The mayor of Tacoronte, José Daniel Díaz Armas, expresses his discontent with the project that the Regional Department of Public Works has submitted to the public for a few days to carry out the third lane on the Autopista del Norte (TF-5). “We are really concerned because it does not have any sensitivity with the municipality,” he indicated, since, in his opinion, “the accesses to the Los Naranjeros highway are eliminated, both in the Santa Cruz and Puerto de la Cruz directions, in such a way that Tacoronte loses connections with this main road and, in addition, others that are safer and more powerful from a commercial point of view and job creation disappear.
Díaz Armas asserted that the City Council has not been consulted on any aspect in relation to this project and regretted that whoever wrote it “had the same motivation as those who did the initial layout of the TF-5 in the 60s.” In this sense, he pointed out that this road “what it does is further divide and disconnect the upper part, the neighborhoods of Agua García and Barranco Las Lajas, and the lower part of Tacoronte, generating two unconnected spaces, just as the first route of the highway, which as it passed through Tacoronte generated great problems that we drag on today and that now make the wound even greater”. The links from El Chupadero to Casas Altas have not been resolved, nor has the link between Casas Altas-Camino La Cuesta and the Los Naranjeros area been resolved.
The president explained that, after reviewing the documentation, “we have been able to verify that the expansion to three lanes means removing connections with the TF-5, which is the main artery to which the municipality is connected.”
In addition, he said, “from what was observed in the documentation, at the entrances and exits of Tacoronte a space for a link is condemned that does not seem to make any sense, eliminating a public facility that has been planned for many years, destined to host a interchange or diverse regional equipment”.
Another failure of the project is that it continues to propose the bus station in the current location, despite the fact that “there is already a document that is pending an environmental report in the Cabildo de Tenerife, which proposes a relocation so that the current one serves as a large parking lot or exchanger”.
As if that were not enough, the councilor pointed out that “the service roads that are proposed are deficient and, in the case of the one that comes from the IES Los Naranjeros, it is condemned by the ravine, which in the end generates a miserable connection for the needs that the municipality has, since the service road does not have continuity.
“It is a document that has not been negotiated with the City Council and that is being imposed through public exposure,” remarked Díaz Armas, who considered that “this is not the way to build the future of Tenerife”, since ” the only thing that is involved is making a third lane and not solving the daily problems that Tacoronte or the rest of the municipalities in the North have”.
