In St. Petersburg summed up the results of the navigation season. As experts expected, due to the Chinese virus pandemic, passenger traffic has almost halved.
The situation in the field of cargo transportation is less critical. The volume of cargo that was transported this year has decreased, but not globally. As Aleksey Sidorov, Head of the Boat Movement Service of the Volga-Baltic Basin Administration, notes, 16,5000 trips were made in 2020, which is only 15% less than the identical figure for 2019.
Completely different statistics on passenger traffic. During the 2020 season, only 800 flights (81,000 people) were made on the reservoirs of the Volga-Baltic basin, while last year the number of flights reached 2,000 (350 thousand passengers). At the moment, flights are closed, except for the routes Priozersk - Valaam Island and the Voznesenye crossing. These lines are required by local citizens to get from the city to their homes.
In the waters of the Neva in 2020, 146 moorings of ships were registered, on which tourists traveled for more than a day. In 2019, this parameter was equal to 500 moorings.
The reasons for the reduction in passenger traffic are known. A general lockdown across the country due to the coronavirus pandemic has brought dreams of cruises on the Neva to naught. The season could only start at the end of June. It lasted only 141 days. For comparison: the navigation period last year was 216 days, which is 75 days more.
