Thursday, March 2, 2023
A great boulevard with wide sidewalks, friendlier, with a bike lane, green areas and new street lights and a sewage system. That was the suggestive proposal that the City Council had for Duque de Tamames Avenue until it collided head-on with reality, that of a neighborhood and commercial opposition that has forced these works to be parked.
As LA VERDAD has learned, the project, valued at 2.2 million euros, cannot be carried out at least until the next legislature and it will be the next government team, whatever its color, that will have to decide whether to resume this reform that from the current Consistory they deem more and more necessary.
Although the section between the platforms and the old asylum presents a better appearance, from the Glorieta to Príncipe de Asturias, the avenue shows a picture that leaves much to be desired, with broken tiles and little space to wander.
The project aroused neighborhood opposition due to the loss of parking and the extension of the blue zone to adjacent streets
When the project was presented to the residents, the main axis of opposition came from the elimination of 45 car parks on the same street (except those for the disabled and loading and unloading) and the extension of the blue zone to adjacent roads, both those that there are between Duque de Tamames and Obispo Rocamora, as well as towards the neighborhood of Las Monserratinas. They even collected signatures ‘online’ to paralyze the work.
The City Council defends that these spaces are going to be more than recovered, “with 80 new car parks on Príncipe de Asturias avenue and another 40 on Temístocles Almagro and José Ávila streets. To which should be added the opening of a deterrent on the Correntías highway, with a capacity of 180 places, provided for in the new Mobility Plan”, says the Councilor for Infrastructures, Ángel Noguera.
And, to calm the spirits of some merchants, fearful that the work would scare off the clientele, the mayor assures that they were informed that the blue zone already offers 10 minutes of courtesy that would facilitate parking for those visitors who come to do a quick purchase.
However, the most urgent reason, in the opinion of the municipal executive, the work in Duque de Tamames is underground. Few living Oriolanos have known the ditch that crosses the open-air avenue. Structural for decades, the age of the canalization is generating problems of leaks and humidity in the basement of some adjoining buildings. “It is a ditch that usually carries a lot of water. It is full one out of every 15 days,” explains Noguera. However, he assures that the previous water judge already showed his reluctance to act on the ancient irrigation canal.
Along with its reform, it was proposed to renew the sanitation, drinking water and, above all, the rainwater network to give it more evacuation capacity in the event of torrential rains. At first, it was considered to make the project cheaper to join the rainwater network with the ditch. Matter ruled out by the current executive that, if it continues after May, it will do so with the four pipes (fecal, drinking, rainwater and irrigation water) with individual pipes.
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