An item of 3.2 million European funds will allow to undertake the works and another intermodal network in the garden of Floridablanca
The Circular Plaza will lose a lane for private traffic before the summer of 2023, as stated in the project that has just received European funds and that includes the execution of the first two intermodal urban transport nodes, the Redonda and the surroundings of the Floridablanca garden. To do this, the City of Murcia will have 3.2 million euros of financing from European Feder funds, 80% of all the planned investment of just over four million euros.
Both infrastructures will be connected to the segregated bus and bike lanes; They will have parking for electric scooters and bicycles, as well as outlets and recharging spaces for electric vehicles and buses. They will also allow users to change their means of transport by taking a taxi, the urban bus, the tram or the BTR (Rapid Transit Bus), whose routes will be extended towards El Palmar and Espinardo. This will mean the reduction of lanes for private cars, increasing traffic calming in the city, and the construction of a north-south bike lane in Floridablanca.
The possibility of leaving Proclamación Street, on one of the sides of the emblematic Carmelite garden, only for public transport and means of electric mobility is also being considered.
These are the general characteristics of these intermodal networks that the Mayor of Murcia, José Antonio Serrano, presented yesterday during the presentation of the project, in which he was accompanied by the Deputy Mayor, Mario Gómez, and the Councilors for Sustainable Mobility and European Programs, Carmen Fructuoso and Juan Fernando Hernández, respectively.
The idea is that these nodes allow citizens and visitors to easily use the different means of public transport, to the detriment of private vehicles. The maximum execution period that has been planned is June 2023.
The City Council will build a north-south bike lane in the Alameda de Colón in the Carmen neighborhood
Serrano stressed that both nodes will allow the reduction of the emission of six tons of CO2 per year, “mitigating climate change.” And he was pleased that the new municipal government team had achieved in ten months a total of 20 million euros for sustainable mobility in the municipality. He was referring to the other 17 million that will come from Feder funds for rapid transit buses.
“It was money that we had lost for not doing the projects well, and where there were only drawings and colors, we have presented a strategy” for future transportation in the municipality, he said. The mayor was referring to the memory that the Popular Party presented in 2019 “without a plan or a budget” and that they had knocked down, according to Serrano, the Ministry and Europe. «In June of last year we resumed the project, we developed it and now we have obtained the award».
The Councilor for European Programs, Juan Fernando Hernández, insisted on this argument, emphasizing that “there have been ten months of hard joint work to save the project by the technicians from the departments of Sustainable Mobility, European Programs and Development, in collaboration with those of the Institute for Energy Diversification and Saving (IDAE)”, of the Ministry for Ecological Transition.
Cutting traffic in both areas of the city will reduce CO2 emissions by six tons per year
The deputy mayor, Mario Gómez, commented that this project will be the starting point for the extension of line 1 of the tram from Plaza Circular to El Carmen and the Virgen de la Arrixaca hospital and the Health Campus, in El Palmar . He recalled that he will also follow the planned line of traffic calming and pedestrianization from the Puente de Los Peligros and Plaza de Camachos (pending modification of the project to adapt it to its classification as an Asset of Cultural Interest, BIC), to the Alameda de Colón .
Claim of the PP
The spokeswoman for the Popular Party in the Murcia City Council, Rebeca Pérez, however, claimed the project as one of her political formation, and celebrated that “the transport model that José Ballesta’s team left fully designed continues its development.”
After criticizing that the PSOE sells it as its own, he stressed that “it is once again demonstrated that the PP’s mobility plan is solvent and compact, which is why it has achieved the largest European funding to modernize mobility in the municipality, with 21 million” .