Given the pressing housing problem in Spain in large cities, one of the simplest solutions for those who can afford it is to leave stressed centers such as Madrid or Barcelona in search of more accessible municipalities and properties. How much? It depends on your budget, what your work is like and what the destination location offers you in such objective terms as services and infrastructure. And there is one essential to move: the distance to a main road.
I speak with knowledge of the facts: this was a key factor when choosing a municipality to Buy an apartment months ago. My new location has direct access to the highway and getting from there to my trusted padel club in Pamplona is 10 minutes longer than doing it from my old apartment, located in the center of the Navarrese capital. Although it is not ideal, my pocket has appreciated it and the sacrifice is profitable for me. Now, having chosen an idyllic municipality in the Navarrese Pyrenees would have been a very bad idea in terms of mobility (although bucolic on days like today).
That was my personal decision, but given the prices, I know that I am not alone: from buying in the capital to doing so in a municipality in the province there are Price variations of up to 131% in Madrid or 126% in Álava, according to the latest Idealista study reported by La Razón. Because if the price of the property in Villagónadas de Abajo is the lowest in the province but it is where Cristo lost his lighter, ya tal. Well yes: the price differences are abysmal and the communications are too.
An X-ray of territorial inequality and Spanish orography
This map prepared by Digital Cartography with data from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge demonstrates this. The cartography collects the minutes by car to a highway or highway from a good part of the Spanish state (if there are no this type of roads, as happens in Ceuta or Melilla for example, then they do not appear) with information from 2022.
To see everything in a more intuitive way, they have used the colors of the traffic light, where green is what can cost you up to 20 minutes and red goes from one hour to 133 minutes in the maroon areas.
The access time to a highway or highway in Spain. Digital cartography with data from the Ministry
If we superimposed a physical map with a demographic one we would find a clear diagnosis of red zones in critical areas such as the Asturian massif and the Pyrenees, the muga with Portugal (especially in Zamora, Salamanca and western Extremadura), the Iberian System and the maximum expression of “Empty Spain” in the south of Teruel, the north of the basin and areas of Guadalajara or the Betic Systems.
We know that in communications Spain is a centralized state with Madrid as the nerve center and the lines of these main roads, although they do not appear on the map, can be intuited. Without going any further, it is not too difficult to imagine where the A-2 goes to Barcelona or the A-6 to A Coruña. That is the first clue as to why we find such an uneven map: the radial network model, which leaves enormous gaps in peripheral areas that are not linked to large state/European corridors.
Obviously the extreme orography of the Pyrenees or the Iberian System makes construction difficult on a technical and economic level (it is not that it is not possible to lay out viaducts or tunnels, it is that it makes the cost skyrocket), but the Average Daily Intensity rules: for a public work to be approved there is a cost-benefit analysis and if an area has a low population density, the ADI is low, making it difficult to justify the investment.
On the other hand, there are environmental restrictions: some of these red zones coincide with national parks or protected areas. In this scenario, obtaining an Environmental Impact statement (mandatory in projects of this magnitude) is an impossible mission.
The small print. Something that I greatly appreciated when I returned to Navarra is that there is no traffic… compared to Madrid. The rush hour for leaving work or school may be noticeable in a few minutes of delay, but it is light years away from the traffic jams that I have had to suffer in return or bridge operations when I lived in the state capital. Because although in Madrid almost everything is green, in practice those minutes correspond to a distance traveled respecting the limits of the road and assuming fluid traffic.
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Cover | Digital cartography
