REPORT
THE PASSENGERS AND UNIONS CRITIQUES GROWS UP AGAINST THE UNDERGROUND COMPANY AND METROSUR
LUIS GARCIA
Not all are congratulations in the present and future operation of the Madrid underground. Some of the most famous sector openings and the Metrosur project have provoked some critiques based in the need of more trains and the existence of electoral interests.
Some users of the underground have protested about the want of trains and about the little frequency of the trains passing in the lines 7 and 9. In the image, the platform of the Vicálvaro station.
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Metrosur is a proposal presented with much interest in 1998 by the Madrid Community President, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón, whose intention is to join with it the great cities (Alcorcón, Fuenlabrada, Getafe, Leganés and Móstoles) of the south zone of Madrid. The project logically, would join this new line with the underground network of the capital.
Moreover of the first and hard political critiques about it, the Comisiones Obreras Union (CCOO) has done a large report that accuses the Ruiz Gallardon proposal of being full of "electoral interests".
CCOO says that there are technnical reasons: It has been taken some facts from the Madrid Community mobility inquiry presented in 1998 (and done by the Ministry of the Regional Government responsible of the operation of the hypothetical Metrosur).
"Really, the real demand of journeys in colective transport between the cities included in the Metrosur proposal is 56.633 journeys, a mean of 2.980 journeys by hour, that is a very little demand for a substructure like this. It is clear that this is an absurd cost that, according with all the studies, the trains will go back empty or with a very little number of passengers", adds the Union.
These are not the only critiques of the Union: "it is said too that this substructure is to connect the most important zones, but in the proposed route this is not true. There will be connected the supermarkets (that do not need this kind of substructure), but the production zones are excluded (the 77,47% of the industrial zones organized as industrial estates are far from the route); this happens too with the hospitals, national health clinics and a big number of social and educational places and other of diferent interest"
The last argument of CCOO is the hardest and talks about the real-estate interests: "In this point it is important to talk about the details and impacts not sufficiently known in this kind of operations. The clearest case is the extension of the actual underground network, presented as a ambitious proposal to give a solution to the problem of the demands not attended by the old network, but that has been used to insist in the pouring of the public resources to the private initiatives. Only from the last fact it is possible to understand why the extensions serve to attend non-existent demands (the ones of the new districs in project) or to add some value to housing private promotions, at the same time that they forget older and more urgent demands from other zones of Madrid, curiously all the ones from the city periphery that limit with the Metrosur zone (Carabanchel, Villaverde, Orcasitas, etc...), in which moreover that it is not possible to obtain property benefits, the demanders are not possible voters".
CCOO wants an extension of the commuter railway service as an alternative in spite of Metrosur. In the photo, a commuter train passing by the renovated Príncipe Pío underground station.
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The Union, "In front of this vanity and hided objectives", proposes
some alternatives: "The closing of the commuter railway line (that is already
projected) in Fuenlabreada and Móstoles, that would connect this cities
with Alcorcón and Leganés without the pass through Atocha; continuation
of the last closing to connect with the Getafe Sector Three line and with the
C-3 in Getafe Industrial that supposes the connection of all the cities included
in Metrosur with a less cost; approach of the Madrid underground lines up of
the south zone limit and to improve the substructures for the internal movements
to the city centers, that could be attended redesign the bus line, opening other
new ones with little vehicles and installing streetcar lines (these ones only
in connection with a new design of the city center and a big reduction of the
car traffic)
THERE ARE NEEDED MORE TRAINS
If Metrosur is a critiqued project, some of the recent openings in the underground
neither escape from the polemic. The new sectors of the line 7 (Las Musas-Pitis)
and 9 (Herrera Oria-Arganda).
According with the protests of the customers, done in some media, the frequency
of the trains is not enough and this fact provokes delays and at the same time
masses of people in the coaches. "They runs with intervals of sever or
nine minutes, when the normal time is four or five minutes", says Javier
Pérez, Underground CCOO Secretary. "The openings diary of Mr. Ruiz
Gallardón does not correspond with the runnig material that has the company
in this moment", he adds.
STOL has tryed to have the opinion of some responsible from the Underground
or the Community about these critiques, but no one speaker has responded to
this requests.
About the problems in the lines 7 and 9, in a recent press conference, the Substructure
and Transports Ministry of the Community Government, Luis Eduardo Cortés,
admited that "it is necesary to put in service some more train units to
have a good service. "Before the summer, all the lines will have the 100%
of the trains", he assured.
About the future of the railway transport in Madrid, the journal El País
published the 8th of February an information titled: "Renfe studies to
put six new stations in the present commuter network".
According with this journal, "The commuter network of the Madrid commuter
is able to improve the number of stations without a growth of the length. The
Renfe technicians are doing some meetings with the ones from the Regional Transport
Consortium to see the possibility of new stops in the lines that already exits
in the network. The project is advanced in six possible places: Colegio de San
Fernando (C-1), San Diego (C-2), Dehesa Boyal (C-4), Imperial and Puente de
los Franceses (C-7) and a new station to Aravaca".
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