The parking lot at the Camp de Tarragona station

The case of the new parking lot at Camp de Tarragona station perfectly illustrates the extent to which users are irrelevant to the Spanish managers of state-owned railway infrastructure in Catalonia. True to its name, the station is located neither in Tarragona nor in Reus, where it would logically have to be, but rather in the municipality of La Secuita, meaning that access is always by car. The paid parking that has been in operation until now costs €2 per hour, so the shoulders of the access road were full of illegally parked cars, making them vulnerable to all sorts of thefts, broken windows, and even fires. Until yesterday, when Adif, after placing concrete blocks on the shoulders, opened a free, reasonably monitored, and temporary 126-space parking lot, awaiting a permanent, low-cost (or so they say) 600-space parking lot that will become operational once the Generalitat (Catalan government) builds a roundabout, the plans for which are barely complete.

The station opened just over nineteen years ago, and this temporary parking lot cost €140,000. If it took them twenty years to carry out a common-sense and inexpensive project like this, which has been long demanded, how long will it take them to get the Cercanías commuter rail service to be decent? And how long will it take the Generalitat to build a simple roundabout? Yesterday, they presented the joint venture Cercanías de Catalunya, from which the miracle of efficient management is expected. Because, so far, in relation to Catalonia, the same thing that Íñigo Errejón said when he was asked about the suspension of the Catalan deputies taken by the Process could be applied to the management of Renfe and Adif:It's too far away for me"