Coincidentally, the political pact for the (new) transfer of Rodalies to the Generalitat has coincided with the 175th anniversary of the first train that was built on the Iberian Peninsula and that joined Barcelona to Mataró. Its main promoter was Miquel Biada, who contributed money from his own pocket and convinced a group of investors to finance a project that received permission from the State in 1843 and was inaugurated five years later. Look at the short space of time that passed from the approval of the plan to the completion of the works on the nearly thirty kilometers of "railroad" and compare it with what any public project costs us today.
For example, the AVE between Madrid and Barcelona took 16 years to become a reality and 21 to reach the French border. Or the Sagrera station, whose project was approved in 1997, but its work began eleven years later and is still under construction until, they say, the end of 2025. Not to mention the famous line 9 of the Barcelona metro, designed in 1999 and which has been under construction since 2003 with a final completion date of 2029, no less than thirty years, at an average of one kilometer per year. Without forgetting the desperate Mediterranean corridor, which accumulates more than 20 years of delays and the end is not in sight. It is clear that Miquel Biada took his know-how to the grave, because if he raised his head today he would not give credit to the degree of ineffectiveness we have.
In this sense, read the text of the agreement signed last week between the PSOE and ERC to facilitate the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. In this document it is recalled that the first pact to transfer Rodalies was in 2009 and it is now explicitly stated that it has not been fulfilled. Fourteen years after that failed political commitment and countless promises of raining millions in investments in the train network in Catalonia that have never arrived, this issue is back on the governments' table, pushed by the anger of hundreds of thousands of Rodalies users who suffer from a clearly precarious and always unfortunate service in the distribution of public investments.
The new agreement for the transfer of Rodalies determines that, at the very least, ownership of the R1 railway infrastructure will be transferred to the Generalitat, precisely the one that is now 175 years old and that transports 100,000 people daily. Users of this line must ask themselves what they will gain from this transfer. The answer that comes from the Government of Catalonia is that management from the proximity will improve the service and they give as an example the good operation of Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat. There is no other choice but to hope that this is the case, because the problem deserves the agility and efficiency that Biada showed in the 19th century. Dear passenger, you know that hope is the last thing to lose because, in your case, patience has already given up.
