The Minister for Infrastructure, Pedro Marques, re-launched the western Algarve section of roadworks today as if it was something we should be grateful for.
The work, that should have been finished years ago, now has a completion date of ‘the end of June 2017’ which inevitably will run on into the summer season accompanied by a range of increasingly improbable excuses.
As for the eastern section from Olhão to Vila Real de Santo António, this won’t happen until next year despite the road visibly crumbling under the onslaught of HGV traffic.
As for the chronic delays to the work on the western section, Marques tried the ‘I know how you feel’ approach saying he “understood the anxiety” in the region while blaming the concessionaire, Rotas Litoral do Algarve for the delays but not explaining how this company had managed so successfully to hold up the work of installing 23 new roundabouts and fixing up the roads in between.
Rotas do Algarve Litoral said it would finish off between Vila do Bispo and Lagos in January, between Albufeira and Faro by the end of May and between Lagos and the IC4 junction by the end of June.
Marques was asked by some wag if the tolls on the motorway would be suspended while this work drags on. The reply was the standard one, that the toll rates had dropped for which you should be very thankful.
The link between Faro Airport and the Algarve railway line 'if possible from the environmental point of view' is to go ahead 'if not before, at the beginning of the next Community framework'. This guarantee was given by Pedro Marques, Minister of Planning and Infrastructures.
The politician said that he took up the challenge of studying the work "from a cost-benefit point of view" and he assured that "preparatory studies will be made of what this connection could be."
According to Pedro Marques, in addition to environmental issues, this rail connection "only makes sense if we are able to boost the connections of the stations to the main areas with intermodal transport".
Pedro Marques believes that with this connection, "we can greatly increase the demand for the use of the railroad" in the Algarve.
"If it is possible, from the environmental point of view, if we are able to integrate transport in the Algarve from an intermodal point of view, this link must be a priority of the PS Government and a job to carry out '.
As a minister, Pedro Marques also undertook the commitment to place the work "as one of my priorities for a future intervention in the railroad in Portugal."
These words will come back to haunt him as Marques has no intention of seeing the railway link built and will use a mixture of environmental and cost objections to drop this scheme while hoping nobody notices.
