Above and below the ground.
Of the same.
Madrid is collapsed.
Every morning, going to work is a headache. It doesn’t matter taking the car, the subway or vicinity. The city has diverted in gigantic improvement works that will bear fruit to its neighbors but the city has taken the calendar leaves, has wrinkled them and threw them with all its forces in the trash.
A funnel
The capital is reforming the entrance to it through the A-5, the north of the Paseo de la Castellana (one of its main arteries), covering the passage of sales on the M-30.
All while public transport faces a remodeling in Chamartín that seems to always be about to end, the complete remodeling of the Count of Casal exchanger and the modernization of Metro Line 6, another of the great passageways for those who take this means of transport.
In order not to put more pressure on the Express pot in which Madrid has become, the City Council has decided to delay the works in the surrounding area to the door of Alcalá.
And the result is a funnel with a public transportation that it fails to absorb the cuts for their own remodeling and, of course, has problems to serve those who have chosen to park the car and take the transport underground.
Videos and photos of the collapsed subway, the company deriving workers to manage the entrance to vehicles and stations in which access to waves is controlled to avoid massifications on foot of the way.
The Madrid subway has said enough.
And the lace to this unsustainable situation has not been put by a macroconcierto reahíla. Nor football.
The last event that has ended up filling the subway and that has caused waiting times to at least reach the platform of the Metro lines of the Nuevos Ministries Station (exchanger with five nearby lines and three subway lines of which one of them is cut) has been the World Fruit Fair.
And it is that those who aspire to reach IFEMA by subway from the city have to pass yes or yes by this station, which connects line 8 with access to the fairgrounds with line 10, one of the most used in the suburban because it crosses from north to south the city.
They explain in The confidential That Fruit Attraction, as this fair is called, has attracted 2,200 companies from 150 different countries between September 30 and October 2, days in which the Metro has been especially collapsed and when those videos that demonstrate the problems to manage the accesses have been recorded
It will not be so much, you can think. Well, in total the fair has occupied 10 of the 12 pavilions that IFEMA has available and accumulating 120,000 visitors. In total, those who went to IFEMA had 70 km2 of exhibitions. The organization of the event itself explains in this video that special accesses had been enabled for the entry of visitors.
The event, although punctual, demonstrates that the city is having important problems to absorb the demand for trains in its hours and that continuing to add pressure to the system even if it is promptly ends up overwhelming it.
Beyond the circumstances
715 million travelers.
That was the figure that moved the Madrid subway in 2024. Absolute passenger record with a growth in demand of 8% compared to the previous year. According to Metro data, four out of 10 displacements in the Community of Madrid add their company. The figure is slightly higher than 2007 when the previous record had been registered, when 100,000 passengers were added.
Since before the 2008 crisis, the Madrid Metro had not added so many Displacements. They were years in which the trips multiplied. In 2000, 525 million passengers had registered according to the Madrid City Council.
But the figure exploded in the subsequent years. In 2000, the Madrid subway had 201 stations and in 2007 it added a total of 285 stations. It was those years in which line 12 was opened, known as Metro Sur, which serves all the southern belt peoples of the capital, adding 28 stations and more than 40 kilometers of travel.
Of course, those inaugurated between 2006 and 2007 (42 stations) corresponded mostly with the three light subway lines that move a very low passenger figure. And shortly after line 7b, which also adds stops and kilometers but its performance has been very low by the constant closures and reopenings motivated by structural problems that, in fact, has forced some neighbors to leave their homes.
Once this huge investment was made (from which part were peripheral lines that have not added a large number of travelers) the infrastructure of the Madrid Metro has stagnated. Public transport It has not grown at the same pace than the city. Since then adds 17 new stations and 10 kilometers more of roads but there are a lower number of available cars 2,083 in 2024 compared to 2,157 in 2005.
Nor does the same number of people live in the city. Last year the capital exceeded the barrier of 3.53 million people, which is also an absolute record. In 2006, the figure was 3.12 million inhabitants. And the population of the metropolitan area has shot in one million inhabitants, going from the six million almost 20 years ago to the most current seven million.
And to this we must add that Madrid lives a tourist explosion. 2024 has also been the year in which the city has received the most visitors, accumulating 11.19 million visitors. To get an idea of the explosion, there are almost 800,000 people more than in 2019 and the 7.3 million that were recorded in 2007, the year in which the last works of the Madrid Metro were completed.
The problem is that the last part of the expansion of the 2000s focused on lines that have fattened the infrastructure but It has not served to absorb the number of travelers. In fact, the company is undertaking a new expansive plan to try to decongest some routes although only two are under construction.
To the recent expansion of Line 3, which now unites Villaverde Alto and Getafe and offers an alternative route to the capital for those who arrive from Metro Sur, and the automation of Line 6, which pretends that trains travel faster and the waiting time between trains is lower, the expansion of line 5 to the airport and the connection of line 11 with four winds are added. This last section will facilitate departure to the east of those who arrive from Metro Sur.
The rest of the projects are more or less firm proposals but there is nothing really specified.
Photo | Roger Casas-Alatriste and Fruit Attraction
In WorldOfSoftware | The residents of Madrid had been yearning for the Soterramiento of the A-5. Now he is making his life impossible
