Public transport managers in Catalonia recognize that today the service is incapable of absorbing the mobility that occurs by private vehicle. The citizen does not arm himself with patience every morning in the daily and exasperating traffic jams that occur on the roads to Barcelona because he thinks that at the wheel of his car he is a much freer person.
If only a quarter of the people who come to the capital of Catalonia by private vehicle every day did so in any of the modalities offered by the public transportation system, we would need another network of Railways of the Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC). . Of the one we already have and also of another of similar dimensions. Otherwise the collapse would be even more serious.
This was said yesterday afternoon by FGC’s own director of strategic planning, Carles Casas, in the debate orchestrated by the Cercle d’Infraestuctures Foundation on the La Salle campus of the Ramon Llull University under the title Is it time for transportation? public? . Also participating in this meeting were Oriol Matori, general director of Transports and Mobility of the Generalitat of Catalonia, and Xavier Flores, CEO of Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB). Neither of them tried to refute Casas’ assertion. Quite the opposite. And neither did the new head of the Rodalies network, Antonio Carmona, sitting in the audience, whom everyone questioned and looked askance at all the time.
The story is very simple. The Barcelona metro does nothing other than break user records since the pandemic was behind us and we returned to normality. And young people no longer have in any way the interest of yesteryear in obtaining a driving license as soon as they turn 18, much less in going into debt to buy a car, even an electric and environmentally sustainable one. Despite this, when push comes to shove, when citizens put their money where their mouth is and go to work, they largely resort to private vehicles and assume, with more or less stoicism, the corresponding traffic jam.
It is not only a matter of citizen trust, beliefs and truths of faith. Furthermore, everything indicates that the situation will worsen, at least in these latitudes. The intensity of traffic jams has been for some time now directly proportional to the increase in housing prices. As the big city expels inhabitants who also have to return every morning to work, the deficits of the public transportation system will be revealed with increasing forcefulness.
And after listening to the managers gathered yesterday by the Cercle d’Infraestructures Foundation, the solution seems even more complicated and distant. It is not only about multiplying public investments, but also about optimizing infrastructure and, above all, integrating the services they offer. The magic word is interchange, but we are not talking about a parking lot behind a train station, but rather real hinges that facilitate people’s movements, that give coherence to the entire transport system offer. Who just takes one train every day? Metros, taxis, shared bicycles and others must constitute a whole. And the other magic word is governance.
“We have to look for stable financing mechanisms to guarantee the future of the system,” said Casas, from FGC. “We cannot depend on temporary decisions.” “In recent years we have increased investments by 30%,” stressed Matori, the head of the Generalitat, “but we have to be much more efficient.” “In reality, if you don’t go with the whole family, there is nothing more inefficient than the private vehicle,” added Flores, from TMB. And at the end, among the audience, Carmona, the new head of Rodalies, also spoke. “There are no immediate solutions. Improvements take years.”
