TW

The Partido Popular have been paying close attention to the Balearic government's transport plan and will react to an apparent "flood of criticism" that has come from within the party.

The period for submissions to be made about the plan expires next Friday, and PP are understood to have a host of objections. These appear to be because much of what the government has proposed has been raised before and not acted on or because the proposals are impractical. The party is critical of transport minister Marc Pons for having failed to come up with any new ideas.

The idea for a railway line from Palma to Felanitx via Llucmajor and Campos will be, according to the PP, "an expensive chimera"; in other words, an unrealistic idea. The old line disappeared in the 1960s precisely because of the boom in car use. The PP accuse the government of having an obsession with revisiting previous infrastructure that is both "absurd" and "very costly". The Manacor to Arta railway is another example. When PSOE headed the government between 2007 and 2011, the intention had been to reactivate the line, but it - as with other projects - simply caused a lot of discussion and nothing else.

The project which the PP consider to be the most "hilarious" of all is that for a tram from the Plaça Espanya in Palma to the airports. This was another idea from 2007 to 2011 and was a "fiasco". The government is also obsessed with running this tram along the Avenidas, which would be "a disaster, as there isn't room". The scheme would envisage the same errors that one of 2010 did, such as contemplating track on streets through El Molinar to Coll d'en Rabassa and Can Pastilla where it would be almost impossible.

The transport plan, suggest the PP, is "utopian" and has revived previous initiatives that had previously been rejected, "including by the voters".