Hi again,

I am not so sure, but I think there is no thread about the biggest project of the new Madrid mayor: Alberto Ruiz Gallardon, the main promotor of the biggest subway extensions ever made in the world during his 8 years of Madrid region goverment.

Now He has a new incredible project, he will erase the traffic jams of the famous M-30 ringway expanding it trough the underground, how?, probably you can find more details inside some related webs, but I can advance you some points:

1- All the track between "Puente de los Franceses" till "Nudo Sur" will be fully underground, it means no cars outside!!, he will cover the way with a riviera park, the madrid citizens will can go back for enjoying the Manzanares river with a picnic, meanwhile the cars are running some meters below.

2- Some by-passes will let the M-30 to have extra corridors in some critical points, so cars going into N-V will can use a new corridor (underground too) and the rest of the cars will use the old part.

3- The traffic lights of the north M-30 will dissapear, so the M-30 will be completely finished.

Now we can add the excellent subway system, new lines under construction, the new Cercanias tunnel between Atocha and Chamartin and some new trams in conflictive ways and probably Madrid will can say good bye to the traffic jams.

It sounds like a dream, but it could be true because day trought day I see that the traffic jams are being moved to the outside cities.

Bye.

Madrid is going to collapse from under our feet! Its pratically hollow underneath- I don't see what further gutting will do... instead of continuing to allow so many cars into Madrid- they should be looking to better the public transportation services, like have the metro open 24 hours, but after a certain time running with less frequency= less need to take your car into madrid if you don't live in the city center. Not even all of the subway lines have to do that, just a few of the main ones, (el circular and Metro Sur and Linea 1 for example)

But no, let's spend more money on projects and have more construction to continue to interrupt the flow of things even more!

Whenever I have to change to linea-9 at Avenida de America I get the impression that I am going into the bowels of the earth. I am a bit claustrophobic and I think it's about 9-levels underground

That construction proposal sounds like an air quality nightmare to me. Hold your breath!

I don't remember how many years they lasted or exactly when they were constructed or when/why they were taken down but I do remember seeing elevated highways cris-crossing the Plaza de Atocha. Yes, MadridMan, right there in front of el Brillante. Does anyone else remember that??

I don't remember so well because I didn't go by Atocha then. They were called escalextric (I don't remember the right spelling) and I supose they were built to avoid traffic problems because they should be cheaper than tunnels. Now they prefer to make tunnels because they're not so ugly. You can still see one of this in Cuatro Caminos.

I agree with a 24h opened metro system. But we prefer to use the night buses, they are really smart since the last expansion, now the nighters prefers twice to use the bus instead metro, because you can cross the whole city with only one inmediate transfer in Cibeles (maybe the negative thing is that you have bad connections between colindant districts).

But the M-30 project is so nice and neccesary because the current traffic level makes this highway slow and unrealiable for professionals (like me, I need to drive it frequently because I am computing technician).

The city centre has a good "pay per park" and many people use the car only for arriving at the closest train/subway station.So the major part of the private cars are away from the city center.

Greets.