The Mobility Manager of Barcelona City Council has defended the state of the road on Aragó Street at the confluence with Sicília Street, the point where the boxer Xavi Moya was killed in an accident with his motorcycle. The municipal manager, Xavier Patón, appeared this Thursday before the judge as a defendant after a report from the Urban Police exempted the motorist from responsibility and attributed the accident to the collision with a rubber element of the road of an old lane. bike that had not been removed nor was it marked, a circumstance that could constitute serious imprudence on the part of the City Council.
The manager, Xavier Patón, has assured that Aragó street “was in perfect condition for use” after the works from previous years had been completed. “The section of the accident was correctly marked and illuminated,” he explained to the judge. The road was properly marked with the separation of the bike lane from the traffic lane with a double continuous line and with the drawing of a bicycle on the road, he has maintained. During his appearance in which he refused to respond to the lawyers representing the victim’s family, the Mobilitat manager pointed out that there were two separators of the bike lane that had been damaged and that they had to be reinstalled. These missing elements were found before the obstacle with which Moya collided and perhaps for this reason the deceased found an element that he did not expect.
When asked who was responsible for the maintenance of Aragó Street, the Mobilitat Manager responded that there is a company hired by the City Council that is in charge of preparing the streets, but he stressed that there is no department responsible for warning of the incidents. “Incidents reach us in many ways,” he explained. “We are all responsible and no one,” he added. Patón has stated that he was not aware of any accidents prior to Xavi Moya’s and has indicated that they did not receive complaints about the state of the road either.
The accusation, brought by the family of the deceased through the Vosseler office, assures that Moya’s accident “was avoidable” and that there was serious imprudence on the part of the City Council in not removing an element that posed a risk to traffic. Daniel Vosseler, lawyer for Xavi Moya’s family, has announced that they have found five motorcyclists who suffered injuries after colliding with the same rubber element. Two of them suffered serious injuries and the other three suffered minor injuries, which would indicate that that point “was not a black dot but a black hole,” the lawyer denounced. The testimony of the five motorcyclists will be brought to the case by the prosecution to convince the judge that there were accidents prior to Moya’s death due to the same obstacle without the City Council doing anything to solve it.
