Spotlight North: Record-time resurfacing of the Alcudia motorway road

They found a safe place not on the road itself in order to look at some images on two boards, to have their photos taken and to announce that rather than four months, the work had taken less than a month. A spend of 2.12 million euros has gone on resurfacing and drainage improvements.

The Council usefully explained that average daily traffic equates to 16,720 vehicles, ten per cent of which are “heavy”. No improvement had been undertaken for fifteen years.
The resurfacing, it must be said, was badly needed, but the work does raise a couple of questions. Firstly, the shortening of the time taken by some three months was so as to avoid the start of the tourism season.

But as it was originally due to have taken four months, was it not appreciated that the work would coincide with more or less the whole of the peak season? Why, as many have asked, was it not in any event done earlier? Secondly, the Council is right to mention the heavy vehicles.

When I got stuck in the roadworks a couple of weeks back leaving Alcudia (I opted to go via Sa Pobla and Albufera on the return), the number of heavy vehicles was particularly noticeable; they were lined up in the queue heading for Alcudia.

Most of them, if not all, would have been going to the port, and it is this connection (as well as the sheer volume of general traffic) that invites the question as to why the motorway ends at Sa Pobla.

But there is the railway to consider, if the extension from Sa Pobla does ever become a reality. Running alongside the road is one of the options (and almost certainly the most sensible), and the possibility of this extension will surely have entered into past decisions about the road.