None of the 250 kilometers of bike lanes that Ayuso promised in 2021 have been built

World Bicycle Day, which is celebrated worldwide every June 3, will not be, at all, a party in Madrid this year. Although the City Council will offer a day of free trips on the Bicimad bicycle sharing system and Metro Madrid will allow free entry of bicycles to the entire network this Monday, cycling groups warn that there is little to celebrate because regional and local governments have not fulfilled their commitments to cycling mobility. On the one hand, the Community of Madrid has not built a single one of the 250 kilometers of bike lanes of the new Basic Network of Cycle Routes that President Isabel Díaz Ayuso promised in her 2021 inauguration speech. And, on the other hand, the Madrid City Council has not allocated more budget to complete the La Castellana bike lane, of which only one of the six sections has been built since the project was conceived 12 years ago. Given the non-compliance, Madrid’s cycling groups are preparing a “bike festival” on Sunday, June 2.

In the Community of Madrid, only 0.5% of trips are made by bicycle, according to the 2018 Mobility Survey. For this reason, Miguel de Andrés, president of the urban cycling association Pedalibre, affirms that Ayuso has the opportunity to increase the percentage of sustainable trips and safer by building new and better infrastructure. Currently, cyclists only have 53 kilometers of cycle lanes, while vehicle drivers have a road network of 2,488 kilometers.

But the regional government is moving at a slow pace in fulfilling the promise of creating a Basic Network of Cycle Routes by 2027. It has not built a single kilometer of the 250 that it had announced in 2021 and, now, in the new legislature, it has increased the stakes. : It will no longer be 250 kilometers, but more than 400. This is stated in the 2025-2032 Highway Plan project, which is still being drafted. More than 120 million euros will be invested to build 142 kilometers of bike lanes parallel to the roads, in a first phase, and 259 kilometers in a second phase, as detailed by the Ministry of Housing, Transport and Infrastructure. In the new Highway Plan project, some of the roads that are part of the old promise of 2021 are resumed.

The socialist deputy Marcos Herrero, who has put a magnifying glass on the status of the projects of phase I of the Basic Network of 2021, denounces that “they have been three years totally lost” since the announcement was made. “And if of a plan [el de la Red Básica] another one is taken [el Plan de Carreteras], in the end nothing is ever done,” says Herrero. Since 2021, barely more than half a million euros of the 120 million that the Community claims to have have been executed, according to Herrero’s calculations, who searched one by one for project drafting contracts – the phase prior to the work― that he found on the Contracting Portal. “I would ask you to take the bike seriously,” the socialist deputy told Alberto Tomé, general director of Sports, who reported on this issue in a session of the Tourism Commission of the Madrid Assembly in April.

Since 2021, the Community of Madrid has only awarded three project drafting contracts that, according to the Ministry, “are quite advanced”: that of the M-111, in the section from Barajas to Fuente el Saz de Jarama; that of the M-206, in the section from San Fernando de Henares to Loeches and that of the M-307, between San Martín de la Vega and Ciempozuelos. Two other project drafting contracts are pending award: that of the M-501 and that of the M-121. And the bike lanes on the M-605 and M-608, which were part of the 2021 promise and which appear in the Community’s press release, have not been mentioned by the Ministry.

“On paper, everything is going well,” says the president of the Pedalibre cycling group when he remembers the history of the Basic Network of Cycle Routes and the new promise of the Road Plan project. “The plan is interesting because its purpose is to transfer car trips to sustainable mobility, that is, to bicycles and public transport,” says De Andrés, “but then, with a blow, they say that they are going to build more roads for cars. In addition, they propose a network of bicycle paths in the regional crown and not in the municipalities of the metropolitan area.” Pedalibre presented 60 allegations in August to the Initial Strategic Document and the Progress of the 2025-2032 Road Plan, among which it suggested that the regional government build all bicycle lanes between 2025 and 2028 and not just a third of them, as the Initial Document says. In addition, the cycling group suggests other bike lanes, such as one on M-502 that connects Torrelodones, Las Rozas, Majadahonda, Pozuelo and Casa de Campo and on the M-201, between Rivas and Vicálvaro.

“But today there is still nothing. There is no safe itinerary,” De Andrés laments. Weekend, a cyclist died on the M-209near Campo Real, after a driver ran over him and other colleagues who were riding bicycles.

The La Castellana bike path, with no more budget in sight

In the capital they were also left waiting for a lane. It has taken Madrid City Council five years to build 13 kilometers of a bike lane – 6.5 kilometers up and 6.5 kilometers down – along Paseo de La Castellana. A year ago, the City Council celebrated the delivery of the longest section – 4.4 kilometers, that is, 2.2 one way and 2.2 return – between Raimundo Fernández Villaverde and Plaza de Castilla and on which 4 million were spent of euros. But there was no further news of the other 8.6 kilometers that were missing. In the general budgets of 2024, no item for the work was included even though in a 2019 plenary session all political parties They approved that the complete project would be ready in 2023 and that resources were included in the budgets, year by year.

The alarms went off again in the last session of the Urban Planning Commission this month, when the Urban Planning delegate, Borja Carabante, avoided answering a question from the PSOE about the future of the project. The Urban Planning Area, when asked by EL PAÍS, limi
ted itself to answering that “the project was born to extend in the different sections that were presented” without specifying a schedule. In March 2022, during the works on the only section built, he assured that once those four kilometers were finished, they would begin “with the next ones to reach Atocha.”

The Pedalibre cycling collective fears that the project has been abandoned and has called for a demonstration on Sunday, May 2, on the eve of World Bicycle Day. “What we have today is a disconnected and incomplete section. There were six segments and only one has been made,” recalls the president of Pedalibre. In 2021, there were only 921 bike trips in the La Castellana axis and the goal, when building all the sections, was to increase trips to 4,000. But, as of January, in the only section completed, 1,800 are circulating, less than half of what was expected. The La Castellana bike lane appears for the first time in the official documents of the City Council in 2008, when the Madrid Cycle Mobility Master Plan was published. After years of struggle, the Castellana Bike Lane platform was organized, which managed to get the City Council to commit to building it in 2019.

But the fight threatens to continue. The cycling groups have not been able to get the City Council to confirm how and when the project will continue. “We have asked three times and they do not respond, nor do they respond to the Urban Planning Commission. The municipal government demonstrates once again its lack of interest in promoting a safe and connected cycling network,” laments De Andrés.

The Works and Equipment Area of ​​the Madrid City Council, however, highlights that, recently, more than 17 new kilometers of bike lanes have been built: Gran Vía de Villaverde (3 kilometers), Eduardo Barreiros (2.4), Avenida of Arcentales (2), Doctor Esquerdo-Pedro Bosch (1.7), Avenida de la Illustration (1.5), Plaza de España (1.4), among others.

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