Last Sunday, when the Barcelona city council recommended, through the news media at its disposal, that would-be users of the new Plaça de Glòries tunnel should steer clear of it between 7:30am and 9:30am to avoid problems, it was easy to predict what would happen on Monday: endless queues, drivers enraged over the possibility of arriving late to work and traffic chaos. In short, major inconvenience for all those who enter the Catalan capital from the Besòs side. It is clear that an elementary question must be asked: can it be justified that a work of the magnitude of the Glòries tunnel, whose construction has been delayed for seven years and has cost the public treasury hundreds of millions of euros, ends up making traffic flow worse than it was before?
We all know that Glòries is not exactly an easy space, that many attempts have been made over recent decades to improve traffic and none have given the right result. But this should not be an excuse for a debacle like this, which will go down in the annals of a political team that has governed the city with great ineptitude. The Ada Colau-Jaume Collboni duopoly has, with the odd oscillation in the relationship, been in charge of the city for seven years - it is not just one party at the head of the council team, but rather, right from the beginning BComú and the PSC have been mutually back-patting their way through the mandate, even if the latter try to only appear in the photos that interest them ―Winter Olympics and America's Cup― and load onto the mayor's back those ones in which they prefer not to figure. Seven years is more than enough to be able to say convincingly that Colau and Collboni have not been a passing alliance.
There is no major city where mobility is easy or straightforward. This goes for the leading European capitals, where it is without a doubt one of the most important challenges facing municipal government teams. Former Barcelona mayor Jordi Hereu's lack of perspective on the Avinguda Diagonal tramway and his timing in proposing it cost him, in the 2011 elections, the position that the Socialists had held uninterruptedly since 1979. There was a major discord between what the people wanted, a project that was not mature and the dog's breakfast of the referendum over the Diagonal, in which almost 80% of participants voted against making any changes to the city's most important avenue. Hereu's popularity fell to 4.1, a percentage very similar to what Colau has now, with 4.2 - clear fail grades and the worst levels of support that any mayor of Barcelona has had. Interestingly, the score that Ernest Maragall has been awarded is the same as Xavier Trias before he reached the mayor's office in 2011.
For a good while now, the clock has been counting down for Colau in her management for the city council, and everything seems to indicate that this time she will not have the resources which the establishment lent her in 2019 to bar the door to ERC candidate Maragall. In the so-called Upper Diagonal sector, which mobilized to prevent pro-independence Maragall from taking the mayor's chair, he is not seen today as a problem to the sectors that would prefer him over Colau. Obviously, they would have a greater liking for the PSC with Salvador Illa at the helm, or Collboni, but the Manuel Valls operation, which will be repeated in 2023 with Sandro Rosell or Santi Vila as candidate, will not be to consolidate the current mayor, but to support an alternative who is not pro-independence if possible. The game is the same as always and the financiers, with the exception of the odd new player with a big cheque book, are pursuing the same goals.