When you arrive or leave the Camp de Tarragona AVE station, far from the main cities as is well known, you always come across the same, sad image: dozens of cars parked on the side of the access road to the terminal It is not new, as it has been repeated for almost 18 years, when high speed arrived in Tarragona.
On the ground, strewn along the asphalt and sand curbs, dismembered remains could be seen yesterday. Also some car with a broken window. The reason, a new wave of robberies. About thirty cars were attacked on Wednesday morning, information advanced by Diari de Tarragona.
The station has an underground car park, guarded, with a subscription of 50 euros per month. It is the option chosen by a large part of regular high-speed users, most of them to travel in Barcelona.
Another thing is what happens to the occasional high-speed passengers. If they are not season tickets, the price of the underground car park, operated by the company Saba, exceeds 20 euros if you leave your car in the morning and pick it up in the afternoon. It is almost the same as the cost of a high-speed return ticket , without discounts, in Barcelona.
The result, that many of the occasional users leave their cars on the side of the access road, next to the fields and with almost no lighting, which turns into normal what is not normal.
“Vehicles parked in the dark along the access road… it’s a situation that no one likes, neither for image nor for safety, with the risk that there are people walking along the curb with suitcases”, he warns , indignant, Eudald Roca, mayor of La Secuita (Tarragonès), the municipal term that houses part of the station and its accesses to the center of Perafort.
Aware of the problem, the Ajuntament de la Secuita (1,800 residents) decided to launch in 2017 the construction project of a large dissuasive car park next to the station, 210 meters away and with 650 spaces, in outdoors, at around five euros a day. “We have claimed it from the first day, a small City Council like ours is solving a problem of an infrastructure of territorial scope; we should have the complicity of all the administrations, the Generalitat and even the State, to place the station in the place it deserves”, adds Roca.
Instead of aid and facilities, the mayor assures that they have always felt “very alone”. “The administrative paperwork is enormous, if we were a private company we would have gone bankrupt and abandoned the idea”, criticizes the batlle, who has met several times with the Generalitat.
Despite the obstacles, seven years later they continue with the processing. A week ago the Generalitat gave the green light to the one-off modification for the urban requalification of the land, owned by the Council, where the parking lot has been planned. The processing has not yet ended and the mayor does not dare to talk about any calendar, given the experience.
At 11 kilometers from Tarragona and more than 20 from Reus, most users arrive at the station by car. There is no rail connection and the only public transport, apart from taxis, is the bus. The station is between fields, most of them uncultivated, but no administration thought to create or demand a low-cost surface parking lot.
