TITLE:
Innovations and Reforms to Be Introduced for the Modernization of the Conventional Railway Line of Madrid-Cuenca-Valencia
AUTHORS:
Juan Andres Buedo Garcia
KEYWORDS:
Conventional Train, Railway Modernization, Plan XCuenca, Mobility Strategy, Sustainable Development Goals, Public Investment, Speculation, Depopulation
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Political Science,
Vol.12 No.2,
April
29,
2022
ABSTRACT: This political study unravels the results and derivations of the
potential official interest in closing the conventional train line between Madrid
and Valencia, showing in all sections that it is urgent to ensure that a
mistake is not made with wide consequences. This requires completely discarding
the so-called “XCuenca Plan”, since it would generate a problem that has been
dragging on for many years and that has only been getting worse over time. The
general objective is focused on claiming support for the train and the
maintenance of the line, as the backbone and dynamizer of the province of
Cuenca. This opinion has been achieved through the most common methods of
information extraction in Sociology in the field of local management, focusing
on those areas in which it is necessary to have a diagnostic knowledge of the
reality on which it is intended to act. With concrete data it is shown that
there is a better alternative to this plan to structure the localities of the
provinces of Cuenca, Toledo, Madrid and Valencia, in terms of travel time and
price. And a new strategy, elaborated by Pablo Salvador Zuriaga, a PhD
professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, reveals that the solution
to this problem must be based on rail-road intermodality and its application to
the localities of the Serranía Baja de Cuenca. The strategy is based on
improving the benefits that the improved line would introduce and its operation
with updated rolling stock, but it goes further. Once the line is renewed, the
objective is to carry out a public consultation with the municipalities under
the area of influence of the line to agree on the service schedules. From
there, solutions must be articulated to move travelers from the population
centers to the nearest stations. We will see that this solution, even
considering the transfer times, is more efficient than assigning a bus that
passes through the successive population centers.