The objective of retiring automobiles

Governments are, basically, a group of well-intentioned-looking people dedicated to promoting announcements (a word that postmodernity has translated into other nouns such as plan or objective). Honoring this definition, our City Council and Mayor Collboni have given birth to Objective 2030, according to which one would wish that in just five years, 250,000 trips made in our city no longer involve a car.

By one of life's coincidences, this noble desire —which today's flowery-institutional language calls "reducing dependence on private vehicles" by 25%— was announced the same week that the European Court of Auditors, in the report Urban pollution in the EU, notoriously called us out due to the lack of interconnectivity between Barcelona and its metropolitan siblings; put in understandable language, that the public transport system is of terrible quality.

The report in question, written by people just as well-intentioned as our illustrious municipal councilors but with that patina of anonymity and leeway regarding criticism that being a civil servant in Brussels provides, reminds us of something as simple as that the automobile can only be eradicated if people have the possibility of coming to work in Barcelona from Mataró or Sant Joan Despí without having to leave home the night before. Apart from this inconvenience, the continental wise men applaud the superblock pacification and the low emission zone, still reminding that 66% of Barcelonians are still exposed to levels of noise and traffic that exceed the thresholds of EU directives. Put plainly, the goal of retiring the automobile can be nuanced by modifying public space, through initiatives such as widening sidewalks and creating more safe spaces to wander, but the hot potato is still not resolved.

I understand that the City Council boasts about its crusade to reduce motorcycles parked on sidewalks, embed a bus lane wherever possible, and digitize the taxi service as much as possible. I also understand that the tram connection along Diagonal and the definitive completion (let's say an Our Father) of the Sagrera station can help oxygenate the city of cars. But most of the hominids residing in the metropolitan area that I know smile with high doses of ironic resignation when you ask them if they could use public transport more. I often have the feeling that most Barcelona administrations talk about this issue with a tremendously centralist vision; in other words, if metropolitan transport is an urgent matter, its solution must also be metropolitan, and it must be understood that it is just as important to pacify as it is to have a first-world bus and train system.

Yours truly has the ancestral habit of walking around Barcelona or using public transport (it helps that I am much poorer than I seem and that I live without a car or even a license), but I perfectly understand that a resident of the outskirts uses the car to get to work, often spending an hour doing so, even if this means dying of lung cancer or the risk of heating the planet and thus increasing the possibility of a Dana dramatically sprouting from Tibidabo and turning us all into floating corpses. In this sense, I would say that the City Council's objectives will continue to be part of bureaucratic poetry as long as they do not align with the enormous mobility deficiencies suffered by our neighboring metropolises. Given that many Barcelonians are leaving our city because they cannot afford a decent rent, with the consequent increase in population, it is difficult to be very optimistic.

Since we are asking for impossibilities from the Three Wise Men for next year, given that the Rodalies reform seems like it will take a long time, perhaps we should start thinking about a plan to unify our neighboring municipalities with an invention as ancestral or effective as the metro. But that is no longer poetry, I suppose, because it must fully enter the realm of science fiction.