Four Months Without Rustaveli: A Real-World Test of Tbilisi’s Detour Network

From 23 July, all vehicle movement is restricted in the rehabilitation area between Tamar Chovelidze Street and Freedom Square, including part of Merab Kostava Street. Vaso Abashidze Street is also fully closed. Tbilisi Transport Company says the works are planned to last four months.

This is not a short event closure. It removes a central north–south link for an entire season and sends traffic into streets with different widths, gradients, junction geometry and pedestrian activity. The displacement is therefore likely to be uneven: a route that remains technically open may still become unreliable at the morning or evening peak.

TTC listed 17 bus routes and four minibus routes that will connect Melikishvili Avenue to Baratashvili Street via Heroes’ Square and the right bank of the Mtkvari. It also announced separate changes for buses 359, 391 and 378 and minibuses 408, 420 and 457. That is at least 27 named routes affected by the rehabilitation.

Counting altered routes is not enough. A detour can add distance without adding much time in free-flow conditions, then become much slower when queues form at Heroes’ Square, the river crossings or the entrances to Baratashvili Street. The relevant indicators are headway reliability, end-to-end travel time and the share of trips that exceed the timetable by a material margin.

The official diversion plan uses streets including Tarkhnishvili, Barnov, Makashvili, Kakabadze, Chonkadze, Asatiani, Dadiani, Tabukashvili and the Mtkvari embankments. A citywide average speed could hide severe local effects on one or two of these corridors.

A defensible monitoring dashboard would publish travel times for fixed origin–destination pairs, queue lengths at selected junctions, bus running times, traffic volumes on residential diversion streets and pedestrian delay at crossings. The comparison should use the same weekdays and time bands before and after the closure, excluding unusual events.

If private-car trips simply move to parallel streets, congestion and emissions are displaced rather than reduced. If some commuters switch to metro, walk or alter their departure time, the total pressure can fall. TTC ridership data, parking occupancy and traffic counts are needed to distinguish those outcomes.

Fuel consumption is another hidden cost. Stop-start traffic on a longer detour raises fuel use even when the distance increase looks modest. AutoBridge should avoid estimating a citywide fuel bill without observed traffic volumes, but a later report could model the cost for a small set of measured routes.

The city should publish a baseline and then weekly or biweekly results for: median and 90th-percentile car travel time; bus punctuality and headway gaps; traffic volumes on the main diversion streets; crashes and near-miss proxies; complaints; and public-transport ridership around Rustaveli, Liberty Square and Marjanishvili.

The final assessment should separate construction delivery from transport management. Finishing the avenue on time is one result. Keeping people moving safely and predictably while it is closed is another.