The umpteenth press conference on the green axes of the Eixample has served this Thursday to put a face, name and surname to one of the star projects of this second term of Ada Colau in the city hall of Barcelona. Because the virtual detail is already known about how the first openwork intervention will look on the deck that Ildefons Cerda sculpted more than 160 years ago. will happen in Council of Cent and in his crossings Comte Borrell, Rocafort and Girona, in addition to the crossing with Enric Granados.
The works start in june and the forecast is to finish in eight months. It remains to be seen, and that will apparently be explained in another call with the media, what traffic cuts or various affectations They will have these jobs. Once finished, by the way, forget about any inauguration, since the premiere will coincide with the municipal elections May 2023, the time before voting, in which the government of the day has historically always tried to have projects ready that campaign on their own.
The Total budget of this first intervention is €52.7 million. Intervention will be carried out on four axes that will generate four new squares that will not have continuity for traffic, unless one goes in bike. At each of these intersections, vehicles will be ejected to the right or left, effectively becoming streets that will only make sense for neighbors, merchants and restaurateurs. As it happens with the reform of Via Laietana, also here the unknown is to see how private mobility behaves in the face of the humanization of these four streets. The scenario is a bit disturbing, since the Eixample is still a metropolitan highway crossed by nearly 350,000 vehicles dailymore than in the two roundabouts that surround the city.
On this issue, the Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning, Janet Sanz, has pulled from the manual and has brandished the list of pending interventions in terms of collective mobility. He has cited the tram connection via Diagonal and the improvements in Rodalies, and it could have added the bus lanes in the entrance arteries to the big city or the park&ride car parks at train stations. “When we finish in 2030 (the year in which the 21 planned axes are expected to be executed), we must try to get people who now come from the metropolitan region by car, because it is the most comfortable, to do so by public transport”. This will be, without a doubt, one of the aspects that the opposition will exploit the most to question the project of green axes of the ‘comuns’, a project that, according to Colau, has no brake
The PSCa member of the government of the ‘comuns’, has shown some astonishment at the presentation, since, in his opinion, and quoting a spokesman for the Socialists, “they were still negotiating some details” and they did not consider the project closed. In fact, at the November 2020 press conference, when the first images of a Consell de Cent very similar to what is today the environment of the Sant Antoni market were exhibited, the socialist councilor Laia Bonet was present. At this Thursday’s meeting there were only representatives from Barcelona en Comú, led by the mayor.
There are three points that the PSC considers unresolved: the elimination of Bicing stops, which municipal sources indicate that they will be installed in nearby areas, about 80 meters from the green axis; the non-guaranteed reservation of parking spaces for people with reduced mobilityand the impossibility that the neighbors can cross linearly the whole street and have to meander to get home.
In addition to the traffic, the maintenance is another of the main challenges of the project. The Eixample, with less than two square meters of green per inhabitant (holes count as a green area…), will begin to comply, in its own way, with what Cerdá called ruralization of urban space. Sanz has promised that the new cleaning contract, which he begins to work in the coming weeks, already includes a “more everyday presence” from cleaning services. You asked, by the way, “co-responsibility“citizen, or what is the same, that we are not so dirty.
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The detail of the first axes leaves an Eixample very different from the one we know: 440 more trees, four new large squares (2,000 m2 each) and other 31 small sizealmost six hectares recovered for the pedestrian, disappearance of asphalt (it is replaced by ‘panot’ and granite), speed limited to 10 km/h and a lighting on a more human scale. Everything, prays the council, with the aim that in 2030, when everything is finished, the residents of the district have a humanized area less than 200 meters from your portal.