Days without cars. Vplanned urban trip so that you can move around your city by public transport. So that you can move around the territory, go sightseeing, visit remote places in a more sustainable and orderly way: the car is not an essential object. Do you want to go up to Parc del Montseny? You have a train connection with buses for you. Do you want to work outside your municipality, visit relatives who live in another region? Buses, trains, trams, subways… who wants a car?
We’ll talk about parking it another day, and about motorcycles, too.
But we continue using cars and motorcycles because Plan B, which should have been plan A for a long time, does not exist.. Organizing a life based on public transportation requires faith and a lot of tolerance for frustration, because the model is underfunded and there is not enough commitment to regular transportation lines, where regularity has its broad meaning and is not just a label. That the future of the management of Rodalies is a core issue in the Government’s negotiation with Pedro Sánchez is good news, it would be better if the transfer comes with money and is invested in the real needs of the traveler: punctuality, frequency of passage, capillarity in the territory.
The climate crisis is going to test the future of the coastline: the road has already moved inland, but an alternative railway route, more protected from the advance of a sea that devours the beach, seems a chimera. We celebrate 175 years since the inauguration of the line that linked Barcelona and Mataró, the first train journey on the peninsula, and more unknowns than ever are opening up for the future of the line’s mobility. In much more remote communities, and I’m going to the Antipodes (where better to change perspective), it was also a train that linked the center of activity and population of Kalgoorlie, the mining heart of the country, with the southern coast, Port Augusta, much better communicated, a hundred years ago. The railway connection of a federated state like Australia, with an immense desert in the central area and the population distributed along the edges of the island continent, should be the closest thing to hell, and disputes, errors and resounding failures occurred in the process. Roads, the robust bus transportation system and, naturally, the car, saved communication. But that first train opened a universe of possibilities that have come true and in distant Western Australia its capital, Perth has become one of the longest cities in the world thanks to its transport interconnections.
Let’s talk about buses
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Turning our eyes to our reality, the bus network seems the most optimal model to unite remote communities and urbanizations, or to compensate for railway incidents. We are talking these days about the already endemic problem of lack of drivers to cover the positions necessary to guarantee services. Let’s say those driver positions are filled. Do we really have all the territory well covered? The starting point of this essential map should include the needs of older people who go to doctorsof shopping center users in all opening ranges, of children who go to school. From the workers. Ensure mobility not only in the thesis of the city of 15 minutes on foot, but in the territory of half an hour by public transport, a model that removes the car from the equation, or the parents’ or children’s car, personal dependencyIn short, it should be the horizon.
At the moment, going up to Parc del Montseny by public transport from Barcelona is now possible although it seems like an adventure. The departure box for this trip is now available.