Bilbao imposes the limit of 30 per hour in all its streets

On July 24, 2005, a score of single-seaters came to circulate at

.

Avenues and streets with several lanes up to twenty meters wide were transformed into an imitation of Monaco, an icon with which the capital of Biscay wanted to compete face-to-face to be in the

of the most glamorous cities in the world.

Fifteen years later,

.

Starting today, the drivers of 435,000 vehicles will have to focus their attention on the speedometers to avoid penalties ranging from

in avenues that were homologated as a racing circuit by the International Automobile Federation (FIA).

.

Bilbao, with 345,000 inhabitants and almost a million in the neighboring municipalities, is

.

Since 2018, the 30 km / h limit has been applied to internal roads in a city in which

and which boasts almost everything, but especially a Metro that transported in 2019 to 97 million passengers, the third after Madrid and Barcelona.

But

, a city renewed after its past as an industrial city, activated in 2015 a plan with which to reduce the 1,500 traffic accidents a year,

emitted by its cars, buses and vans and the up to 85 decibels registered on some roads in the city designed as fast connections.

Five years later, the deputy mayor and head of Mobility of Bilbao,

(PSOE), is convinced that reducing speed to 30 km / hour will be another step without going back.

"

and we want them to live longer and better," Gil sums up, aware that the representatives of taxi drivers, transporters and drivers do not share the measure.

The City Council's argument raises environmental studies that establish that

with this measure and that when driving at 30 km / h only

.

"We know that noise generates heart disease and reducing speed throughout our urban environment will improve the health of thousands of citizens," insists Gil.

Borja Musons observes in detail the traffic on the Gran Vía de Bilbao, an artery with four lanes and online parking that will have to be traveled at 30 km / h from tomorrow.

Mussons, president of the Basque Taxi Federation, rejects the speed reduction and fears its consequences in a sector battered by the pandemic.

"We feel this new change like a

because a single fine for exceeding 30 per hour and we lose

" laments Musons.

With a drop of up to 70% in their billing, the 774 taxi drivers in Bilbao fear the usual

of customers in a hurry and, even more so, the figure that will reflect the meter that will choose to charge for the accumulated time with the new speed limit.

The Consistory has six boxes distributed throughout the city in which it locates the radars that have so far controlled the speed of the 180,000 cars that arrive in Bilbao every day from the peripheral residential areas, of the 150,000 Bilbaoans who leave to work in the industrial estates of the province and of the 105,000 drivers who use their vehicles to move around the city without leaving it.

A flow of transfers that has even been increased in recent weeks when, due to the threat of Covid-19 contagion in public transport,

.

Drivers who, as

, from Automovilistas Europeos Asociados (AEA)

assures

, question that road safety depends only on speed.

Despite the recommendations of the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) to establish a limit of 30 km / h on urban roads, Arnaldo questions

and accuses the administration of not doing its homework.

"They use the speed reduction as a

when the logical thing is that each road has its limit based on its characteristics," he stressed, concerned about the difficulty for any driver to identify the limit on each urban road in Spain.

Bilbao has hurried over the last few days the horizontal marking of huge 30 that have come to share space with the 50 that were covered yesterday at midnight.

A problem that can be easily solved with paint, but for the spokesman for the Royal Basque Automobile Club Navarro Álvaro Martínez is not anecdotal: «It is a measure that they have not thought about much, that

».

The

even in a city that has seen its traffic reduce during the pandemic flies over among the representatives of the professionals who will test from today the obligation to circulate at 30 kilometers per hour.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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• Bilbao

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