Without irony: the fact that the councillor Paneque has apologised to users of Cercanías and has called a daily meeting "to control incidents" is, at least, a message that the Government has heard the destruction that continues to be caused in people's lives by not knowing whether they will arrive at work late, very late or never. And if, as has been announced, the meetings are "at the highest level" (Government, ministry, Renfe and Adif), we would like to think that they will serve some purpose. The problems of these days, when it was supposed that an improvement would be noticed after some works, are a humiliation for the travellers.
Now, the magnitude of the problem of Cercanías is such that rather than meeting once a day they should stop everything they are doing and form a permanent assembly. This Thursday the megaphones and the screens of all the Cercanías stations went down. I was reminded of 2007 (!), when a computer failure at the Estación de Francia caused delays on all the lines.
We know that there has been no maintenance of infrastructure or renewal of material, that because there is no such thing there will be no budget to guard the wagons out of the reach of the graffiti artists who dirty them, and all this reflects a sustained political neglect that makes the Cercanías from afar not work. That the minister dared to say that the train is experiencing the best moment in its history in Spain was indecent, or does it mean that Catalonia does not count as much as in Spain.
Now it is upon us, but the accumulated delay is so great that even with political will and budgets we will be short, because we have a problem with two public companies, Renfe and Adif, with changes in structure and governance. Adif has lived very well while it has built new AVE lines of a bunch. When it has to manage existing and dense services, it suffers and causes suffering. Will we ever see a commuter train service worthy of the name? It shouldn't be that difficult. It's not about going to Mars, but about getting the trains of a country in the European Union up and running.
