According to IRIB News, Mr Mohammad Reza Ghalandarsharif, appearing on the Special News Dialogue programme on the topic of "Urban Management in the Spiritual Capital of the Country", spoke about the Mashhad urban railway, especially Line 3 and the advantages of this line. The full text of this interview is as follows:
Question: Let us start with the story of Phase Two of Line 3 of the urban railway. Can this opening transform urban transport in Mashhad?
Ghalandarsharif: Mashhad is a different city. The philosophy of Mashhad's existence differs from all cities not only in Iran but in the world, and it is a city that has taken shape on the shore of the sun, the sun of Imamate and Wilayat. Providing service in the city of Mashhad is special, because it must serve the entire nation of Iran and all lovers of Imamate and Wilayat, and every year we proudly host more than 30 million Iranian pilgrims and close to more than 4 million foreign pilgrims. One of the important issues is public transport, which must be considered in metropolises, and in Mashhad we have also paid special attention to this issue and, especially in the sixth term of urban management at the municipality, together and in agreement with our dear colleagues on the City Council, we have moved the work forward.
The very important issue of public transport is the metro and urban railway, which is mass, the cleanest, fastest, cheapest and most important intra-city public transport, and in Mashhad we have looked at it specially, after Tehran. Our capabilities, the number of lines and the quality of work are very high, and we rank second in the number of lines and the length of lines, and this is a good development.
We have two lines, One and Two, in operation; we completed Line Two in this term and brought it to the end, with Salamat Town, Shahid Fakouri Station and various other issues it had. Line One has been in operation for close to 15 years and needed other measures, and from the beginning it had a shortage of wagons and had 60 wagons. We have signed the wagon contracts, and with the current situation, with the arrival of new wagons, capacity will increase greatly and will become close to 2 times, while we are also replacing the rails. Line 4 is also being excavated and connects two deprived areas of Mashhad, in the Khajeh Rabi area and Mehrmadar Town, to Shahid Rajaei Town and Shahid Bahonar, and its excavation is close to Shohada Square. In total we have 4 lines, and Line One, 24 kilometres long, has been put into operation with 24 stations, Vakilabad and the airport. We are the first city to have covered the airport as well; in Tehran this happened after us.
Line Two is 14 and a half kilometres, from the end of Tabarsi Boulevard to Salamat Town and Shahid Fakouri Station; in this term we have completed this line, and Line 4 is 17 and a half kilometres long. From Mehrmadar Town and Khajeh Rabi, 17 and a half kilometres long with 16 stations, it reaches Shahid Rajaei Town and Shahid Bahonar; it is being excavated and its excavation will be finished by next year.
Line 3 is the most important rail line not only in Mashhad but the most important rail line in the country. First, the length of the line is close to 30 kilometres and it has 24 stations, and the important point is that this line is the first pilgrimage rail line not only in the country but in the region, serving the Holy Shrine, and we put Phase One of Line 3 into operation last year during the Karamat Decade, and it has not yet been officially inaugurated, and we hope it will soon be officially inaugurated in the presence of the President. These 6 kilometres are an inaugurated line. That is, in the sixth term of urban management, it is the only line in the country that has been put into operation, and it has four stations: Shohada Square Station, Bab al-Jawad (PBUH) Station, which is at the Holy Shrine and serves the passenger terminal, and Basij Square, which is the most important interchange station of the Mashhad Metro, where Line One and Line Three connect to each other. This line, in addition to directly serving the passenger terminal, by connecting Lines One and Two, which were previously put into operation, has made Mashhad's rail network, which is about 40 kilometres, a coherent and complete network that has connected both the railway and the airport and the passenger terminal to the Shrine. All pilgrims can go to the Shrine by metro, quickly, cheaply, healthily and cleanly.
Question: It has been said that it is an Iranian mega-project?
Ghalandarsharif: This project, at about 30 kilometres, costs approximately 250 hemmat. Phase One of it has been put into operation; so far, given that it has been over time, 30 hemmat has been spent, and it is ready for official inauguration. Phase 2, whose executive operations we begin on Tuesday, is from Shohada Square to Ferdowsi Square, with 3 stations: Shahid Raeisi, Shahid Gharani and Ferdowsi Square. Its initial estimate is now 27 hemmat. The important point is that for the first time we have moved towards this: at the start of the Mashhad Metro we had about 20 percent localisation. Now the Mashhad urban railway, including the wagons, has become more than 85 percent localised, and if we do not count the wagons, more than 95 percent in the structural and construction field, and its engineering work is 100 percent localised.
These are important points: for the first time we accepted this risk and implemented it, and Iranian rail has been used on Line 3 of the Mashhad Metro. For escalators, lifts, and electrical and mechanical facilities we trusted domestic industries and used more than 70 percent of them as Iranian. We are moving towards fully localising the metro industry. Many parts of it have been localised, both in rial terms and in that we have used Iranian facilities and specialist forces. Dynamic young people who work consciously, and even knowledge-based companies in reverse engineering of special and sensitive items that exist in the urban railway, even in the field of repairs of Lines One and Two. These have made it a mega-project in which, in terms of amount and quality of work and in that Iranian young people and Iranian specialist forces are present in all sections from the study stage to the final stage of operation, except for the wagons, where we have dependence across the whole country and companies have entered and do this work with foreign companies.
We have moved towards both bringing part of this special mega-project into operation, and it will soon be put into operation, and also having the executive operations of its Phase Two on Tuesday in Mashhad, and Phases Three and Four remain, which are being acted on. The studies are complete, the stations are specified, and of the excavation of Mashhad metro lines, of close to 90 kilometres, about 15 kilometres remain, of which in Line 4 about 11 kilometres, and in Line 3, at the end of the work from Ghasemabad neighbourhood of Mashhad to Elahieh and Amiriyeh, about 4 and a half kilometres remain, and next year the main infrastructure, tunnel excavation, will be finished. This same tunnel excavation now costs only more than 1000 billion to 1500 billion tomans for excavating one kilometre of tunnel, and the execution of the metro from zero to 100 costs 50 million dollars per kilometre. Now, even if we calculate it cheaply, each kilometre of urban railway costs more than 10 hemmat, and of course the need of metropolises like Mashhad and Tehran is a metro; action must be taken, and we are carrying out this work with domestic specialists, facilities and equipment, and on the other hand with approximately the internal resources of Mashhad's municipalities.
Question: Was this 250 hemmat the municipality's budget or the government's?
Ghalandar Sharif: This whole project, 20 to 30 kilometres, has cost 250 hemmat; this 30 hemmat, whose start was with a very cheap dollar, has now reached these high dollars, and this 27 and a half hemmat is apart from the help the government gives in the field of participation bonds; the 50 percent share of it, whose amount is also small, helps. We have no other help, and the rest is from the municipality's internal resources, and the municipality also repays the participation bonds, and we accepted this risk in this term, that we used participation bonds one hundred percent well; we were able to advance both the urban railway project and other fields, including buses and urban services fields and the purchase of machinery, firefighting and various discussions, and this risk-taking. Of course we must say that unfortunately, given the existing inflation, it paid off and we did it, and Line Three of the urban railway; we added one line to Mashhad's lines and made the existing rail network coherent and uniform, and people can use it.
Question: Please also tell us about bus transport; what is the situation of the city of Mashhad now?
Ghalandar Sharif: In the field of buses too, in this term compared with previous terms, we performed very well. We concluded contracts for more than 700 buses, of which four to eight new buses have now entered Mashhad's bus lines, and we have contracts for another 300 buses; because of the issues that arose in the past year, there was a delay and the domestic company has not yet been able to deliver the buses. At the same time, in the next one to two weeks we will also purchase 100 new buses and they will enter the fleet, and on the other hand we have also fully renovated and rebuilt more than 180 decommissioned buses.
Mashhad's bus fleet now has 1750 buses. We have the first rank in the country; we are even ahead of Tehran in terms of buses per capita relative to Mashhad's population.
Question: How much of it is worn out?
Ghalandar Sharif: The average age of buses in Mashhad and all cities of the country has gone above 10 years, but at the same time we also renovate and rebuild. We rebuild decommissioned buses at a suitable price; they work again for between five and 10 years, depending on the type of operation and the routes used. But Mashhad's need for buses, given the current situation, is in total about 3200 buses, and we hope by the end of this term to bring it to 2000 to 2100, and Mashhad has a shortage of 1000 buses. Of course, the more metro lines are put into operation, the less the need for buses becomes, but in any case Mashhad, in terms of hosting pilgrims, always needs these 3000 buses. So far, whatever we have and whatever buses we bought have been from the municipality's internal resources, and it will continue the same way. We hope that of the buses the government and the Ministry of Interior are contracting, a large number will also be for Mashhad.
In the resolutions of the Government Board and also the National Pilgrimage Working Group, the government had considered 1000 buses for us, to be purchased from government resources and delivered, and these problems and events that occurred. This has not yet been realised, and we hope the government will operationalise its resolutions on this matter and help the city of Mashhad, and issues related to public transport are among the necessities.
In this term of urban management we defined several red lines for ourselves. Our goal is not to let another Tehran be created in environmental fields, and if public transport in the city of Mashhad is not attended to, it will become a second Tehran, but given the work we have done and are doing, we hope on this matter, progress in the transport field, especially metro and buses, we will have good progress, and in the environmental field, which is one of the red lines, we can have a suitable trend, while the safety of citizens, pilgrims and our dear neighbours is another of the red lines.
Special attention to pilgrimage infrastructure issues in the city of Mashhad is another of the red lines, on which good work has been done, and another of the issues is attention to deprived points and the outskirts of the city of Mashhad, where in this term we spent close to forty percent of our development budget in deprived areas and had a very good improvement in those areas, which caused good satisfaction on the outskirts of Mashhad.
Question: This spending that was done for the outskirts, what quality has it had on people's lives?
Ghalandar Sharif: What we did in this term was that, because the nature of my employment is that I am a municipality employee and I am the first Mayor of Mashhad who is a municipality employee, and given that I served for about 30 years in Mashhad Municipality, I had complete knowledge of all areas of the city and of the municipality itself, and in this term, first, we used Mashhad Municipality's specialist forces for the municipality's various managements and strengthened specialist forces in the municipality. We also trained forces for the future of the city and of Mashhad. Management forces who perform their duties, and on the other hand we also worked problem-oriented and on problem identification. We identified Mashhad's problems; we launched a system for identifying and solving problems entitled the "Shams System", for identifying organisational issues, which anyone can enter and submit whatever comes to their mind, and for this, various solutions are also provided by ourselves, by urban forces, by universities and by our dear young people; we brought in knowledge-based companies and they give solutions.
Problem identification was one of the important points in the field of urban management that happened in this term, and on the city outskirts we did this work, in that in addition to implementing the city's needed development projects, in implementing various parks, there is the discussion of infrastructures, which is fundamental, and another work that happened in the city of Mashhad was quick-return projects, which were operationalised. In Mashhad we may be the only city to have neighbourhood dispute-resolution councils. We have 172 neighbourhoods and neighbourhood social councils, in which people from various professions are present. It has a head of the neighbourhood council; using the capacity of the people themselves and the neighbourhood social councils, in each neighbourhood they themselves announced their needs: small projects that could be effective in people's lives.
Question: That is, what must happen?
Ghalandar Sharif: That is, projects that do not require a large amount. For example, we came to each neighbourhood and said 20 billion tomans is at your disposal; define a project. We brought the projects to the City Council's supervisory committee and they were approved.
The project was implemented, with the opinion of the neighbourhood's people. These projects caused all the small tasks that people were looking for in their area to be resolved, and we implement major projects. This was a special work, which of course the Ministry of Interior also modelled in the past and made it a duty for all cities that this work be implemented. Quick-return projects do not cost much, but they have had and have a very great effect on people's satisfaction, and we still continue this work, and the neighbourhood social councils announce their neighbourhood's needs; they are identified and assessed by experts, selected, and their project is implemented. We also implemented large projects on the city outskirts, while in the city of Mashhad a good development that happened at the time of the martyred Leader of Islamic Iran, in the year 1394 (2015/16), the Cultural Headquarters for the City Outskirts was, by order of the Supreme Leader, our martyred Leader; the honourable representative of the Wali Faqih, Ayatollah Alam al-Hoda, and the honourable Friday Prayer Leader of Mashhad, took over the chairmanship of this headquarters by order and decree of the Leadership, and continuously, on the issues of the city outskirts and the needs of these dear people, they hold meetings every month; especially cultural needs and development work on the city outskirts are followed up. The Regeneration Headquarters is active in the county and also the province, and these have caused, over these few years, a very good improvement in providing services and welfare to the people.
Question: Did you advance the asphalting of passages and the parks that are built, and safety and cultural work, in the form of these same quick-return projects?
Ghalandar Sharif: There are such projects too; that is, in addition to the major projects we implement. For example, a special work we did in this term: in the field of asphalt in Mashhad, we worked uniquely; we launched an asphalt movement in the city of Mashhad. Last year we asphalted four million square metres in Mashhad; this year the target is five million square metres. Other metropolises, even including Tehran, did not asphalt more than two million square metres. In this term, so far we have asphalted 12 million square metres in Mashhad, and it has no precedent in any term. In the most asphalt done in one term in past terms, it was less than five million square metres; we did this work, while this is both the asphalt overlay of the city's main passages and also in dirt passages that were on the city outskirts.
The Urban Regeneration Company has also helped in the field of supplying part of the needed bitumen for the regeneration target, and the trend of such projects, part of which are the same quick-return and small projects, such as asphalting some passages. Because their pavement works and related issues, the initial needs, drains, canals and various places, have happened and good satisfaction has been achieved. But the important point is that in this term we targeted close to 40 percent of our development credits on the city outskirts and tried to reduce the gap of deprived areas in the fields of urban facilities, welfare and project gaps.
Question: Is this reduction of the gap tangible for the people too?
Ghalandar Sharif: Yes, it is tangible, and let me remember our dear commander, the honourable Martyr Salami; every time he came to Mashhad, one of the issues that was certainly of interest to him and that he visited was the outskirts of the city of Mashhad, and because he came every few months, he felt this issue very well, and he had very great interest, given the emphases of the Supreme Leader, our martyred Leader, he certainly monitored it. Our dear colleagues in the IRGC also implemented projects on the city outskirts and in various sections: cultural and sports fields; sports halls; on the outskirts of Mashhad we have a complete beach sports complex, in Panj Tan neighbourhood.
Would you believe we have a complete complex for all beach disciplines? We do not have its beach, but we have the beach complex, and we have a street in Mashhad called Darya Street, at the end of which the "Kashafrud" river was originally known as Darya. Its other name is Vahid Street, but we also have a Darya Street in Mashhad. On the city outskirts, in the sports field, as much as we could, we created various sports grounds.
We created Mashhad's first wrestling house on the outskirts of Mashhad and handed it over to Mr Dabir for training the new generation of Mashhad wrestling, for which, as you know, we had very good memories in Mashhad in the field of wrestling and we had many wrestlers and champions. In all fields in Mashhad we work on special projects across the city, in all sections, whether development, traffic, transport, green space, urban services and various complexes, at three levels.
In this term we also work underground, which is the metro; four thousand specialist forces, the dear colleagues of Khatam Headquarters together with our own colleagues, are working. We are the only city that now has two "TBM" machines. They excavate the continuation of Line Four and the continuation of Line 3. On all four lines we have special activities, whether lines that have been put into operation or lines that are being continued. On the ground we have very many development projects, whether in traffic discussions, numerous bridges and green space, squares and sports halls.
Question: Your third field is above ground?
Ghalandar Sharif: It is above ground; three-level and four-level tiered bridges that have been implemented in Mashhad, and these are level and underground, and in some terms they came and focused only on the urban railway or other projects that existed, but in this term we saw all projects and the whole surface of the city.
Question: Were you able to do something for Mashhad's traffic, and has it been effective?
Ghalandar Sharif: You yourselves in Tehran are very stuck, more stuck than us. We tried to identify traffic knots, in the problem-oriented issue; whether in the field of geometric correction of small projects, or in the field of geometric correction of large projects, or in creating the intersections that were needed; we even had two-level intersections, underpasses and at-grade, a third level, and we created a large number of U-turns. We defined new projects. Now we are building Seyyed al-Shohada Highway to connect the Mashhad-Chenaran Freeway, and other major projects for opening up Mashhad's traffic discussion, and special attention to public transport.
Question: In Tehran, whatever project is implemented, in proportion to these projects coming into operation, it seems a very large volume of cars is brought in. Is Mashhad like this too?
Ghalandar Sharif: Unfortunately a large number of cars constantly enter; many are also low-quality, and we also have air pollution problems in Mashhad, and this is a point, and whatever we do, perhaps these many cars that come, but ultimately we tried to identify the city's problematic points and implement the projects, and the metro discussion: now five percent of Mashhad's public transport is metro. It is very little; we must bring it to 10 to 15 percent. On the other hand, in the total public transport field we are at 40 percent; that is, our buses are now 15 percent.
Question: That is, 60 percent is private?
Ghalandar Sharif: Yes, about 20 percent is also taxis, and 60 percent is cars; it must be reversed. We must move towards having more than 60 to 70 percent public transport, so that cars decrease. If we do not reach this level, we cannot make the use of private cars expensive. When we can tell people that if you do not use the metro, bus and taxi, the cost of transport using city cars will increase, we must move in this direction; the same work that countries that did this work did: the use of private cars is expensive, but in Iran, the use of private cars, until public transport is provided, which the government must certainly help the metropolises with for this to happen, but we are moving towards, God willing, being able, by fully implementing Mashhad's metro lines, to bring metro transport to 15 percent, bus transport to 25 percent, and taxi transport to more than 25 percent as well. That is, close to 70 percent of transport being public, and the rest private cars, which is heavy work that the government must help with.
Of course, in the transport field, the main cost must be paid by the government, especially in the metro field; the supply of wagons is with the government, help with construction is with the government. The name municipality is municipality and city maintenance, city building; it has its own specific ministry. Previously it was Housing and Urban Development; now it is the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development. The city must be prepared and handed over to the municipality, but now it is not like this, and the municipality now does both city building and municipality work, and its money is also from the people's pockets. Fortunately we have aware people, and by paying levies on time and the city's cost discussions in various fields, this work happens and we do this work.
During the wars, for close to eight months we have been engaged in an unjust war imposed on our country; the people are of course at work, and in Mashhad, certainly other cities are also like this. In Tehran too I was there and saw that at night, every night, they are present in the squares, powerfully, at 400 points of the city. On the first night it was 18 points; now it is 400 points of the city where they are specially present and at work; these people deserve the best services. Whatever we do, these services do not compensate for this magnanimity and greatness of the nation of Iran, but we do all our effort to carry out, in wartime, the order of our martyred Imam after the sedition and that January quasi-coup, who said executive bodies and officials should work more than twice as much; services did not decrease; we acted even more strongly.
On the other hand, we did not shut down projects either. In these same eight months of war, we put into operation more than 35 major projects, whose cost was close to 12 hemmat, apart from the metro and metro stations, one of which was inaugurated in these same days of war. On the first day of the war we inaugurated a project; every week we inaugurate a project and proudly present it to the people, and this work still continues. Now we have a large number of projects ready for inauguration.
Question: We have the extra blessing of providing service to the pilgrims of Imam Reza (PBUH), and it is not only the people of Mashhad. How much of a role does the municipality play in the discussion of easy pilgrimage?
Ghalandarsharif: Easy and cheap pilgrimage is one of the points that is of interest to everyone, and the elders of the city of Mashhad emphasise this issue. In the field of urban management we have tried to implement many pilgrim-centred projects, of which the Mashhad Metro has the greatest effect. The Mashhad Metro is effective in making pilgrimage cheaper. This is a discussion we had not thought about, but Ayatollah Alam al-Hoda stated this matter on a visit he had to the metro before the operation of Phase One of Line 3: you have not paid attention to this point. The metro has caused, given the 6 kilometres that connected Lines One and Two to each other and connected the rail network to the Holy Shrine, that from any point of the city they can board, and we have the cheapest public transport in the country.
The ticket for this metro is 3000 tomans. Every year, by our resolution, we have one month free, and based on need it becomes free, and Tehran has now made it free for three months, and Tehran's ticket price is much more expensive. People and pilgrims can find accommodation at the farthest point of the city that has a metro, instead of around the Shrine, where accommodation is very expensive, and come to the Shrine by metro within 5 or 10 minutes and return again, without looking for parking and without trouble. Providing parking in the first ring area of the fabric around the Shrine, next to the metro, pilgrims and neighbours can park their cars and use the metro and go to the Shrine. We created special pilgrim-welcome projects at Mashhad's entrances, "Shahid Mohammadzadeh", where those entering Mashhad can rest there.
A special work we have done at the passenger terminal: a very suitable character and a suitable entrance and the Salam Porch and numerous other projects implemented in the pilgrim-centred field in Mashhad, and projects being implemented in the fabric around the Shrine. But the government has not yet carried out its resolutions in the fabric around the Shrine; the resolutions of the National Pilgrimage Working Group and the resolutions of the Government Board, the major part of them, are in the area of the fabric around the Holy Shrine.
In the initial agreement between the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development at the time of the late Engineer Kazerouni, and after that also in the term of Mr Saeedi Kia's ministry, it was agreed that all revenues from implementation in the fabric around the Holy Shrine, which the government creates in the Urban Regeneration Company, whether properties or revenues, must be spent in the area of the fabric around the Shrine, and now this work is unfortunately stopped, and the properties are there and they must spend, and everyone is following this up, and we are also following it up, and I ask the Minister of Roads and Urban Development and the President to give a firm order that this development is among the demands.
Question: Regarding high-rise construction around the Shrine and preserving Mashhad's spiritual and cultural identity, how much attention does the municipality pay to observing the precinct?
Ghalandarsharif: The initial plan, known as Engineer Kazerouni's plan, which acted to improve and renovate the fabric around the Shrine, had flaws. It was revised and a new plan was prepared, and it has been being implemented for several years. Heights have been reduced; the view of the Shrine's landscape and dome is considered, and the height of buildings decreases the closer we go towards the Shrine, so that the view of the Shrine becomes better. Of course, this also needs revision. We must take measures so that problems are resolved. Those that have been implemented, nothing can be done about them anymore, but we can strengthen access. In this new plan, somewhat little attention has been paid to the accesses that existed before for the high-rise buildings that were built, and it has created a series of problems. This is one part of the revision. The President has also ordered it, appointed a special representative and emphasised it, and it has been notified to the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development that everyone should strive so that a good correction is created in the new plan.
Question: Where has the discussion of transferring the barracks from the centre of Mashhad reached?
Ghalandarsharif: Given the follow-ups that have been done, the barracks left the centre of the city of Mashhad, and its public and services part was handed over to the municipality. The profitable parts were handed over to our dear colleagues in the Army; the share of Astan Quds was also considered. Here I thank the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially the Ground Force. Astan Quds and the honourable custodianship also cooperated greatly, and it was a collective work in the province, and the barracks left. What remained for the city of Mashhad and Mashhad Municipality is about 120 hectares of green space use, on which a good park will be built, and we put its Phase One into operation a month ago: Jahanshahr Park, 27 hectares, a forest park in the city centre, which is very beautiful.
I emphasise again: Line 3 of the Mashhad Metro is an Iranian mega-project. It is a source of pride for the Iranian engineering community and specialists, and we must all be proud of it, and the government must also help us in supplying the wagons for Line 3 and also in supplying the costs of the wagons for Line One. At the same time, we paid special attention to women in the city of Mashhad. Mashhad's women's parks are unique. Pilgrims should certainly visit the women's parks, of which there are 17. In this term we have brought them from less than 50 hectares to 85 hectares. The most special women's park in Mashhad is Shahrbanoo Park.
Source: IRIB News
