The year in which the mask ceased to be mandatory outdoors is coming to an end.
One of the most visible symbols of the health crisis declines, but not the virus itself.
Far from being eradicated, the covid is leaving behind a whole trail of urban policies aimed at minimizing its impact and improving living conditions.
A series of experts show in this report the forked paths towards the post-pandemic city that Madrid and Barcelona have followed.
Only five months before the municipal elections, the City Council governed by Mayor Ada Colau (Barcelona en comú) is firmly committed to gaining space for pedestrians and bicycles at the expense of cars.
The City Council headed by José Luis Martínez Almeida (Popular Party) is more timid in terms of traffic restrictions and the only major pedestrianization that he has undertaken —the areas around Puerta del Sol and Plaza de Olavide— began in the previous term.
Of course, the two largest Spanish cities favor the terraces of bars and restaurants after the covid.
They also share a sentence that the European courts have just imposed on Spain because they fail to comply with the safety limits regarding nitrogen dioxide.
Urban mobility
The hegemony of the car is far from history, but it seems that the pathogen called it into question.
Walking is the main way of getting around (35% modal share) in the interior of Barcelona.
The city took advantage of the health crisis to accelerate urban transformations that Ada Colau's team already had in mind to reduce pollution and that, seen in perspective, share the objective of taking space away from road traffic.
First with concrete blocks, fences and paint, ingredients of the so-called tactical urbanism that has been tested from New York to Berlin.
Later the changes were consolidated through the cement.
The result is 30 more kilometers of bike lanes and the Superilla Barcelona project, the evolution of superblocks that, if materialized,
It would pedestrianize one of every three streets of the Eixample to turn them into 21 “green axes”.
In this mandate four will be executed.
The surroundings of 200 schools are also being modified, not only reducing the speed of traffic, as is the case in Madrid, but also widening sidewalks.
Avenida de la Meridiana in Barcelona, the main north access to the city, was until a few years ago an urban highway.
Massimiliano Minocri
Municipal redevelopment plans total one million square meters.
Although the great pending issue in the Catalan city is metropolitan transport, with a Cercanías network that fails several times a week.
The professor of Urban Geography at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) Carme Miralles highlights two phenomena of post-pandemic mobility: that citizens have "revalued the fact of moving around on foot" and the weight of the bicycle.
“One of the effects of the covid is that we walk more than ever, which also gives a different vision of public space”, she reflects in the first place.
Secondly, she values "the capacity that Barcelona has had, with all its complexity, to introduce, give space and create a network of bike lanes".
The Bicing infrastructure,
The covid has also reformed the habits of the capital.
The use of the bicycle and trips on foot are undoubtedly growing, but not at the expense of the car, but rather due to public transport that has not yet recovered its levels of activity prior to the health crisis, even despite the reduction in fares.
The formation of significant morning traffic jams at the accesses to the city during the last quarter of the year points to a slow but inexorable return to the workplace.
It also suggests deficiencies in the connections to the periphery, the same as in Barcelona, as Andrés Monzón, professor of Transport Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), puts it: “The only way to reduce the use of the car is to restrict its space in urban centers and control the dispersion of activities.
Invasion of the bike lane of Paseo de las Delicias in Madrid by cars. Olmo Calvo
In Madrid, only three of the 29 streets provisionally closed to traffic during the lack of confinement have been maintained afterwards.
Almeida annulled Madrid Central in September 2021, the paradox is that his new mobility ordinance, presented under pressure from Brussels, could well be considered a legacy of former mayor Manuela Carmena.
Both regulations differ on only one point: downtown dealers with cars without an environmental label, about 15,000 vehicles, can now access the low emission zone (LEZ).
This has been extended twice in almost four years to limit access to Plaza Elíptica —15 times smaller than the Centro district— and to prohibit the movement of A-vehicles along the M-30 ring road since January.
Before the pandemic, the Barcelona LEZ was already one of the largest in Europe.
Madrid has traced this mandate half as many bike lanes as Barcelona, where the network already has 120 kilometers more than in the capital.
The Villa Agreements that all the political groups signed, a declaration of institutional principles in the heat of the health crisis, included the implementation of new bicycle lanes seeking “the coherence and continuity of the whole”.
All a frustrated aspiration, according to Fernando García, elected by the Dutch NGO Bycs as mayor of the bicycle of Madrid, an honorary figure that promotes the culture of pedaling: "We are talking about loose, scattered sections and some also insecure that connect nothing to nowhere .
The perfect example is on Paseo de las Delicias, where cars have to cross the bike lane to park”.
Public space and terraces
The city is in dispute.
A theory formulated among others by the American urban planner Jane Jacobs that with the pandemic is gaining strength beyond university chairs.
Squares conquered by children's games, new green areas that change the life of a neighborhood, disused markets, avenues without a single bench or scooters thrown onto the road, everything pleasant and exasperating that takes place in public spaces is the result of the rivalry between different actors.
The future of the so-called covid terraces, those that were expanded due to the health crisis, is the subject of one of those debates, which has closed in Barcelona with the obligation to install platforms in bars and restaurants according to four models approved by City Hall.
A terrace gained during the pandemic on a corner of Carrer de Diputació de Barcelona, already with the platform that allows the premises to consolidate it.
albert garcia
The Catalan capital has also undertaken the pedestrianization of 215 meters of Cristóbal de Moura street, where the idea is to create a 1.27-kilometre linear park.
Óscar Chamat-Nuñez, urban planner and co-producer of the
CiudadHub
podcast
, understands that he emerged from the pandemic with the certainty that "mobility is chosen and is a right."
“The streets do not have to be 24 hours a day, seven days a week to go by car, which implies designing the public space in a flexible way, prepared for different uses and audiences: a day of business on the street, a concert, a party, or cars passing by”, he notes.
And he denounces the consequences "of the culture of the click: that home orders alter the public space."
Barcelona will implement the
Amazon Tax in March
, which will be charged to the large operators for parking on the street in the home delivery process.
For its part, Madrid has yet to manage the negative externalities of last-mile delivery.
Yes, it has undertaken a modification of the terrace ordinance that throughout 2023 will allow those tables and chairs installed by the covid in the parking bands, in exchange for an occupancy fee that amounts to up to 24 euros per square meter.
With the exception of the acoustic protection zones in the center and two other neighbourhoods, in addition to those that are saturated such as Calle de Ponzano.
The merchants of the latter, very involved in the campaign of the president of the Community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, are granted an apparent measure of grace: to widen their sidewalks (this new norm sets the width of the passage at two and a half meters). , so that they can request ordinary terraces on both sides of the road.
Works to widen the sidewalks in Calle de Ponzano, Madrid. Olmo Calvo
The dean of the Official College of Architects of Madrid (COAM), Sigfrido Herráez, is critical of the extension: "I understand the commercial reasons at a time of transition towards what we called the new normality, but I do not think that the best solution is to invade the driveways or subtract parking for longer.
Madrid already has many terraces, those of a lifetime, which are almost a cultural phenomenon that also generates many jobs.
It seems to me that perpetuating the exception puts obstacles to other uses of the city”.
As for the design of public space, Herráez calls for more competitions, "because the best architecture comes out of them."
Contrary to Superilla Eixample, the concurrence of projects was not the system chosen by the Madrid City Council to reconfigure the streets of Pedro Bosch and Francisco Silvela.
Air quality
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) condemned Spain last week for failing to comply between 2010 and 2018 with the community air quality standard in Madrid and the Barcelona metropolitan area.
In these urban centers, the safety limits against nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), established at an average annual concentration of 40 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3), have been repeatedly exceeded.
The capital has continued to violate each year, as reflected in the annual air quality reports of the Ministry for Ecological Transition.
In the case of the Barcelona metropolitan area, the limit for NO₂ was exceeded in 2019, but not in 2020 or 2021. The data for 2022 will be released in the first week of January.
The conviction does not carry sanctions, but future breaches would.
A traffic jam in the new boulevard of Francisco Silvela street, in Madrid. Olmo Calvo
Far from loosening up, Brussels expects the nitrogen dioxide limit to drop to half micrograms per cubic meter by the end of this decade, in line with the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO), of which it is advisor Cristina Linares.
This scientist from the National School of Health of the Carlos III Health Institute illustrates: “The drastic reduction in the number of vehicles is essential if we want to control the values of NO₂ that is breathed in large cities.
Measures to reduce the number of vehicles in specific situations of contamination are not enough, structural interventions are needed”.
And she remembers that such exposure worsens diseases such as lung, breast, bladder cancer or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
The data supports Linares' opinion.
In the first year of Central Madrid, the Plaza del Carmen station —located next to the Gran Vía in the capital— expressed average annual concentrations of nitrogen dioxide 20% lower than the average for the entire previous decade.
It is equally important to look at the daily peaks expressed per hour, episodes that increase the number of hospital admissions for severe bronchiolitis or pneumonia and that cost the Madrid health system 200 million euros each year, according to a recent study published in the journal
Environmental Research .
.
An example: the Villaverde station (Madrid) registered 127 μg/m3 on December 26 at nine o'clock at night.
Breathing that air has consequences, but the researcher of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) Xavier Querol fears that in times of crisis and war "the argument of smoke or hunger will return."
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