In a country where the infrastructure works, that is, a normal country, the incidents that occur should not be news. From time to time, there might be a problem, and that would be normal, because, statistically, glitches are part of normality. What is not normal and does not cease to be a real pain in the backside for the Catalan public is the situation of Rodalies, Catalonia's commuter rail services, which is an authentic and undeserved torment for users who never know if their train will be running or when it will reach its destination. Years go by, governments of one colour or another come and go, and the situation remains largely the same. The first news story of the day on the vast majority of mornings is that some line on Rodalies is not working. That at one station or another the delays will be significant and that they can be expected to get worse or better, depending on the severity, throughout the day.
This Tuesday, the Catalan government offered a statistic that was worrying, to put it mildly, on the dimension of the problem. With the data available for 2023, there have been only 44 days without any incidents in the Rodalies system. Considering that we've had a little more than nine months of the year already, we can state that the service has only worked properly for five days of every month on average. In the case of July and August, the situation was even worse: there was an incident attributable to infrastructure or rolling stock every two days. And even though this is the case, and even though all the political will asserts that it must not be the case, there is no way to achieve the transfer of Rodalies to Catalan government control. That is, for the management of the biggest drama suffered by the people of Catalonia on a daily basis to be made the competence of the autonomous community.
For at least fifteen years, the different presidents of the Generalitat - Pasqual Maragall, José Montilla, Artur Mas, Carles Puigdemont, Quim Torra and Pere Aragonès - have been demanding the transfer of the infrastructure from the different Spanish prime ministers, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Mariano Rajoy and Pedro Sánchez, and all of them have sprinkled their replies with promises or with negatives, but with an identical result. Thus, steps were taken with regard to the management of the services, but not in the ownership, which is the real nub of the issue in the negotiation, since from Madrid they believe that a transfer of this nature breaks the unity of the rail system. And so the years have gone by and the problems have grown. The Generalitat of Catalonia manages Rodalies, but the infrastructure belongs to Adif and is operated by Renfe. In the assets which come under the auspices of the Spanish development ministry, the public company Adif is the infrastructure owner and Renfe is the operator; and both of these business entities report to the current minister whose portfolio is known as transport, mobility and urban agenda, and which, in addition, is held by the Catalan politician Raquel Sánchez, former mayor of Gavà, who I suppose has not been especially content with all this lately.
The question we must ask ourselves is the following: for how long are the government of the Generalitat and the Catalan parties prepared to accept this game of all or nothing? Because if the goal of politics is to improve the welfare of the people, there is a failure here and prolonging it does not make much sense. Just as from the associations, the employers and the union organizations there is a consensus in demanding the transfer of ownership of Rodalies from the state: why can't all the Catalan political parties come to an agreement? Don't anti-independence voters don't take these trains too? Don't they also get to work late as a result? Don't they suffer equally from the seriousness of the problem? How can it be that all Basque politicians, regardless of their ideology, are in favour of the Basque economic concert, while in Catalonia, some of them play partisan games with the welfare of the public?