Liberal Initiative (IL) president Rui Rocha on Saturday believed there is “a lack of political will” to invest in the railway and accused the government of making “many promises” with “poor execution”.
“There is no political will to implement a railway plan that serves the country and that also serves the interior,” he said in Bragança, where the Liberal Route initiative dedicated to the railway ended this Saturday, visiting the Railway Museum and a colloquium on the subject.
Bragança has not had a train for more than 30 years and the president of IL defended that “the district capitals that are not served by a rail connection this Saturday, namely Bragança, Vila Real and Viseu, will now have this connection”.
“The railway should be a bet for the country and it should also be a bet for these regions,” he stressed, before criticizing the National Railway Plan presented by the government, which envisages these connections, but whose president from IL understands “there are already signs it may be scrapped”.
“There are solutions, for example in the Algarve, of light rail that indicate an incompatibility with what has been presented by the government in recent times. The signs are everything that promises, but the implementation is always very poor, far behind what the promises are” , he said.
Before discussing concrete solutions for each area, Rui Rocha argues that it is first necessary to have “the political conviction that this is fundamental and that Portugal needs railways, Portugal needs trains”.
He considered that what can be seen “is that systematically the investment plans presented by the government in the field of rail are not being implemented”.
“The 2020 rail plan is currently about 15% of its implementation completed, it was a plan that should have been implemented already, about 30% of that plan will not be implemented and everything else will be implemented with a long breath .” delay” , orphan.
The president of IL considered that “a good image of the country itself” is the decade-long impasse with the Tua mobility plan, which provides for the return of the train to about 30 kilometers of the deactivated Tua line, in Trás -os-hills. .
“There is an agreement, there are negotiated counterparts, but then a decade goes by and they don’t get off the ground because the issue is administrative and bureaucratic, no one agrees on the responsibility they have for the structure and this ensures that the population is deprived of a counterpart because no one understands each other,” he concluded.
“It’s a real picture of what the country’s problems are: bureaucracy, lack of accountability, sometimes it seems like things are done in a loose way so nobody understands each other afterwards,” he added.
Rui Rocha also commented on last Saturday’s general strike, which the CGTP had called to reiterate that the solution to the rising cost of living problem cannot be solved with measures such as price fixing.
IL argues that the bet should be on the tax issue and that “the Portuguese should have more money in their pocket” and that the “thousands that the state raises” should be distributed through the reduction of taxes such as IRS and VAT.
Source: DN
