The number of passengers using Moscow's metro system has fallen at the steepest rate since World War Two as the economic crisis drives up unemployment, its chief said on Wednesday.
Moscow's chandelier-adorned metro, ranked as one of the world's busiest, said passenger numbers had fallen by 7 percent in the first quarter of 2009 from the same period last year.
The number of people travelling on the Stalin-era system has fallen by an average of about 700,000 a day in April and May, said Moscow metro chief Dmitry Gayev.
"This is the steepest decline in passenger numbers ever recorded in the post-war history of the Moscow metro," Gayev, who has run the metro since 1995, told reporters.
Gayev said the fall was steeper than during the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union or during the 1998 financial crisis, when Russia defaulted on its domestic bonds.
Russia's $1.7 trillion economy has been slashed by the world economic crisis and is heading into the deepest recession for at least a decade, driving up unemployment to an 8-year high of 9.5 percent in the first quarter, according to government statistics.
The economy is forecast to contract by 6 percent this year.
However, Russia's stock market has soared by 71 percent so far this year on hopes the crisis could be near to conclusion — although the Moscow metro figures paint a more gloomy picture.
Construction firms in the capital, many of which borrowed heavily during the boom years, have slashed jobs for manual workers, many of whom commuted from greater Moscow to the now silent building sites that litter the capital.
"Many people working at Moscow enterprises were coming from the greater Moscow region and other regions while in the construction industry many workers, especially from the former Soviet Union, have now been made redundant," said Gayev.
Opened in 1935 under Josef Stalin, the capital's metro is a subterranean sanctuary complete with marble floors and mosaics that celebrate the utopias of several generations of Kremlin rulers.
The price of a ticket on the Moscow metro is 22 roubles ($0.68).
One of the world's deepest, it serves about 9 to 10 million people a day, putting it on a par with Tokyo's underground system. They are considered the busiest two metro systems in the world, though Gayev said Moscow is still the busiest.
