The transfer of Rodalies has opened up a hole that not even the central government is aware of the scope it can reach. In the same way that powers will be transferred to the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Ministry of Transport is willing to do the same to the other autonomous communities that so request. In this sense, Thursday surprised the Andalusian Government of the popular Moreno Bonilla by speaking in favor of the transfer of its Cercanías to the Junta d'Andalusia, to follow in the footsteps of Catalonia and the Basque Country.
Minister Óscar Puente picked up the gauntlet yesterday and showed himself "willing to dialogue within the legal framework" with all the autonomies that may be interested in assuming the powers of the service based on what the railway law allows. "If Spain is broken to cede the Regions to Catalonia, let's see if it will be broken a little more if we also transfer them to Andalusia, or maybe it is not broken and is part of a decentralized management of the country", Puente later quipped of his speech at a conference on sustainable mobility organized by ElDiario.es. This decentralization, like it or not, over the next decade is a path that will have to be followed in order to comply with the European regulations that will force the liberalization of regional services, just as was done with high speed.
Óscar Puente took advantage of his first visit as minister to Catalonia to have a first contact with the Minister of Territory, Ester Capella, and her team. Both parties face a long road of political negotiation, but above all technical work, in which innovative formulas never used until now will have to be found to give shape and concreteness to the transfer of Rodalies agreed by the PSOE and ERC in the pact of investiture of Pedro Sánchez. For now, Puente avoids setting specific dates to take the first steps and acknowledges that "the issue is complex and it will take time".
Aside from the trains, Puente is printing a much more political tone in his portfolio and talking about issues that until now were hardly heard in the offices of Nuevos Ministerios. One of the workhorses of the legislature will be the defense of sustainable mobility, which has been incorporated as a last name in the Transport portfolio. This results in the determined promotion of non-polluting vehicles, bike lanes and well-sized low-emissions zones among municipalities.
It had already become clear that the municipal governments that withdraw these actions will have to return the money received from the European funds, but yesterday Puente went a step further and warned that the aid that the central government grants to the municipal bodies to finance the public transport will follow sustainability criteria. "We cannot apply purely population criteria regardless of the public transport policies that are developed in urban areas", indicated the minister, without going into more detail. The issue may cause major rebellions at a time when public transport operators are going through serious conflicts to square the accounts due to the ticket bonuses by the Sánchez Government. The widespread discount for travelers seems doomed to disappear and give way to free for the young and unemployed, so the old prices for everyone else will be restored.
