In 2010, ahead of the 100th birthday celebrations for Madrid's Gran Vía, architect Miguel Oriol produced plans for a makeover of the Spanish capital's most iconic thoroughfare: his scheme saw cars mostly banished and the 1.3 km street turned into a lush garden.
The centenary celebrations came and went without anything happening with that scheme, which would have involved creating a huge subterranean tunnel and a massive parking lot under the street (because it was 2010 and the idea of actually banishing cars was #TooCrazy).
During her brief spell heading Madrid's City Hall (2015-2019), progressive mayor Manuela Carmena concluded that, in lieu of a big dig project, it made more sense to adopt on-surface measures to squeeze cars out of the central street. Lanes were reduced, sidewalks expanded.
Two lanes were for cars / cyclists, with speed capped at 30 kmh; two others were exclusively for buses and taxis. Trees were installed to bring a bit of green (and needed shade) to the thoroughfare. Although right-wing pols complained, the measures were popular.
Carmena left the door open to making the Gran Vía a fully pedestrian thoroughfare and set the goal of making that happen by the end of the 2010's. Right-wing pols said such a move would be catastrophic and kill local business and bring upon the end-days and etc.
But surveys showed that a majority of Madrid's citizens were fully in favor of the move. And that became a problem for the conservative Popular Party when — allied with center-right Ciudadanos party and far-right group Vox — it retook Madrid's City Hall in 2019.
As part of its governance pact with Vox, the Popular Party agreed to look into eliminate the restrictions Carmena had put in place to limit motor vehicle access to the city center and slash Madrid's insanely high air pollution levels.
In lieu of pedestrianizing the Gran Vía, the pact with Vox also obliged City Hall to go back to the Oriol plan and analyze the possibility of taking on a massive big-big project to "bury" the thoroughfare (rather than banish cars, let's just hide them from view).
From the get-go, architects said the idea was nuts as the project would be expensive, dangerous for the historic buildings in the area, and only serve to keep cars flowing into the city center. It would also be technically difficult due to the thoroughfare's long incline.
Still, the study was carried out. So now, three years and €17,000 later, we have the results: turns out burying the Gran Vía would be a very, very bad idea.
While technically possible to carry out, the extremely complex operation would cost €327 million and likely create massive traffic jams at the hypothetical entrance points to the tunnel, subsequently causing traffic issues in front of City Hall and on the nearby Paseo del Prado.
City Hall now admits that the plan is a no-go. But will the municipal government reconsider Carmena's pedestrianization plan? Not yet, apparently. Paloma García Romero, delegate for Public Works, says that "other alternatives to improve east-west mobility" are being analyzed.
So while cities like Paris opt for phasing cars out of iconic thoroughfares like the Champs-Élysées, Madrid, which could have been a European leader in this sense... waits.

En fin...

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More from @aitorehm

18 Feb
Portugal is famous for its mild climate and sunny beaches, but each year hundreds of people freeze to death and millions struggle to survive frigid winter weather.

Here's a quick thread based on my @POLITICOEurope story on Portuguese energy poverty 👇

politico.eu/article/freezi…
When I lived in Lisbon my friends and I joked that although the Portuguese were famous for melancholia, uncharacteristic (and unrealistic) optimism defined their approach to thermal insulation: homes seemed to be built as if the weather was expected to be perfect year-round. Image
While the weather is, indeed, really great for most of the year, it can also be really awful sometimes. In the Summer temperatures can shoot up to truly unbearable levels for weeks on end, and in the Winter the icy humidity can easily make you feel like you're freezing 24/7. ImageImage
Read 19 tweets
17 Feb
WSJ news div. explains why the “damn frozen turbines” argument is tired: wind only meets 10% of TX’s winter capacity; natural gas and coal make up 82%. While some wind farms are stopped due to ice, the gas generators with frozen water intake facilities are much more problematic.
Other problem: a not-great grid. As @rrocasalamero points out nicely in his thread, Spain was hit with similarly unusual, extreme winter weather last month and went through it without significant blackouts. One can be prepared for extremes without having Arctic-level facilities.
Poor market design also has a role: TX’s market-driven energy system is structured so that generators are paid for producing energy but not for keeping reserve capacity on standby to meet potential demand peaks. Having some facilities offline for maintenance compounded the issue.
Read 6 tweets
16 Feb
Fascinating story from @l_guillot: Residents of the French village of Denting are split over plans to build a wind farm on the site of a former Nazi prisoner-of-war camp where thousands of human remains may still be buried. politico.eu/article/french…
The Ban Saint-Jean Camp is spread over 100 hectares in France's Moselle Department and was originally built to house those working on the Maginot Line. After the fall of France, and leading up to 1944, it operated as a satellite of the Stalag XII prison camp.
According to French army archives, up to 300,000 Soviet prisoners of war passed through the camp during that period; they were kept in appalling conditions, with little food and no medical attention. Successive breakouts of disease led to an estimated 20,000 prisoner deaths.
Read 6 tweets
25 Jan
Back in 2018, when I was working as a foreign correspondent in Lisbon, I got a call from my editor back in Madrid asking me to put together a story about one particular example of Portuguese exceptionalism: the abscence of the far-right within its political landscape.
Just a few days prior, VOX, a new ultranationalist party, had won 12 seats in the Andalusian regional elections, marking the first time that a far-right group had made it into a regional parliament in Spain since the country's return to democracy.
Across Europe, center-left parties were on the decline while right-wing populist parties were making major gains.

But then there was trusty Portugal...
Read 28 tweets
9 Nov 20
Now that the election is settled, how about coming along on a leisurely bike trip across the Belgian countryside? That's what @KarlMathiesen and I did in order to explore the struggle that cities face as they try to decarbonize urban transport and meet the EU's climate targets.
EU cities have a clear role to play on the bloc's progress toward its 2050 climate neutrality goal: zero-emission mobility is a priority, and there's a serious push to free streets of emissions-spewing vehicles that take up public space. But that's easier said than done.
To check out what factors differentiate the cities struggling with clean mobility from those that are already green models, Karl and I hopped on our bikes and spent a morning pedaling from the Brussels to the Flemish university city of Leuven (and nearly back again).
Read 32 tweets
8 Nov 20
Per our American cousins at U.S. @politico, frontrunners for Biden’s cabinet include...

State: Susan Rice
Treasury: Lael Brainard (or Elizabeth Warren)
AG: Doug Jones
Transport: Eric Garcetti
Commerce: Meg Whitman
Energy: Ernest Moniz
VA: Pete Buttigieg

politi.co/2IdHxAc
Energy watchers: Moniz (the son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores) is a nuclear physicist who served as Obama’s Energy Sec. (2013–2017). Back-up contenders include WMD expert Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall and thermoelectric scientist Arun Majumdar, ex director of ARPA-E.
Given Biden’s plans to green U.S. energy it’s kind of surprising that there’s no one with a clear background in renewables on the list (Moniz’s links to the fossil fuels industry trouble activists), but all the candidates have experience in government.

newrepublic.com/article/159357…
Read 6 tweets

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