In the 1980s, the city paved the surrounding moat to create a ring highway.
While violence has dropped with the surge of American troops in some parts of the province, the Taliban have been asserting themselves in Gereshk, a market town on the ring highway that circles the country.
MOSCOW--Stanislav Sutyagin was driving with a friend on Moscow's busy ring highway last week when the traffic police stopped him and several other drivers and ordered them to block the road with their cars.
Despite a few sparse patches, protesters filled most of the length of the 10-mile ring highway, suggesting that enthusiasm for the movement was not on the wane, as Kremlin officials and Mr. Putin's supporters had insisted.
Mr. Coleman's family had tried to leave the city Thursday at his urging -- he is traveling on the West Coast -- but they gave up after 12 hours of stalled traffic, without even passing the city's outer ring highway.
MOSCOW — Thousands of anti-Kremlin protesters donned white ribbons and held hands along downtown Moscow's 10-mile ring highway on Sunday, demonstrating the resilience of the protest movement and the continued dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin a week before he is to be on the ballot in a crucial presidential election.
In satellite photographs the metropolis can be seen to sit compactly in a Green Belt of open land, with its principal ring highway (the M25 motorway) threaded around it at a radius of about 20 miles (30 km) from the city centre.
This movement beyond the périphérique, or the ring highway separating Paris from the suburbs, isn't a trend as much as a necessity, said Olivier Cazin, an artist who attended the fine arts school of Cergy-Pontoise, north of the capital, and is now based in the suburb of Romainville.
A persistent problem is downtown's lack of retail: all the big department stores except one (Foley's) relocated to the Galleria-Post Oak area, a paradise for mall shoppers and a nightmare for urbanists, just beyond the loop, the ring highway 610 that encircles little Houston.
Other improvements to the local infrastructure are in progress or on the boards, including ring roads, highways and bridges.
