It rains. Midday. Having overcome the maelstrom of the entrance to the schools, the traffic flows with unusual normality on Carrer Muntaner until a van stops in a double row. He wants to park in the new service lane enabled next to Besòs. While the maneuver lasts, the van occupies a lane, so that the street becomes a one-way funnel for cars traveling downhill. Some horn sounds. "When someone stands in a double row, everything gets complicated...", comment Josep and Lidia, from the bar On Semper, on the corner of Provence. For a week, cars have lost one of the three lanes they had on Carrer Muntaner, which has been converted into a service lane, with spaces for motorbikes and for loading and unloading.
Last weekend the change materialized in this street and on Saturday it will be the turn of neighboring Aribau. In this case, the lane that the cars will lose will be the one on the Llobregat side. The loss of a road for cars – taxis and buses keep theirs – has caused the anger of some drivers who during peak traffic hours – which usually coincide in this area with the entrance and exit of schools – they have been stuck longer than usual.
"There are always vans loading and unloading and it is difficult to park in disabled spaces", complains a driver with reduced mobility and driving a vehicle with the corresponding accreditation. In a few minutes, an impromptu tetris is set in motion on this corner of Muntaner and Rosselló: the van pulls away and reverses so that she can finally park. During the maneuver, they occupy a downhill lane and some cars have to stop. Again the funnel effect. The horns sound again.
The reorganization of lanes on this access artery to the city center - and also on Carrer Aribau from next weekend - was an initiative voted and approved within the framework of participatory budgets. The action was called "Enough freeways in the Esquerra de l'Eixample" and was conceived as a way of expanding the space for pedestrians on the sidewalk, and the motorbikes and containers were placed in a of the traffic lanes "to prioritize the health of the population". Therefore, private vehicles have lost one of the tracks in the section between Diagonal and Gran Via.
Fewer cars, but more space on the road so they can park 900 motorbikes (between the two streets) and 90 new loading and unloading spaces, beyond the corners. Car drivers find a single complicit gesture in the section before the left turns, where neither parking spaces for motorbikes nor garbage containers have been placed. It is a space to speed up the turn and prevent all the cars in the left lane from having to brake at intersections.
"I used to leave the house and the whole pavement was full of motorbikes, now they have gone down to the road, and the containers that were on the corner have also been put in the new service lane... for the neighbors it is good", he says Lourdes, who lives in number 138. However, it never rains to everyone's liking. Álvaro, another neighbor who travels by motorbike, fears that there will not be enough parking spaces on the road and that some will continue to be above the pavement. "Also - he says - parking it in this lane on battery is not at all easy with a big motorcycle". In fact, while parking, the cars behind have to stop and wait.
But if there is one section of Carrer Muntaner where the horns sound more than any other, it is at the intersection with Carrer Aragó, where a three-column traffic light tries to direct traffic. The patience of many drivers reaches its limit here. One traffic light column for each lane. The one on the right – a horizontal or vertical bar – is for taxis and buses and is activated when the other two columns are still red. In a moment, everything changes color. The light on the left can be set to green, but the one that allows you to turn to red, because taxis pass. "You need to take a course to understand it... and between those who go to the limit and those who leave early... there are always problems," says a taxi driver.
The reorganization of Muntaner, with the car as the main victim, fits in with the municipal policy of reducing private vehicle traffic within the city and favoring public transport and bicycles. Next weekend, while Carrer Aribau is being reorganized, the work to repaint the road will force the passage of cars to be reduced to a single lane, as happened last weekend on Carrer Muntaner.
