The AEC has a plan. Build, resurface and adapt roads to repair conventional ones, reduce emissions, revitalise rural Spain and speed up the transition to new mobility.
Could the road be the lifeline after the COVID-19 effect? According to the Asociación Española de la Carretera (AEC), yes. Such is its conviction that last week
it presented a plan—the Safe, Green and Connected Roads Plan—to remodel Spain’s network of secondary roads… and all types of roads in Spain, in general. This is a demand the organisation has been making for years, ever since the country was plunged into the 2008 financial crisis and strict compliance with the public deficit required by Brussels was imposed.
At the time of writing, the new coronavirus disease has left 27,136 people dead in our country (out of 242,280 confirmed cases). The Bank of Spain’s forecasts, after the economy came to a standstill and an industry as important as tourism ground to a halt, are not encouraging: the economic damage ranges between 9.5 % and 12.4 %, with unemployment rising to 21 % in the first half of 2020.
Against this backdrop, the AEC talks on the one hand about boosting leisure and tourism by looking towards the interior of “empty Spain”. On the other, it points to the enormous opportunity of adapting our roads to the realities of the mobility of the future. And according to the organisation, this means urging the Government to launch a plan which, with an investment of 32,000 million euros, “would absorb around half of the forecast unemployment in 2021”, they state.
More than a million jobs
That is what the association promises with this measure which, moreover, aims to meet needs such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions (with interurban resurfacing) and creating a Tourism Mobility Network in depopulated areas.
The part of the programme devoted to urban land would include the design and construction of lanes for bicycles and personal mobility vehicles (PMVs, so popular before the epidemic crisis).
2+1 roads on dangerous conventional roads (an additional lane to make overtaking easier), safety zones, rumble strips, 3,300 kilometres of cycle lanes, 90,000 kilometres of road surface, pedestrianisation and smart signage—spread across 12 action programmes—would be some of the measures in this ambitious proposal. According to the AEC, the return on investment would amount to 49 %, taking into account VAT, other taxes and the Social Security contributions of the people hired.