The president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Pedro Martín, returned yesterday to defend the governability pact signed with Sí Podemos in which the construction of the southern train, for not considering it “priority”. In parallel, his partner and vice president, Enrique Arriaga (Cs), was present in the Congress of Deputies during the registration of the Citizens parliamentary group of a Non-Law Proposal (PNL) for the promotion of a railway network in Tenerife and Gran Canariawith the aim of forming a “real alternative to road transport” on both islands, according to Arriaga, the same one who a week ago withdrew a motion in the insular plenary session in support of the train, after Yes We Can threaten to break the pact of Government (PSOE-Cs).
This is the same proposal that will now be taken up by the opposition groups, CC and PP, to take it to the next plenary session of the Corporation.
Today, Emilio Navarro, mayor of Santiago del Teide and the new popular island president, will give details of that initiative that will basically try to achieve the “yes” of Ciudadanos and try to erode the current government pact.
Pedro Martín insisted again yesterday before a group of journalists that the South train “is not a priority”, emphasizing that it will not solve the mobility problems in Tenerife and it is one more and very expensive “alternative”.
Martín said that “it is a multimillion-dollar investment, that no one believes that the European Union alone will pay for it, all the institutions and the Cabildo, too, will have to put up money”, and sees it as “unfortunate” that especially CC tries to “generate confrontation and spend the Government” when mobility issues should go forward with consensus.
In addition, he criticized the changing position of the Canarian Coalition throughout the legislature, because “they have said no”, after “yes a piece” in the Arona-Adeje section and now also “yes above all things”. For Martín, the decision on this project should be agreed upon by all the groups, “it is the ideal” -he also mentions his partner, Cs-, since the investment “can mortgage” the money from the mobility of the next mandates, For this reason, it rejects CC’s attempts not to negotiate but to look for ways to “generate controversy and tension”. When he made these statements, it had not yet been known that his partner and vice president, Enrique Arriaga, was still betting on the train in the Congress of Deputies.
We can and Fepeco
One of its biggest detractors (Yes, you can) and one of its great supporters (Fepeco) also referred to the train yesterday, facing each other when their disparate points of view collided. María José Belda, a resident councilor in the Cabildo, insists on her rejection, because the figure of 2,200 million in the construction of the South train is “crazy” and, in addition, calculating that 18 million annual journeys were sold at the same price as the of the tramway, the investment would take 30 years to recover, he said. She insisted on the “destruction of the territory” and the number of jobs that would be destroyed “linked to the buses.”
For Belda, it is not “abnormal” that Podemos supports the train in Gran Canaria and “the bases in Tenerife, no”, and warned that a report from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria warns about the “economic unsustainability” of the project . As for the criticism of the president of Fepeco, Óscar Izquierdo, he said that, “as is the case with other pressure groups, he is used to pretending to run the Island from his chair as representative of the interests of the four that have always been distributed public money, and doing politics without standing for election”.
Óscar Izquierdo (Fepeco), for his part, speaks of the goodness of “sustainable, ecological transport recommended by the Green Agenda of the European Union” and asked the Minister of Podemos of the Government of the Canary Islands, Noemí Santana, to explain and make his fellow party members in Tenerife think about the benefits of the train, since his training decisively supports him in Gran Canaria, and also because of the knowledge he surely has in this regard, due to his former employment relationship with the public company Ferrocarriles de Gran Canaria ”.
As DIARIO DE AVISOS published in its edition yesterday, according to a study by the College of Civil Engineers, Canals and Ports of our province, “the train, if done today, would be finished in six years and would generate more than 3,500 direct jobs ”, although Rufino García, Luis Gutiérrez and Iván Solla acknowledge that “the train alone would not solve the mobility problem in Tenerife, where there is already almost one car per inhabitant”, for which they request parking on the outskirts of the metropolitan areas and tourist city of the South. “There are not enough square meters to park so many vehicles, which at the rate we are going will continue to be almost 10,000 more each year”, remarked Rufino García.
A NLP to request guided transport in Tenerife and Gran Canaria
The Ciudadanos parliamentary group registered yesterday in the Congress of Deputies a Proposal Not of Law (PNL) for the promotion of a railway network in Tenerife and Gran Canaria, with the aim of forming a “real alternative to road transport” in both islands .
This parliamentary initiative reaches the Lower House from the hand of the regional coordinator of Cs in the Canary Islands, Enrique Arriaga, with a claim that champions the liberal formation in the Archipelago and that aims to “achieve transport services that exceed the municipal level” and ” contribute to the articulation of the main population nuclei”.
This PNL asks the Government to guarantee “sufficient financing” for the construction and start-up of the Gran Canaria Railway and the South Tenerife train.
The spokesperson for Transportes de Cs in Congress, Juan Ignacio López-Bas, focuses on “the serious mobility problem” and recalls that “both Gran Canaria and Tenerife have a car park with a density 3.5 times higher than the national average with almost one vehicle per inhabitant”.
For his part, Arriaga indicates that “it is essential that the development of the Archipelago comes through means of transport that respect the 2030 Agenda.” The State has “the obligation to make investments that lead to an adequate and fair economic balance between the different autonomies, in this case taking into account the circumstances and particularities that arise due to insularity.”
The orange formation recalls that the Ministry’s safe, sustainable and connected mobility strategy includes, among other objectives, sustainable mobility contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, while pointing out the fragility of a territory such as that of the archipelago Canary due to the high demographic pressure it suffers.
