the embankment, but visitors’ cars are evacuated from there. Of the proposed and nearby places, they suggest leaving your car in Alexander Park. According to my observations, you can leave your car there only if you are lucky. On weekdays at 16.00 there are a couple of places, and they seem to have just become free.
Another alternative is parking on Kronverksky Prospekt near ITMO. There are spaces for about ten cars, but on weekdays, occupying them is like winning the lottery.
Parking a car in the center of St. Petersburg is difficult in principle. However, there is an option for violating traffic rules; however, this will result in a fine of 300 rubles. And from July 1, it will generally be increased to 3,000 rubles.
Let's turn to the experience of our colleague in the Moscow metropolis. There they took radical measures. Since 2013, all parking in the center inside the Boulevard Ring has been paid. Residents of the capital will have to pay 50 rubles per hour. It would seem inexpensive. But let’s count on a trip to the same Artillery Museum. It will take at least three hours, especially if you are going on a long walk with your family. We receive 150 rubles in addition to the price of a full ticket. And now culture is costing a pretty penny... Maybe it’s better to walk?
If you do leave your car...
At the Artillery Museum, where parking is prohibited, you will find the following information about tow trucks useful:
— Traffic police officers evacuate absolutely all illegally parked cars, including expensive, large, original and others. And although some of these models require special equipment, in Russia this is usually not taken into account.
— Remember: if you, the owner of the car, showed up when the car was being towed, you are required to return the vehicle to correct the illegal parking, but you will still have to pay a fine for illegal parking in the amount of 300 rubles (for now).
— If your car was towed while you were there, write down the badge number, the traffic police car number and the tow truck number. It is advisable to record everything in photos or videos and, if possible, find witnesses.
Anatoly SLEPENKOV. Photo by the authorParking in St. Petersburg is a problem, as in any city overloaded with transport. There are clearly not enough parking spaces for a city of five million.
In this regard, the city government has already adopted a bill stating that parking in the city center, including parking at the side of the road, will be paid.
Beware of leaving your car in the area covered by the “No Stopping” sign, even if other cars are already parked there. Your car may be towed to an impound lot.
Convenient parking spaces in the city center
There are several underground parking lots in the center of St. Petersburg. As a rule, they are located under large shopping centers (Stockmann, Gallery). The cost of 1 hour of parking is about 150 rubles.
This secure parking lot is convenient if you want to go sightseeing or go to one of the restaurants on Nevsky Prospekt. There are almost always spaces available here, unlike nearby free parking areas. The cost is 150 rubles per hour.
Parking on Konyushennaya Square
Paid guarded parking is located next to the Cathedral of the Savior on Spilled Blood and the largest souvenir market. The cost is 150 rubles per hour.
Parking in the parking lot of Pulkovo Airport or Pulkovo-2 will cost approximately 100 rubles per hour and from 700 rubles per day.
Some free parking spots in the city center
Fines for illegal parking
Current information on fines for other violations of traffic rules can be found on the traffic police website.
The cost of evacuation, which is about 3,000 rubles, is legally paid by the owner of the car.
Be careful: many places only allow parking on even or odd days of the week. Violation of this regime entails the same sanctions as parking in a prohibited place!
If you cannot find the car where you left it:
Try to find out about the location of the car by calling +7812 680-33-33 or 004. This number will tell you the address and telephone number of the traffic police department where you need to obtain permission to issue it.
By calling the traffic police department you need to find out where and when you can get permission to receive a detained car. You can obtain this permit after paying a fine for illegal parking.
If you have written permission from the traffic police to issue a vehicle, you can go to a specialized parking lot, also having with you an identity document and a document confirming the right of ownership of the detained vehicle.
Why go? You can count the major cities of the world that have real ancient fortresses on your fingers, and you won’t have to take off your shoes. St. Petersburg is included in this short list, and not only is included, but proudly stands on the podium. Only Belgrade, Oslo and Lisbon can compete with it. The Tower of London is very small, the Finnish Suomenlinaa is located in the bay, right next to the devil's horns, go and see it in the distance. And the Peter and Paul Fortress is located right in the center of the city - look how many you can fit in.
How to get there. The Peter and Paul Fortress stretches in length from west to east. The most convenient way to get to its eastern entrance is from the Gorkovskaya metro station, passing through a pleasant park. Also, tram routes 3 and 6 and buses 46 and 49 pass through the desired area. The Sportivnaya metro station is located closest to the western entrance. From there you will have to walk about 10 minutes. Not far from the fortress gates there are bus routes 10 and trolleybus 7.
How to get. The fortress is surrounded, as expected, by water. You can get to its territory either through Ioannovsky or Kronverksky bridge. The fortress gates are open daily from 9:30 to 21 hours; you can walk around the ring of walls on Hare Island throughout the day, from 6 to 22 hours. Entrance to the fortress is free, you only need to pay for visiting individual attractions - the museum, the casemates of the Trubetskoy Bastion, the Nevskaya Panorama route along the ridges of the walls, etc. Individual tickets cost from 100 to 450. We were able to save money by purchasing a comprehensive two-day ticket for 600 rubles. With its help you can visit five important exhibitions. 
What to do. Walk through the gate (being careful not to hurt your feet on the historical paving stones) and plunge into the atmosphere of the past. The Hare Island on which the fortress was built was personally chosen by Peter I for its foundation. For this, ungrateful descendants erected an eerie monument by Shemyakin in the fortress. It’s hard to imagine what kind of wild imagination you need to have in order to portray a mighty emperor with a tiny head and skinny arms. The disgrace, to my surprise, is usually surrounded by tourists who, without a twinge of conscience, sit on Peter’s lap as if at home for the sake of a selfie. Another popular entertainment is a walk along the walls along the Neva. The Nevsky Panorama, as the route is called, allows you to see the panorama of the most beautiful piece of St. Petersburg. Just don’t go upstairs around noon: at exactly 12 o’clock, for many years now, blank cannons have been fired from the Naryshkin Bastion. If you happen to be nearby at this moment, you will be surprised by more than enough impressions.
Entrance to the route "Neva Panorama" I remember how, as a child, the most depressing impression on me was made by an excursion through the bowels of the Trubetskoy Bastion, turned by the tsars into a terrible prison. The conditions in which the prisoners of the fortress lived can impress anyone. 
The interior of the Trubetskoy Bastion looks depressing. Having visited all the interesting objects, you need to go out through the gate and walk around the fortress in a circle, marveling at the thickness of the walls. The fortifications were built according to all the rules of military art of that time, Peter I personally monitored the progress of construction. The bastions were specially placed at an angle to each other so that they could shoot at the attacking enemy from all directions. The first fortifications were earthen, then they were covered with stone. As often happens, the efforts of the builders and all the expenses were in vain: during the entire existence of the Peter and Paul Fortress, it never had to go into battle. Nowadays it has become fashionable to relax in free space: in the summer, the beach facing the Neva resembles a seal rookery. In winter there are fewer people, but the “walruses”, who are not afraid of the frost, manage to sunbathe and swim in the ice holes. Nutrition. On the territory of the fortress there is a cafe and many kiosks selling drinks, food, etc. Prices can be judged by the fact that a half-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, the red price of which is 25 rubles, usually sells for 90.
Hare Island, where St. Petersburg began, today resembles a busy crossroads.
Several parking lots have been organized under the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, traffic jams form on the Kronverksky Bridge, and tourists scurry between cars, which even manage to drive through the gates into the area where the paving stones are laid. The museum management explains this by the congestion of the streets, which are not under their control.
Getting to the fortress territory via the wooden Kronverksky bridge on a fine summer day is not easy. The narrow sidewalks on both sides of the bridge cannot accommodate all the pedestrians; cars and tour buses line the roadway bumper to bumper. A Novaya correspondent observed how, due to an unsuccessful turn, a bus descending from the bridge towards the fortress formed a huge traffic jam - cars heading out folded their side mirrors and squeezed a few centimeters from the curb. Behind, on the asphalt road along the Kronverksky channel, impatient drivers honked their horns, and tourists scurried about in the middle of this mess.
The asphalting of the territory of the Peter and Paul Fortress and the opening of parking lots here at the end of the 2000s was accompanied by a scandal. According to archival data, after the revolution, mass executions were carried out in the fortress, including civilians, since there was a liquidation prison here. From 1917 to 1920, more than a thousand people could have been shot here, and here, on the shore, from the fortress wall to the descent to the water, they were buried.
But the museum’s management, trying to increase the number of visitors, laid the asphalt despite the protests of historians and archaeologists, who argued that the remains of victims of the Red Terror lay in the ground. The construction buckets stopped only when they brought out skulls with bullet holes. However, the work stopped for a short time: a narrow asphalt path, rarely free of traffic, now stretches along the Kronverksky Strait and ends at the parking lot.
“It is absolutely clear that this route passes through part of the necropolis of the execution period of the Civil War,” says Alexander Margolis, chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Monuments and Culture.
Until now, the question of whether there are remains of victims of the Red Terror under the busy highway and how many there are remains open. The museum has nothing against excavations, but wants those who want to continue searching for the remains to provide evidence that they are there.
“For example, archaeologist Kildyushevsky did not give us a single document that would justify further work,” said Deputy Director of the State Historical Museum Yulia Demidenko. Currently, an anthropological examination of the previously found bones is being carried out by order of the museum, but even their future is unclear: they are kept within the walls of the fortress, and so far no one is thinking about how to bury them and perpetuate the memory of the dead.
“We will lose tourists if we force them to walk with their feet,” says Sergei Kondratyev, deputy director of the museum for general issues. He does not consider the dominance of cars on the territory of the fortress under his jurisdiction to be critical and recalls the times when tourist buses parked towards them from Nevsky Prospekt.
As for the Kronverksky Bridge, which today is both pitiful and a little scary to look at - its wooden foundations are subjected to thousands of tons of pressure every day - Kondratyev is very categorical: “This is a federal facility that is not our responsibility. We can neither expand it nor increase it."
In August 2015, information appeared that Mostotrest recognized the Kronverksky Bridge as unsafe, and some of its elements were 80 percent rotten. In September, Vice Governor Igor Albin convened a meeting on the fate of the bridge, where he invited representatives of four committees (transport, urban planning, cultural and monument protection) and demanded that work be carried out to eliminate accidents before June 1, 2016. So that, at any time, an emergency does not happen .
According to one of the participants in this meeting, Chairman of the Culture Committee Konstantin Sukhenko, partial repairs were made so that the bridge could work. For transport, a limit of 7 tons per axle was established. Now not all buses can pass there, only two-axle ones, and the passage of heavy freight vehicles is prohibited.
By the way, Deputy Director of the State Medical Institute Sergei Kondratyev was also present at the meeting. In a conversation with Novaya, he did not say a word about this, insisting that the ability to get to the fortress by vehicle is an absolute benefit for citizens and tourists.
It is worth noting that excursion buses usually weigh 13.5-19 tons. At the same time, two buses and several cars can be parked at the Kronverk crossing, so the prospects for the monument of federal significance are not bright.
Igor Albin, in turn, believes that the situation today is not so dramatic. Mostotrest carried out repairs to the bridge from October to January without completely closing traffic. We replaced the wooden supports, changed the top layer of the deck, the connections between the beams and spans, and restored the connection between the asphalt and the bridge. Well, of course, we treated everything with an antiseptic. About 10 million rubles were spent for these purposes. These priority emergency measures make it possible to operate the bridge now. “Next, we have a program of design, survey, construction and installation works until 2018. I will try to speed up the process as much as possible, because I understand the load the Peter and Paul Fortress takes on,” the vice-governor assured.
Entry into the territory of the fortress for passenger cars costs car owners two hundred rubles, and tourist buses three hundred. The museum and the city make good money from this. At the same time, they are not interested in the purpose of the motorist’s visit to the ticket office. For 200 rubles you can leave your horse for the whole day: from nine in the morning to eleven in the evening. It is unlikely that any parking lot in the city center can offer such conditions. And if paid parking appears on Kronverksky Prospekt in the near future (60 rubles per hour), then there will be a noticeable increase in the number of “museum recreation lovers” among St. Petersburg car owners.
When traveling to the center, car owners wonder where to park and preferably for free. Every year the government of St. Petersburg actively expands paid parking zones and every year the number of temporary parking lots in the city center is reduced.
However, there are still free parking in the center- not always conveniently located, but it’s better to walk 200-300 meters than to take the metro or find a car in a parking lot!
List of free parking lots in the center of St. Petersburg at the following addresses:
I have revealed my secrets and now I risk being left without free parking in the center of St. Petersburg, but at the same time, I believe that 50 rubles per hour of parking in the center is not a big price to pay... If you came to the center in a personal car, pay and work or relax in peace!
