About thirty residents of La Laguna, with representatives of the Guamasa residents’ association and the FAV Aguere, gathered this Friday in front of the doors of the Cabildo de Tenerife to demand that the TF-5 link not be closed, that the corporation experimented as a pilot test for two weeks.
The president of the association, Jonay Luzardo, has shown the “discontent” of the citizens, and not only of Guamasa, which has about 4,000 inhabitants, but also of other towns such as Agua García (Tacoronte), El Ortigal, Cruz Chica or Valley of War.
He has indicated that when the test was launched there were many “queues and delays”, especially on the roads adjacent to the TF-5, TF-235 and TF-152, with a “total collapse”, to the point of that a three-kilometer journey took between 45 and 50 minutes.
Luzardo has acknowledged that “there is more fluidity” on the TF-5 for drivers coming from the north but understands that what the Cabildo has done is “transfer the problem” to other roads.
The neighborhood protests are supported by about 900 signatures that have already been presented to the Common Council and, although the Council points out that they continue analyzing the technical data, Luzardo does not hide that they have a “bad omen.”
The neighborhood representative has pointed out that they are “aware” that the citizens of the north of the island “cannot spend two hours in a queue” each day to go to their workplace and that they must be “solidary”, but at the same time Time understands that the mobility problems of the island, in case of works, have to be “suffered by everyone” and not Guamasa and the surrounding neighborhoods.
Along these lines, he has commented that it is not “correct” that it will “benefit some to the detriment of others” if the link is finally closed permanently. “We are going to try to fight it, it causes a lot of problems for the neighbors,” he added.
The Cabildo has not yet made a final decision on the closure of access to the highway in the Santa Cruz direction during peak hours (between 06:30 and 09:00) although it states that the queue “is reduced” by up to an hour if drivers leave from Icod de los Vinos and in 30 minutes if it is from La Orotava. However, the traffic jam, as these neighbors have pointed out, has not disappeared, but has only moved to the surrounding roads, affecting numerous towns and neighborhoods on the outskirts of the lagoon.
