When a Valencian says that until 2017 you could park in the bus lane after ten at night, many do not believe it. He cannot even imagine that some went ahead and put on the emergency lights at a quarter to ten to secure a place on streets as in demand as San Vicente. That artery dawned full of vehicles on its right bank because Valencia allowed it until eight in the morning.
We are no longer that city. But we are still a city in which people drive “that way” and in which giving up the car costs a lot. We are criticized as Valencians for wanting to park “at the door”, but it is also true that our public transport has major deficiencies. The most peripheral neighborhoods, where I come from, applauded more than 20 years ago the arrival of the metro line to Avenida del Cid, and from then until now, peace and then glory here. Look at the metro map, there it is still, immovable even with those small joys for the tourist, for whom they have laid the red carpet to reach the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències.
The ‘offspring’ is left with the bus, and the frequency of passage that could be improved on the EMT becomes ugly. And now, the scooter arrives. In the middle of the cycling transformation of the city promoted by former mayor Joan Ribó, fast young people began to parade, upright, without helmets, along the edge of the road. They don’t circulate, they fly. Although they are the ones who are criticized the most, if you look a little you will see that they are not the only ones. There are many women, mostly migrants, who use it. In Barcelona, ??40% of these users are foreigners and the greatest use occurs in lower-income areas of the metropolitan area. They are the ‘workers’ who need their own route that no public transport offers them.
Because what was before, the chicken or the egg? Should transportation adapt to the needs of the user or is it the other way around? Why do I continue to eat a huge traffic jam every morning to leave Valencia and yet I don’t change my routines? Because we do not trust the system nor do we bet, collectively, on what belongs to everyone. We look for our own shortcut and that’s why I get stuck in a traffic jam and you, who read me, have just parked after driving 20 laps.
On Friday I saw Joan Ribó waiting for the bus that makes the trip from one of those peripheral neighborhoods to the center. He was sitting at the stop and not looking at the clock. His management has left open issues, and a city shaken by the mobility debate, but he was always clear that the pedestrian was the center. We have already heard the new government say that pedestrians will be at the epicenter of mobility. Pedestrians walk, but we also take the subway or bus and we seek to get to work wherever we live. And if it’s night, we want to do it safely. Remember that we are no longer that other city.
