It's unbelievable that we've already had two weeks of chaos on the commuter rail network. How can this be? How can we have the country practically paralyzed, with thousands of people whose daily commutes are disrupted and with increasingly serious repercussions for the economic system? How can the State, responsible for Adif and Renfe, have reacted so slowly and with so few results, leaving the Catalan government out in the cold?

"Those of us on the bus that left Barcelona at 4:30 p.m. have just arrived in Gelida." The message arrives at 7:00 p.m.—two and a half hours later—in the WhatsApp group that was created years ago for Gelida residents to let each other know the route of the direct bus between Barcelona and Gelida. However, for the last ten days, the messages have completely changed, and the vast majority are tips and tricks to try to prevent a journey that normally takes about 40 minutes from stretching to nearly three hours.

The gradual reopening of the AP-7 motorway has been reversed after the Gelida train accident forced its complete closure for safety reasons. Last Saturday, the Catalan government announced the reopening of the left southbound lane near Martorell. However, this Wednesday, the director of the Catalan Traffic Service, Ramon Lamiel, announced its closure again to ensure track repairs can be carried out. Therefore, the AP-7 is once again completely closed southbound near Martorell. Sources from the Ministry of Transport explained to ARA that the lane is expected to reopen within five days, while the full reopening of the road is anticipated within two weeks, starting February 10th, according to the same sources. Up until now, the work of the crews on the AP-7 had consisted of scraping the embankment that collapsed due to the accident in order to find stable ground. This afternoon they discovered that part of the right-hand lane of the highway also needed to be cleared, which forced them to move the equipment (heavy vehicles and cranes) that had been working in the center of the road to the left-hand lane, which was the only one open. However, Lamiel maintained that the closure was not intended to compromise highway safety: "The ministry has a whole system of sensors to detect any movement, and there hasn't been any. When we reopened on Saturday, they installed them as a precaution in case any abnormal movement was detected."

For the second consecutive day, Catalonia has experienced a railway paralysis and traffic chaos due to the closure of the AP-7 highway. This situation is unbecoming of an advanced economy and severely damages the credibility of successive governments, which have announced large investments that have subsequently failed to materialize. The Gelida accident can be attributed to the recent heavy rains, but the underlying cause is not this: it is the deplorable state of the entire commuter rail network, a problem that has persisted for decades and which no Spanish government has been able to remedy. While Spain boasts abroad of being a high-speed rail powerhouse, Catalan commuter rail users endure a daily ordeal of disruptions, delays, and a lack of information. To make matters worse, on Thursday, contrary to what their own government had told them, there was no commuter rail service at all. Therefore, the widespread outrage seen today is completely justified, and the Catalan government has been exposed. On the one hand, because yesterday it rushed to announce the restoration of service when the drivers' discontent demanded a more cautious approach, and on the other hand, because it has become clear that in practice it lacks effective leverage since the service is in the hands of the state-owned operator Renfe. In fact, last night, it was Renfe that announced the immediate—albeit limited—resumption of service on the R2 Nord line, and that almost all lines will be operational this Friday.

Early this morning, another accident occurred on the AP-7 motorway near L'Aldea (Baix Ebre), involving three trucks. One driver was killed, and another was seriously injured. As a result of the accident, the motorway, which runs from south to north across the country, was closed for hours, leaving thousands of drivers stranded. A similar incident occurred last weekend. A truck accident on Saturday afternoon caused a fuel spill, forcing traffic to be diverted onto the N-340 between L'Ampolla and L'Ametlla. Consequently, on Sunday afternoon, the AP-7 became a death trap for vehicles returning to Barcelona from the Valencian Community, turning a journey that should have taken two hours into a six-hour ordeal. The truth is, the AP-7 has recently become a nightmare for drivers, both northbound and southbound, where it's impossible to predict what might happen. This is to say nothing of the danger of driving on a supposedly fast road congested with trucks that, moreover, overtake each other, causing long queues and, occasionally, accidents like the one early this morning.