The general objectives are shared by the RACC and the Barcelona City Council (a nicer city, who wouldn’t want that?), but they differ completely in the way they do it. “We don’t agree on how or when”, concludes Josep Mateu, president of the mobility club. For him, actions such as the remodeling of Via Laietana or the green axes of the Eixample superilla may one day make sense, but not yet: “They should stop, they have to be done once have made improvements in public transport, not hastily”.
In other words, according to Mateu, “the solution is to first have more reliable public transport and then reduce the use of private vehicles”. It is a claim that the RACC has been making for years, but the evident progress of the works on the green roads shows that the organization’s cry has not been heard. Mateu criticizes that actions such as that of Consell de Cent “will be a very good solution for the residents of this street, but not for those on the periphery” and remarks that “touching the Cerdà plan should be a consensual decision”.
Consensus is one of the most repeated concepts during the conference delivered by Josep Mateu yesterday at La Pedrera to take stock of the municipal mandate that is about to expire. “For the last eight years, Barcelona has stagnated: we have four key years for the city’s progress and to turn it into a benchmark for mobility”, Mateu summarized.
For the mayoral candidates to take note, the RACC presented a decalogue of recommendations outlining the most important issues in terms of mobility for the coming years.
This reinforcement of public transport takes the form of actions considered essential, especially in rail matters. The old claim to improve the Rodalies service stands out, as well as the construction of line 8 of Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat, which has just started preliminary works, and a powerful network of interchange car parks at train stations. Reference is also made to the need to give more capacity to the Vallès de Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC) line, whose wagons exceed 100% of their capacity during peak hours. The union of Trambaix and Trambesòs by Diagonal, on the other hand, is not part of the requests presented.
Other lines of action proposed by the RACC are a boost to electric mobility, the promotion of shared mobility and a political solution to the conflict between taxis and vehicles for hire with a driver (VTC). And all this, from a point of view that goes beyond the mental borders marked by the rounds, with a truly metropolitan vision.
In this sense, the RACC calls for the creation of a public-private metropolitan mobility agency that manages and takes consensual decisions, in the image and likeness of the Metropolitan Transport Authority [ATM] but with powers over all means of transport, both public and private. According to the RACC, in this way it could be achieved that by 2030 30% of journeys on weekdays are made by public transport.
The format of launching proposals with the intention that the municipal government collects them and carries out some of them was already done four years ago and the result was not very encouraging. In that case, instead of a decalogue, 40 proposals were presented. Of which only 20% have been carried out (the pacification of school environments, the extension of cycle lanes and the renewal of public administration fleets stand out), 27% have been initially promoted and the remaining 53% , more than half, have neither been addressed nor evolved.
