There are few things as sacred as the way of moving by the city. Sacred and rocky, because when a habit It has been acquired, it is not easy to modify it. Are routines that mark the day to day, that allow us to calculate the times and, ultimately, organize life. That’s why when you open a change window, there are many who sense a danger. It happens that with the design of the 21 green axes in the Eixample, which should be deployed between 2023 and 2030, many streets that today are part of the basic circulation network will become places of passage for neighbors and services. And the question is inevitable: Can the rest of the city absorb all that amount of derived traffic? The city council considers that it is, because the transition to more sustainable means of transport has been a growing reality in recent years, despite the pandemic. The REC, which this Thursday presented a study, considers that in no way. Moreover, according to car club, now converted into a ‘mobility club‘, a monumental traffic jam.
According to the calculations of this entity, queues in the Eixample will grow 26% from 2023 (about 18.5 kilometers in length compared to the current 14.6 in rush hour), but things will be worse in 2030, when the superblock Barcelona is fully deployed. According to the RACC, then the increase will be 55%, with almost 23 kilometers of traffic jams. The streets that would suffer the most, always according to this analysis, are Count Urgell and its continuation in avenue of Sarrià, Gran Via and Council of One Hundred. To a lesser extent, the Diagonal and Aragó.
The study is based on the average daily intensity of vehicles (the passage of cars in a specific section) and transfers the flow, based on the traffic cuts that will be generated by the 21 green axes patch, to the rest of the circulation network that will not undergo any modification. To understand us, the idea is that the same water coming down a riverIf the channel is cut, it looks for and occupies other spaces. The study, however, although it provides data on the evolution of cuota modal (the analysis of the means we use to move around), which is not precisely to launch rockets, seems not to take into account that in this decade it is planned to finish, among other things, the line 9 of the metro and the connection of the tram through the Diagonal. The first should be a reality in 2029, as advanced in December 2020 by the then ‘minister’ of Territori, Damià Clavet. The second is planned for next year the work of connection between Glòries and Verdaguer, to later commit what remains until Francesc Macià.
Too optimistic
What the RACC does highlight, and that is where a large part of its mistrust must come from, is the excess of municipal optimism in recent years in terms of sustainable mobility. The mobility plan 2013-2018For example, it promised to reduce car use by 21%. It barely reached 1%. But there are lights, like the historical record of validations in public transport in 2019, before the pandemic, with 627 million trips, 2.1% compared to the previous year. The bus was the one that grew the most, 4%, probably because it was finally the orthogonal bus network fully deployed. Too Railways recorded his personal best. To all this must be added the growth that the use of bicycles and scooters is experiencing (cyclists, for example, were 22.5% more in September than those registered in the same month of 2020).
In favor of the RACC thesis, the survey that accompanies its study and that provides revealing data: 80% of the vehicles that circulate in Eixample they come from outside Barcelona. So no matter how much inside the rounds he presumes improvements related to public transport, The thing is not far from so clear for those who arrive from the metropolitan area or beyond. That is why the automobile club claims the city council “coordinate your calendar“of deployment of green axes with the improvements planned in the commuter plan 2021-2030, that foresees a investment of 6,346 million euros on the Catalunya railway. Requesting this, and although they have not spoken it during the press conference this Thursday, is equivalent in practice to asking that the green axes plan be delayed 10 years, always in the event that the State has kept its word, which It is already a lot to ask if you take into account the string of broken promises regarding trains on this side of the Ebro.
Confronted zones
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Also in favor of the RACC the study that last week presented the Barcelona Supercomputing Center about pollution in the streets. According to this body, quoting its opinion verbatim, “without a significant reduction in traffic, the impact of measures such as superblocks or the tactical urbanism have a rebound effect on the confronted zones“That is to say, pollution hardly varies in pacified areas but soars in traffic jam receiving streets. The council does not see it the same way, which at the beginning of September presented a report on smoke in the Sant Antoni superblock, with these results: a 25% reduction in the presence of NO2 and a 17% reduction in suspended particles (PM10).
As a solution, the RACC also proposes impulsar ‘park&rides’ in train stations near Barcelona or to promote a new method of distribution of goods to avoid, among other things, that the half of the carriers go with the van empty. But in short, they implore that no progress be made in the pacification of streets without first solving the alternatives to the private vehicle. The council will take a look at the study, but nothing seems to indicate that it will put the handbrake on its green axes plan. How traffic will evolve, which is already at pre-pandemic levels, is anyone’s guess. For the RACC and for the city council.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com