Liberal Initiative (IL) President Rui Rocha said this Saturday that there was “not enough political will” to invest in the railroad and accused the government of making “a lot of promises” with “bad delivery”.
“There is no political will to implement a railway plan that serves the country as well as the hinterland,” he said in Bragança, where the Liberal Route initiative dedicated to the railway ended this Saturday with a visit to the Railway Museum. and a colloquium on the topic.
Bragança has not had a train in over 30 years, and the IL president stated that “the capitals of the districts that are not served by rail today, namely Braganca, Vila Real and Viseu, will now have this service.”
“The railroad should be a bet for the country and also for these regions,” he stressed, to then criticize the Government’s National Railroad Plan that provides for these connections, but which the IL president understands. “there are already indications that it could be dropped.”
“There are solutions, for example in the Algarve, for light rail that indicate incompatibility with the solution presented recently by the government. far from what they promise,” he said.
Before discussing specific solutions for each territory, Rui Rocha argues that it is first necessary to have “the political conviction that this is fundamental, and Portugal needs railways, Portugal needs trains.”
He believes that one can see “that the investment plans that the government presents for the railway are not systematically carried out.”
“The railway plan for 2020 is currently about 15% completed, it was a plan that should have already been completed, about 30% of this plan will no longer be implemented, and everything else will be implemented with a large backlog. delay,” he pointed out.
The IL president believes that “the good image of the country itself” is a ten-year stalemate with the Tua Mobility Plan, which sees the train return about 30 kilometers from the deactivated Tua line, to Thras os Hills. .
“There is an understanding, there are contractual counterparties, but then a decade passes, and they do not move from the dead point, because the issue is administrative and bureaucratic, no one agrees on responsibility for the structure, and this leads to the fact that the population is deprived of a double, because no one understands each other,” he concluded.
“This is a real picture of the problems in the country, bureaucracy, irresponsibility, sometimes it seems that things are done randomly, so that later no one would understand each other,” he added.
Rui Rocha also commented on this Saturday’s general strike called by the CGTP to reiterate that the solution to the rising cost of living cannot be solved through 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 pockets” and that the “thousands that the state collects” should be distributed through tax cuts such as the IRS and VAT.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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