Miró mural at the airport

After the inauguration of T1 terminal at El Prat airport, the activity of the old terminal has been reduced basically to low cost companies and airlines that are not members of any alliance. Thus, most of the passengers arriving to Barcelona by air see the modern, white, photogenic new terminal, but they will not be able to enjoy a piece of art that has been greeting us for ages when we came home: the Miró mural.

In 1968 one of our world-renowned artists decided to devote and donate four works to the city where he was born: the sculpture "Woman and Bird", at the Parc de l'Escorxador, the mosaic at Pla de l'Os on the Rambla, the Miró Foundation and this ceramic mural, that was installed on the facade of what today is the T2 terminal building.

Miró mural has always been associated to something special: a welcome, a farewell, a trip, a gathering, a homecoming...if the wall could talk, it would certainly explain thousands of stories of all kinds!

The Ring Roads - Las Rondes

Those who, as I did, started driving in the 90s can not imagine Barcelona without the Rondes, the ringway that goes around the city. These two ring roads were built, like so many other things, for the 1992 Olympic Games. They are over 35 kilometers long and the two big junctions at both ends help distribute the traffic moving through Barcelona and its metropolitan area.

As a regular user of the Ronda del Litoral I know perfectly its limitations. I know they have been criticized for the number of accidents in it and because they don't contribute to promote sustainable transport. I also know that there are many miles without a shoulder, that entrance ramps are often short and dangerous and traffic jams are very common in some sections. By the way, those traffic jams can be really exasperating when there a vehicle breaks down and stops occupying a whole lane.

I do not even want to imagine the city traffic if all this amount of vehicles that circulate now along the Rondes had to drive through the center of Barcelona!

The Bicing

When the Bicing service system opened in 2007 I hurried up to sign up. By that time, my bike had been stolen several times on the streets of the city, so I really thought it was the best idea that the municipality could have in order to promote healthy, clean and non-expensive transportation. The Bicing was close to collapse shortly after it opened, when the many bikes were broken and not all anchors seemed to work properly, but I have always been a regular user.

It has only (or already, depending on your perspective) been six years and I can't deny that the Bicing has become an image of Barcelona. Leaving aside complaints from pedestrians because of the incivility of some cyclists and complaints of Bicing users about the lack of good bike paths, one must admit that the public bike system has become a "thing of Barcelona", as those that I try to highlight in this blog.

Barcelona Taxis

When I was a little boy I thought that taxis could only be yellow and black. Later I discovered that in most cities they are white, and many of them have a colored stripe so you can detect them. Even later I learned that there are other cities where taxis share colors with ours, as Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Mumbai, but they are an rare.

In 1906 the first motorized taxis appeared in Barcelona, with one single station in La Rambla, and they coexisted with the old horse carriages. Motorized vehicles finally prevailes and at one point it was decided that they should show a yellow, blue or red strip in the back, depending on the rate they charged. In 1934, though, it was necessary to organize the sector, and rates and colors were unified, so yellow was adopted as a common hallmark. this is the origin of the color of our taxis, with yellow doors while the rest is basically black.

As a curiosity, let me tell you that the person who took all this measures was Jaume Vachier, a municipal councilor, who tried to arrange the chaotic traffic of Barcelona in the 1920's, and planned underground car parks, promoted the first crosswalk of the city (at Balmes-Provença) and also the first traffic light at the same intersection.

Currently there is an EU directive that suggests that taxis should be painted in ecru color, as they are in Germany. For the time being noone is paying attention to it. Can you imagine the disappearance of the yellow and black taxis of Barcelona?

Connection L3-L4 Passeig de Gràcia

Some connections between lines in the Barcelona Metro network are virtually instantaneous, some others are quite short, some are long, and then we have, in a category of its own, the one in Passeig de Gràcia. I do not know what you do, but I avoid it whenever I can. I prefer not to walk the equivalent of three blocks of the Eixample on a narrow tunnel..

Perhaps you don't know that the tunnel where we walk nowadays to connect between lines takes up part of an underground car park, which is actually behind just a wall of separation. Specifically, we walk along its second basement. If we could get through the car park, the connection would be a little shorter, but the parking was inaugurated in 1967, before the construction of L4, and the best solution they found was going along ots edge.

In order to reduce the distance the existing underground halls would have to be modified, and some new entrances would have to be done, in addition to a new corridor, that would go below the parking lot. Due to its cost you can imagine that this project is waiting for better times.

I think we'll still have a long connection distance for a few years.