Motorway to Alcudia - Would it ever be built?

It had cost 49 million euros, one seventh of which had gone on expropriations. Oddly perhaps, no one from the Spanish government was in attendance. The state had helped fund the road, one which would prevent accidents and jams. Summer traffic in particular would be aided. Twenty thousand vehicles a day, and they had been making their way through Inca and then along on a route that passed by Menestralia before heading towards Alcudia and other points on the bay of Alcudia as well as to Pollensa and its port. Transport communication for such an important tourism area of Mallorca had been lousy.

But once the motorway extension of 10.7 kilometres from Inca had been opened - even before it was opened - questions were asked. There was one big question. Why stop at Sa Pobla? One reason was that following the election in 2003, Matas had sat down with Maria Antonia Munar of the Unió Mallorquina in order to hammer out agreements for government. The PP had failed to gain a majority in parliament - they were one seat short - and so they needed the UM’s support.

Those agreements included roads. Major investments were planned, but there was only so much funding. The extension was to therefore end at Sa Pobla, another reason having been the administrative difficulties, which included the expropriations. As it was, the government had run up against a great deal of opposition because of the extension and the land that had to be acquired. Some further kilometres as far as Alcudia, and the difficulties would have multiplied; the controversies would have increased.

The road from the end of the motorway to Alcudia was improved, but it remained single lane in both directions. The accidents have continued, their causes being head-on collisions because of overtaking and vehicles slowing to exit onto lanes off the road or entering from these lanes. A motorway would be safer, and so 2003 history is repeating itself. PP minorities in parliament and the Council of Mallorca need agreements - with Vox rather than the UM - and so the motorway extension to Alcudia is now firmly on the table. Setting aside the fact that this plan would require funding from the state, there are other factors to take into consideration, the most obvious one being land. I fancy that there will be hell to pay if and when proposals for the project are made concrete (so to speak). Opposition to road-building, vociferous as it had been when the extension to Sa Pobla was undertaken, went up several notches with the redevelopment of the Llucmajor-Campos road. The left-wing pact at the Council of Mallorca knocked any other major projects on the head as a result of the opposition. The right now in power, and the ingredients are there for confrontation.

This won’t just come from the likes of environmentalist groups. There will be the landowners, the very ones who once staged a tractor protest against the plan of 2009 to extend the railway from Sa Pobla to Alcudia. The likelihood of this protest being repeated would place the new PP-led administration at Alcudia town hall in an awkward position. There wasn’t a PP mayor in 2009, it was Miquel Ferrer of the UM, and such was the backing that landowners in Son Fe received from the UM that there was even a poster publicising the tractor protest at the entrance to the town hall building.

The town hall’s rejection of the railway was in some respects made easier because the Balearic ministry of transport and territory was run by the PSM, the forerunners of Més, who were in favour of the route alongside the road from the motorway. Political differences were clear. Now they are not. Fina Linares, the PP mayor, will be fully aware of what happened in 2009. She won’t want to upset the owners, but her party in government and at the Council of Mallorca could do exactly that.
And where does this plan for the motorway leave the new plan for the extension of the railway? Linares’s predecessor, Domingo Bonnín of El Pi (something of a successor to the UM), argued the case for a shuttle bus service rather than the train. Of course he did, as he didn’t want any arguments with the landowners.

It remains to be seen what the new government will do in terms of rail transport, the extension to Alcudia having been one of the main proposals made by the now former government. Going alongside the road from Sa Pobla isn’t the only option, but it has always been the most obvious option. Could you have both motorway and rail extension? Of course you could, but just think of the land implications, the expropriation, the outright hostilities that would be aroused.

I’ve always been sceptical about the rail extension and am even more so now. As to the motorway, I’m sceptical about that as well. It does make sense. But, boy, there will be one massive fight if it looks as if it may become a reality.

Idiot boy racers

The project for converting Puerto Alcudia’s Pedro Mas y Reus into a sort of boulevard with a single lane for traffic along much of the road really can’t come soon enough if it means putting an end to idiots haring around in cars.

The incident when a couple of boy racers crashed could have been that much more serious, given the number of people - it happened in the evening very close to the entrance to Bellevue. Some years ago, a pedestrian was killed when a drunk lost control.

This wasn’t an isolated incident in that the area does attract idiots, especially when the Spanish students are in residence. It must be a desire to show off, and if you have a BMW, which one of the two did, then all the better. They were both on drugs, have been fined 1,000 euros and have had six points deducted from their licences. They can be lucky that the sanctions weren’t stiffer.