The Government lays the groundwork to invest 4.3 billion euros in infrastructure over the next decade

BarcelonaThe Government took an essential step this Tuesday to advance the planned investments in mobility infrastructure for the next decade. The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, announced that the executive has given the green light to the new investment plan that should allow it to allocate more than 4,300 million euros from now until 2036 to update a network that suffers from the investment deficit of the last decade. To achieve this goal, the Government has approved the update and expansion of the Program for Commissioning of Actions (PEA), a document without which works cannot be put out to tender. "We are making a quantitative and qualitative leap," said the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, this Tuesday during the closing of a congress organized by Forbes in Barcelona.

The objective of the new program is to correct the investment deficit of the last thirteen years. According to calculations by the Department of Territory, between 2004 and 2012, an average of approximately 500 million euros was invested annually, a figure that plummeted from then until 2025, when the average stood at around 134 million euros per year. Thirteen years that, as the ministry points out, meant that 4,700 million euros were not invested, which were necessary to cope with the increase in costs due to inflation, respond to population growth, and prevent the aging of the network.

With the new plan, the Government aims to correct these shortcomings, approach the investment pace of the beginning of the century, and achieve an average investment of 430 million euros from this year until 2034. In total, the 4,350 million announced by Illa will be allocated, on the one hand, to increase the budgetary allocation for ongoing actions —such as the 2+1 road program, which seeks to widen lanes on single-lane roads per direction— and, on the other hand, to new actions and new strategic programs.

Within the first block, it is planned, among other things, to allocate 489 million euros to works to connect the Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC) between Plaça Espanya and Gràcia; 494 million to the Olot and Les Preses bypass; 239 million to the Camp de Tarragona tram; 510 million to improve the metro and bus network —with ongoing actions, such as the improvement of the Verdaguer and Plaça de Sants interchanges—; and the most significant allocation: 785 million to improve road safety with numerous actions on roads throughout the country.

Regarding new actions and strategic programs being incorporated into the plan, highlights include the future bus station at Plaça Espanya in Barcelona (60 million euros); the new railway terminal at La Plana de Lleida —with a key role in freight transport to connect the Mediterranean Corridor with the interior of the Peninsula—, to which 130 million will be allocated; the variants of the C-14 in Tàrrega (70 million) and the one in Sentmenat and Caldes de Montbui (45 million), or the improvement of the C-14 between Montblanc and Solivella, with an additional 19 million.

The extension of the metro, further on

Investments in mobility infrastructure, however, will not end with what is included in the plan approved this Tuesday by the executive council. Further on, the investments to be made through management commissions will be detailed — works in which the Generalitat leads the drafting of projects and execution, even though they belong to and are paid for by the Spanish government — which are expected to reach 1,130 million euros between 2027 and 2033.

A new plan must also be made for all those investments made with public-private collaboration, which, as El País reported, could include a package of actions to, among other things, extend the Barcelona tram along the Besòs side — with the idea of reaching the port of Badalona already on the table — and the Llobregat side. Also all the metro extension projects planned in the Catalan capital. In this case, however, Territori plans to present a specific PEA later.