Sidewalks nearly four and a half meters wide and a hundred trees. Mayor Jaume Collboni’s government announced yesterday the long-awaited reform of the section of Carrer Balmes between Plaça Molina and the Ronda del General Miter. The deputy mayor of Urbanism, the socialist Laia Bonet, detailed that the works will start this autumn, which will last around fifteen months, which will eliminate a traffic lane, which will substantially improve the quality of the public space , which will encourage connections between the neighborhoods of Galvany and El Farró… And also that the remodeling of the upper section of this street, the one that reaches Plaça Joaquim Folguera, is subject to the progress of the works of the ‘L9 of the subway and that the City Council has the corresponding budget item. But it is not known when he will raise the necessary money. And so the horizon of the completion of this never-ending reform is drawn in an even more blurred way, much more. At the moment, no one knows when the works will finally arrive at Plaça Kennedy and Avinguda del Tibidabo.
We are talking about a project, the reform of Carrer Balmes, the revision of one of the main connections between the upper part of the city and the center, which was conceived and took its first steps fifteen years ago . Then the mayor Jordi Hereu had the stretch between Diagonal and Aragó redeveloped. Xavier Trias then promoted the reform of the sections between Aragó and Gran Via, Traversera de Gràcia and Diagonal, and Plaça Molina and Traversera de Gràcia. Later, however, during the terms of Ada Colau, the City Council prioritized the reforms of other roads. With greater or lesser intensity, since it is assumed that a good part of Barcelona’s residents with more resources live here, the administrations tend to underestimate this side of the city.
And this time the municipal oblivion seemed so long that many residents, tired of waiting, have reorganized in order to put pressure on the Consistory. “We are satisfied, despite so many expectations – they said in the recently reactivated citizen platform that they set up around 2015 -. For several years the City Council had been telling us that this work was a priority, but that it did not have a budget. He always told us the same thing, that he didn’t know when he could do it. And so time passed. In our opinion, everything could have been done faster. The problem is that the district of Sarrià-Sant Gervasi is suffering from a large disinvestment that we hope will finally begin to reverse.
This reform project updates one of the two sections of the executive project drawn up by the City Council between 2017 and 2018, which included the redevelopment of Balmes from Plaça de Molina to Plaça de Joaquim Folguera. The municipal objective is for this side of the street to have the same appearance as the sections that have already been renovated. In this way, the sidewalks will grow by almost two meters, until they have a width of 4.35, and the road will lose one traffic lane, so it will finally have two uphill and one downhill. The City Council will also plant 110 trees to make the place friendlier, so that it really invites people to stroll. In addition, the road in this section will go from the current 15 meters in width to only 11.20. The three lanes mentioned will be as follows: two uphill, one for private traffic and another shared, for buses and private traffic, and on the other side another downhill also shared. In addition, the City Council will open several zebra crossings, a service lane next to the Besòs sidewalk with about 130 linear meters of loading and unloading spaces, 147 parking spaces for motorcycles and four spaces for vehicles people with reduced mobility, as well as bus stops and spaces for containers.
