The city council will begin works to transform Ronda Universitat this Sunday and expects to finish them in March, with a budget of around 350,000 euros. The intervention will allow gaining 1,730 square meters for pedestrians and improving pedestrian mobility and commercial activity in the area. In addition, about 60 pots with trees will be placed, elements unknown in the ronda until now.
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The sidewalks of Ronda Universitat will be widened with concrete platforms at ground level, so that the mountain side will go from five to eight meters and the sea side, from five to more than seven meters ---it will be wider in the section between Plaça Catalunya and Carrer Balmes---. The widening will also serve to relocate the bus stop shelters. As for the traffic lanes, it will go from four lanes for cars to two, and two lanes for buses and a service cordon will be maintained. This will make the final proportion of the street 50% of the space for pedestrians and 50% for the roadway.
The Barcelona City Council states that currently in Ronda Universitat there is a disproportion between the space occupied by sidewalks and that destined for vehicles, in addition to the fact that the mountain sidewalk is overloaded by the presence of interurban bus stops. This is the criticism that SOS Ronda Universitat, a platform of residents and merchants that advocates for pacifying the street and its surroundings, has long held and has thanked the city council for echoing their demands with this first transformation.
The city council emphasizes that this action is added to the set of interventions it is executing this November, such as the construction of bicycle lanes in the Zona Franca and Carrer Aragó or the improvements of bus lanes in Avenida Diagonal and Gran Via. They are added to the first package of urgent interventions that were carried out during the beginning of the pandemic, which allowed adding 30,000 square meters of pedestrian space with pacifications; 21 new kilometers of bicycle corridors and 17 actions to improve bus lanes.
Impacts on mobility
The works will begin this Sunday with preliminary painting work in some sections of the ronda to redistribute the lanes and prepare the section for the works, but the significant impact will begin next Monday. The intervention will be carried out in two phases: first, the one affecting the sea side, until Christmas, and then, the one on the mountain side, which will require the relocation of bus traffic. It will mainly be carried out on weekdays and during the day, although some work will also be done on weekends and at night.At times of maximum impact, the works will involve the occupation of all four traffic lanes, two on each side of the ring road. To guarantee mobility, the width of the current lanes will be redistributed, with the aim of always maintaining two traffic lanes and one bus lane in service. While the tasks last, the sidewalks will be partially occupied and when working on the mountain side there will be impacts on some bus lines.
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