The right to petition: The CHESNO movement has investigated the issues that concern Kyiv residents the most
8 May 2025 16:28
Over the past 10 years, the most popular topic of petitions addressed to the Kyiv City Council has been transportation initiatives – in 2024, their number was 27.1% of the total number of petitions. This is stated in a study by the CHESNO Movement, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports.
Kyiv residents often come up with initiatives to build the subway, in particular, in Troieshchyna, Vynohradar, etc. The citizens are also concerned about the improvement and modernization of transport routes in the capital.
In 2024, some of the transportation-related petitions concerned the unblocking of public transport during an air alert. There were nine such petitions in total. Oleksandr Hrechko, co-founder of the Kyiv Passengers NGO, told CHESNO that he registered the petition immediately after the decision was introduced, and the necessary votes were collected within a week.
The authorities, responding to these petitions, traditionally found counterarguments, but the changes eventually took place: from March 2025, Kyiv’s ground public transport stops near shelters during air raids and continues to move. However, this change does not apply to open sections of the subway.
Last year, Kyiv residents filed the smallest number of petitions
In 2024, Kyiv residents published 384 petitions on the portal of electronic petitions addressed to the Kyiv City Council, the lowest number since 2015, when the service for submitting collective appeals was launched.
For example, in 2023, the website recorded 756 petitions, and in 2022 – 560. The year 2016 remains the leader in terms of the number of petitions, when Kyiv residents filed 2,174 appeals to the city council.
How effective are such appeals to the authorities?
In order for a petition to be considered by the city authorities, it needs to have 6,000 signatures.
46 out of 384 petitions registered in 2024 received the required number of votes. Although the level of support for citizens’ electronic appeals has increased compared to 2015-2016, this figure is currently only 12% of the total.
This may partly be due to the high threshold of required signatures. CHESNO has found that other cities face the same problem, especially Kharkiv and Odesa, where the level of support for petitions is less than 1% over time.
36 petitions in 2024 can be considered successful: they were supported by the authorities, and today some of them are in the status of “under implementation” or have already been implemented.
Instead, the city council did not support 10 citizen petitions. The topics of the petitions that were not supported are diverse: lifting the ban on public transport during air alerts, construction of a parking lot in Obolon district, some land issues, and preservation of green spaces.
