Even while Avenida de Salobreña was still being finished, there were many who were not impressed by its emerging layout: all that parking eliminated; tight roundabouts and little separation between pedestrians and the bus lane; not to mention all those unregulated pedestrian crossings. And then, after its inauguration, the traffic accidents started to occur…
When the third vehicle ended up stranded in the large fountain-roundabout, the mutterings of, “I told you so,” became more frequent, as well as audible.
Shortly after it was re-opened, one of the persons responsible for its design commented, “Time will tell whether we got it right with this design; I think we have.” Two years further down the line, readers can wonder whether he still thinks the same.
If the design is faulty, it’s an expensive mistake because the remodeling of this main thoroughfare cost around 4-million euros – Oops!
Even as its form began to be revealed during the construction process, business owners along its length grew more and more worried – they even formed a ‘platform’ or pressure group, pointing out that there was too much room for pedestrians and too little for parking – the pedestrian space is double the space left for 2-way traffic. Where the hell are delivery vans supposed to park, they asked themselves.
…And then there is the sarcastically dubbed, Paella Dish (the accident-prone fountain). it’s a feat of bus-bending for the municipal fleet to manoeuvre around, without the rear wheels climbing the sides of the fountain.
If any driver even looks like stopping, his car is immediately ‘wall-papered’ with parking tickets, so business owners just watch the traffic roll by… and by, and bye bye.
Delivery is a nightmare, both for goods coming in and for goods going out. Nobody can park for even a nano second to get a gas cooker, for example, out of a shop and into the boot of their car.
What it all boils down to is an obsession for the ‘politically correct drive’ to return towns to the pedestrians; cleaner air, quieter… One wonders whether they envisage one of those idyllic Jehovah-Witness brochures, sporting a family sat on a grassy mound, surrounded by ‘smiling’ fauna. Yet, whilst the eco-minded strive for less urban, traffic contamination, they insist on one-way systems that have cars crawling twice the distance to get from A to B, in fuel-consuming higher gears… which apparently doesn’t pollute.
Drivers using Avenida de Salobreña are at the complete mercy of pedestrians, who amble across in continuous dribbles – how can you regulated urban traffic with lights, without doing the same with pedestrian traffic? Is it any wonder, therefore, that there have already been four or five cases of people being knocked over?
Without a doubt, it looked wonderful on the plan; neatly set out with separate bus and bicycle lanes, however in the crusade to eliminate cars, (yet continue to collect as much municipal money off them in road tax and blue zone as possible) somebody appears to have forgotten that shops need to get goods in and out and that drivers are not a lower life form of a pedestrian.
(News: Motril, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)