La Laguna will modify the current General Planning Plan (PGO) to build a road that closes the Tejina nucleus on the southwest perimeter. The Councilor for Territorial Planning, Santiago Pérez, has issued an order to contract the drafting of a substantial modification of the PGO, including its environmental evaluation, for the execution of this new local road from the La Laguna-Punta del Hidalgo highway ( TF-13) to Felipe del Castillo González street (Tejina-Tacoronte highway).
The mayor, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, explains that “this modification is the result of the demands of the Tejina citizen platform, since the future road will be an alternative to relieve a large part of the traffic in the direction of and coming from Valle Guerra, which currently he is forced to circulate through the town, collapsing it at certain hours of the day.”
The new highway must guarantee continuous sections and appropriate to its category, that accessibility regulations are complied with, the functionality of the road network is guaranteed and the mobility of that part of the nucleus is improved. In the event that interior voids occur, the use of this new land can only be public free space, to alleviate the scarcity of urban green areas in the town. Both the infrastructures and the obtaining of land will be raised with public resources.
This modification is the result of the demands of the Tejina citizen platform, but it was ruled out as a minor modification, given that the layout of the road (from the BP service station to the La Castellana area) implied reclassifying rural land.
“We have also appreciated the insufficiency of free spaces, which we find ourselves with a diverse problem: congestion and influx of traffic, an irregular pattern generated by self-construction, narrow streets with accessibility and sanitation problems in the buildings, some roads without exit and the insufficiency of the free spaces qualified by the current PGO, approved by CC, to cover the standards of the Law of the Land and of the Protected Natural Spaces of the Canary Islands”, exposes the councilor.
The 2004 PGO makes it possible to accommodate 8,292 dwellings (6,516 on urban land and 1,776 on developable land), which would mean a total population of 21,310 inhabitants for Tejina. This partial change to the Plan, which proposed a disproportionate population growth that was difficult to digest from an urban point of view, is adapted to the real situation of the nucleus and provides for free spaces commensurate with its population.
Tejina is the backbone of the northeastern region, both at a circulatory, economic and commercial level, and in the last 22 years its population has increased by 1,682 inhabitants, a growth that at a comparative level has been higher than that of the municipality as a whole.
In addition, becoming a pole of economic attraction in the region has implied an influx of traffic from the surrounding towns and municipalities (44,802 people according to the study of the Open Commercial Zones of the Cabildo de Tenerife), contributing to the collapse of the central streets of the town. In this sense, the proposed auction road represents an alternative that will divert the circulation of all this passing traffic.
The current planning of La Laguna is the PGO, which entered into force on May 14, 2005. Then an approval procedure was initiated, full adaptation, and since then two initial approvals have been made without to date having a definitive.
During this time, different regulations have been approved with a direct impact on it. Bearing in mind that the PGO approval procedure was going to be rolled back, the Municipal Corporation considers it more appropriate to carry out a preliminary study on the future city model for La Laguna, which will allow a new General Plan approval procedure to be dealt with later on within a single municipality strategy.
