A hundred residents protest against the municipal project to occupy Calle Mayor with two segregated bus lanes
A hundred neighbors demonstrated yesterday afternoon in the center of Espinardo and cut off the main avenue to protest against the project of the Murcia City Council to enable two segregated bus lanes (one in each direction) along the Calle Mayor of this neighborhood. The work will cause the disappearance of the current 170 parking spaces, since this space is necessary for the passage of buses.
The neighbors attended a call in which they were told ‘Defend your life and your neighborhood’. In addition to protesting the abolition of car parks, they stated in the brochures distributed that trees were also going to be cut down and “make the sidewalks smaller”, with an avenue in which four lanes would have to be crossed. However, they said, this work was going to “harm the neighbors.”
“We do not see any benefit and yes a great detriment,” they indicated while demanding with a big “yes” on the banners improvements for the neighborhood, such as more recycling containers, disinfection in the streets against rats and cockroaches, eliminating the water raft that forms at the Francisco Camino roundabout and a ‘pipicán’, “we don’t have any”, among others. They also lamented the lack of information and demanded a greater participation of public entities in neighborhood events.
Ginés Munuera, one of the spokespersons for the citizen platform created to stop the plans of the City Council, who works in a business, commented that they had already collected almost a thousand signatures that, together with those that continue to be collected, will be delivered to the Consistory after the summer. «We are not opposed for no reason, but because the bus can pass smoothly without there being traffic jams as the street is now; before there were more traffic problems, now, most pass through Juan Carlos I and only the neighbors here », he stressed. The neighbors also rejected the future impossibility of making turns in the street, for which it will be necessary to cross the entire street and do it in the roundabouts that are at each end of the road, they commented.
waiting for the mayor
They are not opposed to dissuasive car parks, “it is a good measure”, but complementary to the maintenance of what they already have. Nor do they reject the intention of the City Council to improve the bus service, reducing journey times and reducing the price of tickets (being free for pensioners). But they insisted: it can be done “without them putting a bus lane on us.”
“We hope that they listen to us because we are still waiting for the mayor, José Antonio Serrano, to receive us; and if they don’t support us, they should leave us as we are, because what we want is for Espinardo to lose as few services as possible.”
The bus lane that will pass through the neighborhood’s Calle Mayor departs from Plaza Circular and runs along Primo de Rivera Avenue, Ronda Norte, Miguel de Cervantes Avenue and from there to the Madrid highway (N-301).
Many of those attending the rally argued that the measure was going to harm local businesses, but the City Council denied this concern: these places, it said, “are used, primarily, by residents and merchants and their turnover is very low.”
That was the conclusion of the study commissioned to the municipal developer, Urbamusa, to check what use these places have and their percentage of rotation. The report was made in the week of June 20 to 25 last and four people participated who took data from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. They verified that the average use is 423 vehicles per day, with an average parking of almost three hours; and that 12% are occupied by the same vehicle the 10 hours of the day in which the sample was made. “Of course the neighbors are the ones who park, but they are our customers,” said Munuera.
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