Assessment of the effects of improving the Madrid inner ring road to a more balanced and sustainable metropolitan mobility.

The city of Madrid is suffering a rapid suburbanisation process where population and jobs are moving out of the central city. This process produces an imbalanced mobility patterns and car dependency. Car pressure on central areas is increasing and the negative environmental effects too. This strategy tries to maintain the social and economic vitality of the urban centre in a sustainable frame in order to reduce externalities and to promote the quality of life of its inhabitants and visitors. The strategy comprises actions both in favouring public transport and conveying car traffic in dedicated arteries. The main targets are: reduce the pressure of the automobile on the central business district (CBD); facilitate public transport mobility; recuperate the share of walking trips achieved 15 years ago; to avoid through traffic in local streets; to manage traffic to reduce externalities; and to reduce severance and environmental degradation of green areas, particularly in the area of Manzanares River. The policy actions to achieve those targets are a combination of hard and soft measures that can be summarized as follows: to build about 110 km of tramways and metro lines to compete with cars in radial trips; to build a by pass line to allow commuter trains to reach 3 central city stations; to eliminate accident black spots by new alignments; to harmonise road conditions and control systems to minimise congestion; to achieve a strict control system in main arteries; to control curb-parking in all CBD; to convert the main historical zones into pedestrian precincts; to segregate 21 km of bus lanes in the main routes; to tunnel urban roads where environmental pressure is high and borough accessibility low. This paper focuses first on the description of those policy measures and how they have been designed to get better results. The evaluation results show that the strategy of Madrid could produce a sustainable improvement of mobility standards, more equity in using urban areas, and reduce car use in dense inner zones. The overall socioeconomic assessment indicated that the action programme will be clearly beneficial although expensive. For the covering abstract please see ITRD E135207.