A visit to Almaty and the Middle Corridor

In March 2025, I had the privilege of visiting Almaty, Kazakhstan, to join the 'SIPA Policy Dialogue on Sustainable and Resilient Freight Connectivity in Central Asia', a forum organised by the International Transport Forum. This was the first time I visited Central Asia, with little idea what to expect.

I arrived in Almaty early in the morning. My plain landed at 5am, meaning I arrived at the hotel when others were just having breakfast. As someone studying transport, I always wonder how a landlocked country like Kazakhstan, with the closest sea being several thousands of kilometers away, can serve a 'fresh' fish platter at the hotel breakfast. After a short sleep, I started to explore the city of Almaty and its infrastructure. Almaty is located at around 800 meter above sea level. I visited during spring, with sunny weather, but temperatures below zero. The city, hosting over 2 million people, is an interesting mix of modern city, but with a Soviet backbone. In between hip coffee shops, you find majestic Soviet buildings and large statues.

Public transport is excellent. The city is connected with a network of trolleybuses, which are buses connected by overhead wires, following specific routes. While I like trolleybusses, given their low-cost electrified solution, I could not help but think that a city of over two million people should have a more advanced urban transit system. While Almaty does have a metro, it is only a single line, resulting in many people still relying on those trolleybuses or cars. Interestingly, I read that there is also one intercity trolleybus in Central Asia, in Uzbekistan, which exists for almost 30 years. This at the backdrop of discussions in Europe about the potential for electrified highways (for intercity trucking). Another nice transport feature of the city is the cable car that brings you from the edge of the city centre to the top of the Kok Tobe hill, which has an incredible viewpoint over the city and surrounding mountain landscape (see cover photo).

When talking about Soviet-inspired infrastructure solutions, the city's main water canal is another beautiful example (see below), which is mainly a stormwater drain. I went twice for a run along the canal, which takes you through the city quite effectively. In terms of drinking water, 70 percent of the city's water supply comes from underground sources, while the remaining comes from mountain rivers and lakes. Despite the view of the snow-rich mountains behind canal, the city actually faces frequent water supply disruptions. Not because of water shortages, but because of turbidity issues. In 2023, for instance, due the large runoff from nearby glaciers during the July heatwave, the city's main rivers (the Small and Big Almaty rivers) became flashy and muddy, with treatment facilities not being able to filter out this turbidity. This, in turn, let to cutoffs of the main water supplies, resulting in residents ordering portable loos and water tankers arriving to provide emergency supplies. For me, reading this was a wake up that water supply disruptions do not just materialise because of physical shortages, but could also happen because of large runoff and related turbidity issues.

Now turning to the workshop itself. The objective was to bring different country authorities and international organisations together to discuss how to better cooperate regarding transport development to improve the Middle Corridor. The Middle Corridor, that contrary to its name is actually a set of different transport corridors, aims to provide a land bridge between China and Europe for the shipment of goods, transiting Central Asian countries. The need for the Middle Corridor was elevated even more after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which led to the sanctioning of transport through Russia. The economics of the transport projects that underpin the Middle Corridor have always sounded somewhat odd to me; spend billions of dollars to transit goods from one border to the other through mainly sparsely inhabited areas. Hence, the only way you can make a good return on this infrastructure is to make sure you attract as much freight. This was also reflected in the plenary discussion. On the one hand, countries stressed the need to cooperate as a misalignment in terms of capacity can hold back the corridor as a whole. On the other hand, each country also took the opportunity to show potential funders (development banks, the EU and China) how impressive their transport projects are and what dreams they could realise with more funding. Arguably, some of the proposed projects were quite impressive, including highways and tunnels at 3000 meter above sea-level or higher.

I was tasked to lead some plenary discussions and provide a training to a selected group of government officials to raise awareness of ways that resilience and sustainability could be included into the planning process, alongside the common objective of increasing connectivity. To be frank, given the challenges at hand, I thought that this would be somewhat ambitious. Still, I received some interesting insights how planners and engineers deal with natural hazards, such as engineering solutions to cope with permafrost thaw or building roads through some of the most landslide prone areas in the world. But also persist challenges where mentioned, such as border crossings that are closed for several months because of extreme weather conditions, with solutions being simply too expensive or technically infeasible.

Overall, my trip to Almaty gave me some fresh new insights into infrastructure challenges and opportunities in a region I knew quite little about. Infrastructure planning in Central Asia is interesting and unique is quite a number of distinct ways. And of course, mountains always amaze me as someone coming from the flattest country on earth.