Page 9 - Anuario FFCC - 2024

presentación

Cohesion means providing services, connections and fre-
quencies to citizens and improving their ability to move. It
means reducing their travel times and creating new itinera-
ries. It means facilitating synergies among large production
centres.
Linking Algeciras with the French border, as the
Mediterranean corridor does, means connecting almost a
dozen cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants that repre-
sent more than 40% of the national GDP. The Atlantic co-
rridor, extended to Asturias and Galicia, is already radically
changing the economic and social relations of the regions it
runs through.
We have a clear objective that is also European: to
double freight traffic by train and triple passenger traffic by
2050, to use less and greener energy, and to operate an in-
tegrated and multimodal transport network more efficiently
and intelligently.
And we are on the right track. Every day more and
more users are choosing the railway as a means of transport.
Óscar Puente Santiago Growth is strongest in high-speed, showing that liberaliza-
Ministro de Transportes y Movilidad Sostenible tion is paying off. But it is also very significant in conventio-
nal medium and long distance as well as in commuter traffic.
In the case of freight, we intend to increase its mo-
dal share to 10% by 2030. Decarbonisation will consolidate
our strategic position as Europe’s southern entry point. We
are the gateway to a global market of more than 500 million
consumers and we aspire to become one of the main centres
for the redistribution of the European Union’s imports and
exports.
If the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists was
supposed to turn any metal into gold, the railway has not
ceased to generate prosperity in Spain in its 176 years of
history. Like the former, it continues to transmute us into a
more competitive and fairer society.

As far as this government is concerned, the resour-
ces devoted to railway infrastructures in the last six years ex-
ceed 16 billion euros. Our objective has been to make the
train the basis of a decarbonised transport system that boosts
the opportunities open to people and companies.
At the moment, thanks to the injection of European
funds, we are working on more than 1,500 kilometres of the
Mediterranean and Atlantic corridors, on almost 1,000 kilo-
metres of other trans-European networks, and on more than
800 kilometres of commuter lines.
Cohesion is the word that best defines this effort.

Spanish Railway Yearbook 2024 Anuario del Ferrocarril 7