A friend from Zaragoza was surprised when visiting the capital of Gran Canaria for the first time. Why are there so many cars here? His observation seemed curious to me because Zaragoza doubles the number of inhabitants of the city of Las Palmas, there they have good public transport and they have inaugurated a tram that soon won popular support. In Tenerife, where they also have an efficient tram, every morning it is a torment to get to the capital if you come from the north, the TF-5 motorway is always overwhelmed and people take a long time to get to work. There, environmental organizations warn of the threat of collapse in a territory that has a fleet of more than 850,000 vehicles, almost one car per inhabitant. The situation in Gran Canaria is similar, there is talk of a lack of historical planning by those responsible for public administrations and it is warned that the solution does not lie in promoting private transport.
Too many people and too many cars on the two capital islands, and an aging and scarce population on the three westernmost islands. Hasn’t the cult of the car been stimulated here, which entails the incessant growth of the fleet of vehicles, a trend in the face of which the construction of more roads is but a patch? Eustaquio Villalba, from the Tenerife Association of Friends of Nature, describes the project of trains that surround the island to the north and south as “nonsense”, estimating that the environmental impact would be serious. There is no island in the world the size of Tenerife that bases its transportation system on railways, so he thinks, what should be done is to create preferential lanes for buses. On the other hand, Podemos assures that the train from the south of Tenerife supposes an exorbitant amount of money for a project that is going to destroy the territory and many jobs linked to the bus lines that connect the capital with the south. In Gran Canaria, Román Rodríguez, current vice president, proposed a tourist train to the south, but in times of lean times due to the pandemic, I do not see the project as very viable. I remember that Vertebrate Train that was set up on the Avenida Marítima in the 70s, a project that was equally rejected. But cities similar to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have trams or light rail systems: Alicante, Murcia, Bilbao, Palma de Mallorca, Malaga and soon Granada. Couldn’t something different from the Metroguagua have been tried here?
The problem with the capital islands is that they concentrate most of the activity in their metropolitan areas, and it will be difficult to decentralize, and the problem of traffic has its ramifications in the peak of tourism in the south. The GC-1 is full at many times of the day, and if an accident occurs, things can be serious. According to Wikipedia, the municipalities adjoining Las Palmas de Gran Canaria form a metropolitan area of more than 600,000 inhabitants, constituting the largest metropolitan area in the Canary Islands and the ninth in Spain.
The fact that this winter of wind and haze, of haze and wind, does not go unnoticed, comes to suppose another episode of climate change. Years go by and the rain moves away, in the Peninsula the reservoirs are half empty and it is not the first time that a drought episode has been declared. Here the important Italian community, clearly on the rise, has inaugurated a station that can be heard both in the south and in the capital, and they have had the foresight to call it Radio Calima.
While the majors collect signatures against banking exclusion, we are going through years of super profits for banking. Billions that fill the coffers of the shareholders and in return there are many layoffs and thousands of offices are closed.
