The new Barcelona-Vallès service: from 80 to 110 million trips per year and all lines will stop at each station | Catalonia
The new service of the Barcelona-Vallès line comes into operation this Friday after a total investment of 120.4 million euros and thus increases its capacity by 37.5%, from 80 to 110 million trips per year, while the offer is simplified and all lines will stop at each station starting today. In this line, 66.3 million trips were registered in 2019, before the pandemic, and during the previous 5 years demand had grown by 3.5% per year (reaching growth in this period of 5.4% in sections called suburban, that is, beyond Barcelona).
The President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, has insisted that the powers and management of Rodalies Renfe be transferred to the Generalitat and has asked that “pending investments” be executed. He said it this Friday in Terrassa (Barcelona), at the opening ceremony. The Catalan president has reiterated that the will of the Government is that “trains are not the day-to-day headache, but the day-to-day solution”and ensures that FGC is the example that, when infrastructures are managed from nearby, they work better.
The new service of the Barcelona-Vallès line was planned before the pandemic And the investments have been maintained despite the fact that the figures for 2019, a record year in terms of the use of public transport, have not yet been reached. The new service entails the disappearance of lines S5, S6 and S7, which are integrated into lines S2 (Barcelona-Sabadell) and S1 (Barcelona-Terrassa), while the current route of L6 and L7 is maintained. In addition, all the lines will stop at each of the stations, unlike until now, when various lines did not stop at Les Planes, Baixador de Vallvidrera, Peu del Funicular, Les Tres Torres, La Bonanova and Sant Gervasi. These changes will mean increasing travel time by between 3 and 4 minutes, but from FGC they indicate that the improvement in frequencies makes it extremely difficult to manage the operations that have taken place up to now, due to the precautionary distances that must be maintained between the trains that stop at all stations and those that don’t.
In the morning rush hour (from 07:30 a.m. to 09:30 a.m.) there will be a train every five minutes between Plaza Cataluña and Terrassa and between Plaza Cataluña and Sabadell, which means that between Plaza Cataluña and Sant Cugat a train will leave every 2.5 minutes. In addition, the concept of “valley hour” is eliminated, due to the fact that after the pandemic a change in habits among FGC users has been noticed: outside rush hour there will be a train every ten minutes to or from Terrassa and Sabadell, that is, , every 5 minutes from or to Sant Cugat. In addition, the service will be reinforced during peak hours in the afternoon: from Monday to Thursday between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. and on Fridays from 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. This will be possible because FGC has acquired 15 new trains, increasing the line’s fleet from 46 to 61 units. The trains, in which FGC has invested 99.5 million, have been manufactured by Stadler and were delivered between 2021 and 2022. In addition to those 99.5 million euros, FGC has allocated another 14.6 to adapt the infrastructure (station and entrances in Plaza Cataluña, Rubí workshop and Bellaterra subcentral) and 6.3 to the new signage.
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